Under the systems of belief that the concept of nation-building is a masculine one, with the traditional Confucian beliefs co-opted and reinvented for modern women, the closer examination of these six works takes on new meanings. When looking at texts like On the Eve of the Uprising, which compiles the short stories of several male writers working within the colonial period, women often fall under similar tropes that echo classical Joseon representations: the filial wife, self-sacrificing daughter, fervent believer, and devoted lover. The women who appear in these short stories play a specific role, but their endings might not be ones they would personally desire, as they are at the male protagonist’s whims. 

 Referring back to the example of Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid, now considered a classic in contemporary South Korean cinema, a factory worker is enlisted in the house of a middle-class family as a maid, but seduces the husband and becomes a source of suffering, death, and the rupturing of a traditional family unit. As the maid stands nude in the shower, the family’s patriarch watches her hungrily, separated from her only by the shower’s glass, making her a physical embodiment of sin and a devil. Perhaps, in another world where she did not enter the lives of this newly middle-class family, they would have continued to live blissfully within their newly purchased home. 

As the concept of the nation and Korean independence was formulated with masculinity in mind, male writers were leaning towards depicting women as a physical embodiment of han. Korean men were expected to be leaders, so the failure of Korean leadership and masculinity can create a cycle in which women are suffering. While this is one suggestion as to why the male writers in On the Eve of the Uprising might be depicting women in such a negative light if they were to appear in these stories at all, the six stories in Questioning Minds offer a different insight into how the patriarchy might be failing women.  

During the colonial period, the concept of han was initially formed. Now something adopted by Koreans and their diaspora, han has been defined as the unique sorrow of the Korean people, and how, in recent history, there has been an abundance of suffering when it comes to contemporary issues and the long-term impacts of colonialism and war. This has been criticized due to its roots within the Japanese colonial system, but throughout modern Korean literature, it can be argued that female characters are being used as an extension of han. As they are expected not to have agency over their decisions and control over might be able to happen to them, this perpetuates the system in which the masculine nation’s failure has led to this suffering. 

Throughout the six stories, the female protagonists’ unhappiness becomes increasingly obvious even without the use of a text mining tool like KH Coder. Each story’s main character finds herself bound by the deeply patriarchal systems in place, even if she finds success intellectually abroad in Japan, or as a writer in Korea who has just started to get published in literary journals. This manifests in how the co-occurrence networks show how these women are directly connected to the male characters, often their husbands, which is a consistent theme.

However, it would diminish these women’s writing to say they solely depict women vehicles for han and suffering. Subverting the “suffering woman” plays a key role. It appears with Kim Myeong-sun’s protagonist’s mother choosing to kill herself, an act considered highly shameful, in “A Girl of Mystery.” As seen in the recurrence of the word “break” and its significance in a story like “Hydrangeas,” there is a clearly defined before and after for many of these female protagonists, even though they may not be aware yet. 

 While factory girls and female bodies were being used to further the idea of a Korean nation and cult of masculinity, han also offered a different alternative: a sense of peace and community. Sandra So Hee Chi Kim defines this as a “transcendence,” something that not only defines a unique sense of Koreanness but an indicator that builds a larger community where one has the opportunity to tell their story and engage with others who faced similar experiences. As Bassnett proposes the idea that the translation of writing allows one to engage with trauma through a removed lens, the act of writing in itself can also serve as artistic therapy and community building for these writers and creatives. While han specifically defines and limits itself into something uniquely Korean, becoming an indicator of a community, its subversion in the feminine context allows a new opportunity to explore deeper into how women were not identifying with the cultural elite’s main benchmarks and ideologies. For those writing within the colonial period, they often worked and engaged with each other’s works. Na Hye-seok and Kim Won-ju are cited as not only having been published in the same journals together, but also working within the same literary spheres and publications. In the postwar era, writers like Song Won-hui and Kang Sin-jae served on the leadership of women’s literary organizations in Korea, demonstrating how broader connections are made within female-dominated literary spheres. 

This ultimately allows and empowers these women to create opportunities due to these networks, as seen with the kisaengs who continued to publish and create literary magazines after Joseon’s annexation. In the modern day, the act of translating these works continues to create a larger community across periods and borders, creating conversations about connection. This subverts not only han, but also the idea that the home is a place where a woman remains by herself. While male writers are engaging in the practice of han as something to depict women as a product of suffering, and potential failures of masculinity, women writers were instead creating conversations about what it means to feel trapped inside circumstances beyond their control.