Gender, Survival, and the Literary Imagination of Park Kyung-ri, ParkWan-suh, and Oh Jung-hee

This paper examines how three of the most important female writers in modern Korean literaryhistory — Park Kyung-ri, Park Wan-suh, and Oh Jung-hee — engage with the politics of gender, identity, andhistorical consciousness in their respective fictional works. Drawing on Park Kyung-ri's monumental sagaLand (Toji), Park Wan-suh's debut novel The Naked Tree (Namok), and a cluster of Oh Jung-hee's short andmid-length fiction including The Old Well, A Garden of Childhood, Chinatown, That Hill, Evening Game, andThe Empty Field, the paper argues that these writers collectively construct a counter-narrative of Koreanmodernity in which women do not merely endure patriarchal violence but emerge as the primary agents ofhistorical continuity, existential resistance, and moral vision. The analysis proceeds in three interconnectedmovements. First, it situates the emergence of Korean women's writing within the broader transformation ofKorean society from Confucian patriarchy to democratic modernity, reading that transformation through thelens of feminist literary theory and, in particular, Julia Kristeva's concept of the chora as a pre-symbolic spaceof generative feminine power. Second, it offers close readings of the primary texts, attending to the ways inwhich each writer constructs female subjectivity against the grain of patriarchal oppression — whetherthrough the quiet, crushing dignified endurance of Lady Yoon in Land, the active and self-determining love ofGyeong-a in The Naked Tree, or the mythic, cyclical symbolism of the well and the tree in Oh Jung-hee's prose. Third, it draws these readings together into a larger critical argument: that Korean women's fiction of thisperiod does not simply represent women's suffering but theorises femininity itself as a life force — asKristeva's chora made narrative, a matrix of meaning that both absorbs and transcends the violence of history.