Tales of seduction: Factory girls in Korean proletarian literature

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Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Barraclough, Ruth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

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EID: 43249159177     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-2006-005     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. From the 1923 strike by Korea's first all-female union at Kyǒngsǒng Rubber Factory in Seoul that demanded the dismissal of an overseer for mistreating factory girls, the abusive treatment of women workers was a regular complaint when factory girls went on strike. The rice mills were particularly notorious, and in 1926 two strikes in rice mills were covered in the Tonga Ilbo: one demanded an end to arbitrary assaults on factory girls and requested that a manager be replaced; while the employees at Samya Rice Mill in Inch'ǒn went on strike "enraged at the Japanese manager's beating of pretty, young factory girls." See Lee Hyo-chae, "Ilcheha-ǔi Yǒsǒng Nodong Munje" ("The Situation of Women Workers in the Colonial Period"), in Han'guk Nodong Munje-üi Kujo (The Structure of Labor Problems in Korea) (Seoul: Kwangminsa, 1978), 165
2. There are many more cases, too numerous to be listed in full here. For a detailed account of the many instances of sexual violence and harassment cited in strike disputes, see chapter one of my dissertation "The Labour and Literature of Korean Factory Girls" (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2004)
3. Kim Kyöng-il, Ilcheha Nodong Undongsa (A History of the Labor Movement under Japanese Colonialism) (Seoul: Changjakkwa Pibyöngsa, 1992), 567
4. See Kang Yi-su, "1930 Nyǒndae Myǒnbang Taekiǒp Yǒsǒng Nodongja-ǔi Sangt'ae-e Taehan Yǒngu" ("Research into the Situation of Women Workers in the Large Cotton Spinning Factories in the 1930s") (PhD diss., Ewha Women's University, 1992), 143
5. Lee Hyo-chae, "Ilcheha-ǔi Yǒsǒng Nodong Munje," 140
6. The phrase belongs to Mary Douglas. Her sentence from the chapter "Institutions Remember and Forget" is worth quoting in full: "In the intervening years, some slogans have become risible, some words have become empty, and others too full, holding too much cruelty or bitterness to modern ears." How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 69
7. For an examination of how the leadership structures of the labor movement were dominated by men in this period, see Yi Ok-ji, Han'guk Yǒsǒng Nodongja Undongsa 1 (A History of the Korean Women's Labor Movement, vol. 1) (Seoul: Hanul Academy, 2001), 39
8. For a discussion of how this was to the detriment of the labor movement as a whole see Han'guk Yǒsǒng Yǒnguhoe (Association for Research on Korean Women), Han'guk Yǒsǒngsa - Kǔndaepyon (A History of Korean Women - The Modern Period) (Seoul: P'ulbitt, 1992), 241
9. The phrase "feminised position of victim" belongs to Patricia Johnson, who uses it in a different context: to describe the character Stephen Blackpool in Charles Dickens's Hard Times, who is physically and sexually dominated by his wife in a role reversal of conventional accounts of domestic violence in working-class homes. See Johnson, Hidden Hands: Wording-Class Women and Victorian Social Problem Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 149
10. Terry Eagleton, Rape of Clarissa (London: Basil Blackwell, 1982)
11. Anna Clark, "The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748-1848," in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. J. Radford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 47-70
12. and Michael Denning, "Only A Mechanic's Daughter" in Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1998), 185-200
13. In suggesting the usefulness of the trope of seduction to analyze this literature I am not attempting to valorize seduction in a way that reinforces an unambiguous distinction between seduction (nice) and rape (bad). Rather, I seek to explore the unresolvable ambiguities of seduction - in relationships that thrive in circumstances of inequality and collaboration. For an excellent discussion of seduction in literature see Ellen Rooney, "Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence,"' Modern Language Notes, 98 (1983): 1269-78
14. Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 13
15. See, for example, the article by an anonymous "lady journalist" (pǔin kija) in Sin Kajǒng (New Household) 13 (1935): 33
16. Johnson, Hidden Hands, 46
17. The strike by 600 workers took place in 1930. Kim Kyǒng-il, Ilcheha Nodong Undongsa, 567
18. Yi Sǒng-ryong, "Ǒnu Yǒkong-ǒi Hasoyǒn" ("A Factory Girl's Complaint") Tonga Ilbo, November 3, 1929
19. Yi Puk-myǒng, "Yǒkong," in Singminji Sidae Nodong Sosǒlsǒn (Collected Labor Literature from the Colonial Period), ed. Ha Chǒng-il (Seoul: Minjok kwa Munhak, 1988), 220. Red love (pǔlkun yǒnae) or love between comrades (tongji yǒnae) were two terms coined in the 1920s to describe radical socialist couples who openly flouted feudal traditions on marriage and campaigned against repressive social conditions
20. Yu Jin-o, "Yǒjikkong," in Ha Chǒng-il, ed., Singminji Sidae Nodong Sosǒlsǒn, 271-310
21. Korean migration to Kando had begun in the early nineteenth century as large numbers of farmers, ruined by bad harvests, migrated to Manchuria in search of a better life. Following Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 political exiles joined the economic migrants and Kando became a regional headquarters of the anti-Japanese independence movement. See Carter Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young-ik Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W. Wagner, Korea Old and New (Seoul: Ilchokak, 1991), 185, 243, 273
22. See also Yi Yi-hwa, ed., Hanguk Kǔnhyǒndaesa Sajon (Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Korean History) (Seoul: Karam Kihoek, 1990), 90-93
