In the late 1980s, in <The Road We Walk Together> (1989), which narrated women fighting in workplaces and on the streets and women responding to the cause of the square, Kim In-suk in <Blade and Love> (1993) turns to exposing the conflicts and disillusionment that arise in everyday spheres such as family and marital relations. The radical shift, in just four years, from the grand narrative of realist representation of social and labor realities to the micro-narratives of breakdowns in communication and inner conflicts unfolding within private realms like the institution of marriage, was accomplished swiftly.

The novella of the same title, ‘Blade and Love’, included in the collection <Blade and Love>, critically illuminates the institution of marriage as a device of emotional repression imposed on women within a patriarchal society. In particular, the novel carefully reveals, through the confessions and observations of two women of different generations, how the institution of marriage calibrates, suppresses, and blocks a female subject's desires and emotions.

The novel's focal narrator is a woman in her thirties, ‘I’, who observes the generation of mothers who have long suffered from the violence of patriarchal family culture and who regards them with both compassion and critical distance. For this woman, the lives of her mother and aunt's generation trace a trajectory she does not wish to follow. Watching her mother, who endured harsh in-law abuse, and her aunt, who suffered from a husband's infidelity and violence, I resolve, “I will absolutely not live like that.” I “abhor the misplaced authority of motherhood in which all the women in this world say they cannot help it and must endure for the sake of their children,” and I take “an unnervingly combative stance even over the smallest quarrel with my husband.” I declare that I will ‘absolutely’ ‘not compromise’ with the obligations or responsibilities that marriage imposes on women. My scathing self-analysis of the marital relationship and marriage is dramatised in the bleak worldview, “At times I ask myself why I am living with him, and the most accurate answer then is only that I have no reason to break up with him.”

The novel dissects the fantasy layered onto marriage as the culmination of romantic love and looks at what lies beneath. Two women of different generations, I and Aunt Jong-hee, respond to marriage and the marital relationship in starkly opposite ways. ‘I’ directly expresses my emotions such as anger, disgust, and hostility, whereas Aunt Jong-hee cannot resist injustices like her husband's infidelity and violence and does not reveal her emotions. ‘I’ critically reflect on the marital relationship and ponder the impossibility of communication. If this is the novel's surface story, what we should attend to is the herstory of Aunt Jong-hee, who responds with passivity and silence. Having lost her parents early, Aunt Jong-hee spent more than ten years tiptoeing around in her married elder sister's home. She married a wealthy man as if fleeing, yet she “was unhappy for a considerable length of time”; “there were as many as three occasions when my uncle started a business only to ruin it, and there were two instances, that I know of, of him tormenting my aunt over women. There was a time he lost the house deed to gambling debts, and a time he beat my aunt so badly her shoulder blade broke.” Judging from this litany of misdeeds alone, my uncle is the epitome of a bad man. After he developed cancer and then recovered, he changes.

As if to compensate for past hardships, my aunt regains stability and material abundance. Yet the patriarchal script in which a good, obedient woman is rewarded for her long endurance is completely overturned in this novel. Now that everything is stable, my aunt refuses the role of the virtuous wife and wise mother. Aunt Jong-hee has honed her own ‘blade’ in a way different from mine and has lived while keeping it hidden. She does so by ‘repaying a husband's infidelity with infidelity’. Having “lived with a dagger hidden in her chest,” this act, which is not endurance but ‘a searing revenge at every moment’, could well be called a passive form of resistance. This is the ‘blade’ of the novel's title. Some twenty years later, the psychological ‘blade’ that sustained Aunt Jong-hee breaks when she learns the man involved has died, and she suffers from neurotic suspicion and depression. Her anxiety and suspicion, and the neurosis they engender, are deemed by her husband to be unstable and problematic, and my aunt returns to the role of ‘angel of the house’.

Through my aunt's life and her last choice to remain the angel of the house while receiving treatment for depression, the novel shows that emotions such as love, devotion, forgiveness, and endurance function as moral emotions demanded of women in a patriarchal society and discipline women's lives. In <The Cultural Politics of Emotion>, Sara Ahmed argues that emotion is not a private passion or a transient outburst but a force produced and repressed within social and historical contexts that makes certain choices possible or impossible. Some emotions are suppressed, and some are fostered. Emotions have the power to reproduce or overturn norms. Aunt Jong-hee's endurance and tolerance appear peaceful on the surface but are in fact an emotional discipline required of women. Her anger and depression are treated as abnormal impulses and are repressed. This repression of emotion means that my aunt ultimately complies with the social order and eliminates her own desire.

After hearing my aunt's confession, the narrator, ‘I’, is shaken to the point of finding life meaningless. Yet she says she does not want to choose the path of compromise like Aunt Jong-hee. At the end of the novel, I say that I will continue to struggle “not as a woman and a man but as one half and the other half of a married couple,” and I embrace the belief and a new hope that “the completion of my life will, together with it, complete his life.” Although this plausible meaning-making is a somewhat didactic conclusion, it reveals the active will of a subject striving to recalibrate the marital relationship. I seek to be not a wounded victim but a subject who judges and reconstructs her own life.

The silence of Aunt Jong-hee and my anger are different modes of resistance, yet both show how emotions are suppressed and managed within the institution of marriage and how the emotion called love can function as a cruel and violent device. Love at times demands attachment and devotion while simultaneously forcing self-erasure. Love is an emotional performance imposed by a heteronormative patriarchal order, and marriage is an institution that represses the subject by requiring the performance of emotions such as love, responsibility, and devotion. In ‘Blade and Love’, the institution of marriage as experienced by me and my aunt encourages endurance and sacrifice as virtues under the name of love, while demanding the suppression of emotions like anger, sorrow, and disillusionment. To maintain relations with in-laws or a husband, a woman must suppress her own emotions and perform emotional labor that manages the other party's (the husband's) emotions. A woman who tries to recompose her own emotions, as in the case of my aunt, ends in failure.

In ‘Blade and Love’, I and Aunt Jong-hee belong to different generations yet share the textures of emotions of love and betrayal, anger and compromise. Aunt Jong-hee conveys to me, in the language of recollection and confession, the wounds, shame, and vengefulness she experienced in the past. ‘I’ express empathy and compassion for my aunt's long suffering, but I feel a distance from her mode of revenge and the subsequent process of resolution. Thus I decide not to follow Aunt Jong-hee's path. I interpret my aunt's emotions and make different choices. The women's emotional community is not a seamless solidarity but a space composed of fissures and questions, of imperfect empathy. By sharing these complex emotions, they are fundamentally interrogating the meanings of ‘love’ and ‘marriage’. In this way, ‘Blade and Love’ shows, through the private sphere, how emotions of disillusionment and anger fill the space left by the retreat of community politics. It can be seen as a symptomatic text indicating that literature of the 1990s began to capture gendered emotions and problematics.

▼Kim Yang-seon, Professor at Hallym University · literary critic