김원주 | Kim Won-ju

Biography

Like Kim Myeong-sun and Na Hye-seok, Kim Won-ju had a similar trajectory. Born in Yonggan, Kim grew up in a religious Christian household, as her father was a minister, but was sent to Seoul to pursue an education. Despite her parents’ deaths in her teenage years, Kim continued studying and would attend Ewha before pursuing an education in Japan. It was her education in Japan that set Kim up to return to Korea and become active in the literary scene budding in the early twenties. Like Na Hye-seok, Kim Won-ju became known for advocating for women’s rights, and the two often worked together. 

She was first affiliated with the magazine Sin Yeoja, as she founded the magazine upon returning to Korea. Kim quickly became known for her essays and writing on the oppression women faced during the Korean colonial period. She published in a wide variety of genres: journalism, poetry, short stories, and novels. Advocating for women’s education and equal opportunity became critical points throughout Kim’s essays and poems, making her not only one of the biggest activists at the time but also a controversial target for those looking to keep the status quo. Her journalism covered a broad range of topics within women’s rights, with many opinions she published, such as calling out the double standards and the treatment of women by men, being radical for the period. 

Despite her extensive work and fight against the systems that were in place, Kim harbored a keen interest in religion, but not with the one she had grown up with as a child. Ultimately, she would turn to Buddhism in the latter half of the decade. Kim Won-ju became Kim Iryeop after officially committing to be a Buddhist nun, having been officially ordained in 1933, and spent her remaining days at the temple Sudeoksa. Despite her literary career’s brevity, Kim is one of the key figures of 1920s Korean women’s literature. However, her work published with feminist leanings from the period would not be her last publication. As Kim incorporated spirituality more into her life, she published work with Buddhist leanings and reflections. Until her death, she continued to actively publish, but not with the same activist and political leanings as her youth.

Monk in traditional robes, holding a writing tool

Image Citation: Unknown

Key Dates:

  • 1896 - Kim is born in Yonggang, modern North Korea

  • 1913 - Kim moves to Seoul to attend Ewha Girls’ School

  • 1919-1920 - Kim moves to Japan to pursue her education

  • 1920 - Kim founds Sin Yeoja, the first women’s journal focused on women’s issues

  • 1920s - Kim publishes novels, journalism, and short fiction on the need for women’s rights and education

  • 1933 - Kim is ordained as a Buddhist nun

  • 1971 - Kim passes away at Sudeoksa

Vintage photograph of four Korean women in traditional attire dancing with fans and drums, while men in similar attire play musical instruments in the background.
Blank white paper with leaves on a light background

차각 | Awakening

Kim’s short story “Awakening” was published in 1926, which was at the tail end of Kim’s career as a New Woman writer.

Kim would begin her path of becoming a Buddhist nun shortly after, although many of the ideas she published as a New Woman writer would continue without her. The protagonist of the story is a newly divorced woman, and she conveys what happened to her through a series of letters to her friend, whose responses are omitted from the story.

We begin the story while she is still married, and throughout the course of each letter, new developments appear in the protagonist’s life. Her husband is away in Japan, and she has faith in him while her in-laws treat her terribly.

But as we learn while reading, her husband was not faithful at all. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so the protagonist of the story, angered by what has happened, gets an education and betters her situation, unlike her husband.

This is all told through the letter writing format, and because we don’t know how the friend responds, we only get the thoughts of the main character.

The epistolary form allows the story to open up in an intimate way, allowing one to peer into the private life of this one woman through her own words and without the judgment or thoughts of others mixed in. 

Co-Occurrence Network Analysis Through KH Coder

Concept map with interconnected words such as 'life,' 'father,' and 'child' linked by various weighted lines. Circles indicate subgraphs labeled with numbers and colors. Frequency of connections is represented by circle size on a legend.

The figure above demonstrates the co-occurrence network created from “Awakening.” In this co-occurrence network, some of the most striking themes and images from the story appear within each subgraph. Subgraphs one, four, and nine were examined for this paper. Subgraph one not only demonstrates the connections between a woman’s life and the need to have a child, family, and marriage, but the other side of the subgraph shows the significance of the home and how it is a place of turmoil. Subgraphs four and nine expand on these concepts, feeding into the narratives about the home as a place of struggle and work. 

“Awakening” is a story with many connections throughout the co-occurrence network graph, but one of the most striking pairings is this: the words “be,” “not,” and “do” all appear with high frequencies and are connected by coefficients of 0.16 and 0.32. Despite this being Kim Won-ju’s final piece with feminist themes published during her lifetime, it is this connection that encompasses the story’s main themes.

As the protagonist dwells on the marriage’s failures and how her husband was unable to provide for her sufficiently, she simply exists in a space where she is a virtuous wife. She was someone who patiently waited for him to return from his studies in Japan, despite the growing suspicions that he was cheating on her. She could not break free and do what she wanted until the end of her relationship. Instead, she was merely someone who lived by the standards expected of a woman at that time. 

Like the other two stories from the colonial period, the word “house” and its links provide a sense of feeling trapped. Here, in “Awakening,” it’s paired with “feel,” “much,” and “matter,” cluing into the anxiety the protagonist feels as the days grow without her husband at her side, and her demanding in-laws slowly wearing her down. At the story’s beginning, her marriage is something producing joy and happiness, but by its end, it has become something angering her because of the circumstances she was trapped within. 

However, “home” appears in this co-occurrence network differently. Not only is it tied loosely to the notion of “life,” but it is also connected directly to “in-law.” This implies on a basic linguistic level how deeply woven the protagonist saw her life as tied to her husband’s family. Ultimately, this makes her marriage’s end a different form of loss: she lost her home and sense of what life could entail. This is what makes her rise to independence, gain an education and become a well-rounded woman, even more of a poetic justice by the story’s conclusion. 

By inverting the traditional notion of what a “life” could entail, Kim creates a success story through her protagonist. Through her example, women could find ways to liberate themselves from situations that were ultimately less than ideal, and education was a means to do so. This corresponds with Kim’s broader arguments and journalistic work, demonstrating the echoes of activism in both her fiction and journalism before she retreated from the public eye as a New Woman writer. 

Regardless of the confessional format used to convey her story, responding to a friend eager to learn more but who is never an actual presence, “Awakening” offers a particular sense of physicality through the verbs it utilizes throughout. The confessional epistle format is structured in a way where the letter’s writer, the story’s protagonist, serves as a storyteller. By utilizing this letter-writing format, it gives not only a deeper sense of intimacy through the chance to tell her story in her own words. 

These three short stories are already dwelling on similar themes, targeting the role of women and how they suffer under the patriarchal systems in place during the late 1910s and 1920s. Chapter 2 will continue exploring the three writers from the postcolonial era: Han Moo-sook, Kang Sin-jae, and Song Won-hui. Each of their three short stories from Questioning Minds will also be examined with KH Coder, with the co-occurrence networks creating more opportunities to see how their work not only correlates within their period but with the writers from the colonial period, too.