23. Kang Yi-su, "Singminjiha Yǒsǒng Munje-wa Kang Kyǒng-ae-ǔi In'gan Munje" ("Kang Kyǒng-ae's The Human Predicament and the Situation of Women under Japanese Colonialism"), Yǒksa Pib'yǒng (Autumn 1993): 338
24. Patricia Johnson uses this phrase to describe the plight of working class women in industrial England (Hidden Hands, 12)
25. The proletarian author Kim P'al-bong likened colonial Korea to Russia under Alexander III (1881-94) and called for people to choose between being "a Turgenev" and a laborer (Kim Yoon-shik, "Phases of Development of Proletarian Literature in Korea," Korea Journal 27 [1987]: 31). The South Korean author Son Ch'angsǒp would write a short story entitled "The Superfluous Man" after the Korean War. It should be noted that Russian literature, and indeed most literature from Western countries, was introduced to colonial Korea through Japanese translations. Enthusiasm in Japan for particular writers and their works greatly influenced Korean literary tastes and effected the availability of works in translation
26. Kang Kyǒng-ae, In'gan Munje (The Human Predicament) (Seoul: Sodam Ch'ulp'ansa, 1996), 71
27. As in the story of Ch'ǔnhyang, the beautiful daughter of a kisaeng who secretly marries an aristocratic young man and then proceeds to deserve him by going through numerous public trials of her virtue. Kang Kyǒng-ae tells us that she read "The Tale of Ch'ünhyang" when she was eight years old and thus began her passionate attachment to classical Korean literature. Kang Kyǒng-ae, Chasǒ Sojǒn (An Autobiographical Tale), reproduced in Yi Sang-kyǒng, ed., Kang Kyǒng-ae Chǒnjip (Kang Kyǒng-ae's Complete Works) (Seoul: Somyǒng Ch'ulp'an, 1999), 788-89
28. See Carter Eckert on the education program for textile workers at Kyǒngbang, which he describes as "extremely useful in helping persuade reluctant parents to turn their children over to the factory" (Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991], 201)
29. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 22
30. Terry Eagleton's assessment of the bind that Samuel Richardson's heroine Clarissa is caught in is relevant here when he notes: "Power reproduces itself by engendering in its victims a collusion which is the very condition of their survival" (Rape of Clarissa, 82)
31. Kang Kyǒng-ae, The Human Predicament, 238
32. Leaving aside the ticklish question, "what is native?" the enduring controversy surrounding imported ideas is not unique to socialism or to Korea. For example, it was centuries before Christianity in Europe achieved hegemony, and even into the fifteenth century scholars of Latin and Greek found Christian practices, such as mortification of the flesh, inhumane and the theology outlandish. The novelist George Eliot captures this conservative dissent in her book Romola, set in fifteenth-century Florence and featuring the scholar Bardo who says of Christians that they "lash [themselves] and howl at midnight with besotted friars . . . men who know no past older than the missal and the crucifix" (Eliot, Romola [London: Penguin, 1980], 99)
33. Chosen is the Japanese name for Korea employed during the colonial period. It is a Japanese language variation of the word Chosǒn, the title of the ruling Chosǒn dynasty (1392-1910) when Japan annexed Korea
34. Kim Dong-ch'un, "The Shape of Korea's Modernity" (translator unknown, unpublished paper, 1996), 4. Kim Dong-ch'un was here referring only to socialist groups within colonial Korea
35. For an account of the socialist guerilla movement in Manchuria in the 1930s, see chapter one of Charles Armstrong's The North Korean Revolution 1945-1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)
36. Yoon-shik Kim, "Phases of Development of Proletarian Literature in Korea," Korea Journal 27 (1987): 33
37. Andrew Milner, Cultural Materialism (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 22
38. The P'yǒngyang Red Labor Union was a revolutionary, underground union that was part of a wider communist labor movement with branches in Wonsan, Haeju, Yongsan, Yǒsu, and Masan. It was directly influenced by the Comintern, and its platform included the following demands: an eight-hour day; equal pay for all workers regardless of age, gender, or ethnicity; the right to strike; the right to demonstrate; social insurance; the right to form revolutionary organizations; etc. (Yi Yi-hwa, Hanguk Kǔnhyǒndaesa Sajon, 230)
39. The colonial government came down hard on the Red Labor Unions and by 1933 had arrested about one thousand union activists. Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 123
40. Together with the only other prominent female author of proletarian literature of the time, Pak Hwa-sǒng, Kang Kyǒng-ae was dubbed a "masculine writer" by literary critics. Quoted in Sǒ Ǔn-ju, Kang Kyǒng-ae: Kungp'ip soke P'iǒnan Sahoejǎǎi Munhak (Kang Kyǒng-ae: Socialist Literature Blooms in the Midst of Poverty) (Seoul: Yǒksa Pip'yǒng, 1992), 296. The association of proletarian literature with "masculine" writing points to a more essential equation of proletarian with male. It also assumes that the practice of writing about proletarian characters is unfeminine, even when the characters, and the author, are female
41. Kang Kyǒng-ae discusses this point in "Songnyǒ nsa" ("New Year's Message"), Sin Kajong (New Household), December 1933. A section from this article is reproduced on page 365
42. Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 23
43. Kang Kyǒng-ae, "Songnyǒnsa." Reproduced in Yi Sang-kyông, Kang Kyǒng-ae Chǒnjip, 746
44. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 349 n25
45. For more on this see Chǒng Hyǒn-baek, "Yǒ sǒng Nodongja-ǒi Ǔisik kwa Nodong Sekye: Nodongja Suki Punsǒkǒl Chunsimǒro" ("Women Workers' Consciousness and the World of Work: Analyzing Workers' Writings"), Yǒsǒng (Women) 1 (1985): 116-62