본고는 ‘몸’과 ‘감각’의 문제의식을 통하여 백신애 소설의 정치한 해석에 이르고자 한다. 백신애의 소설을 관통하는 서사적 매개는 시대의 압제를 뚫고, 계급과 계층의 단절을 가로지르는 몸의 감각, 몸의 정치성에 있다고 생각되는 까닭이다. 몸과 감각은 분리될 수 없는 것으로 몸은 곧 감각이고, 감각의 주체이자 대상이다.
백신애 소설의 몸은 크게 세 층위로 구분된다. 1)민중의 몸, 2)신여성, 지식인 남성의 몸, 3)상층 여성의 몸이다. 백신애는 각기 다른 상황에 처한 인물들의 몸과 감각 체계를 따르면서 그들이 포착한 세상과 실존의 치열한 길항 작용을 드러내고자 한다.
백신애의 일차적 관심인 민중의 몸은 폭력의 대상으로 ‘고통’에 빠져 있다. 백신애는 ‘조혼의 악습’을 당대의 풍습으로 포장하며 예사로 감행하던 봉합의 시간을 가르며 실재를 폭로한다. 지식-권력을 갖춘 신여성, 지식인 남성은 모두 고루한 젠더관념에 갇혀 자유롭지 못하다. 그들은 민중에 비해 상대적으로 주체적이고 자유로운 편이나 의외로 고답적 젠더의식에 갇혀, 현실과 자신의 요구를 제대로 포착하지 못하는 감각 지체를 드러낸다. 작가는 자전적 색채가 강하게 느껴지는 소설 속 상층 여성인물을 통하여 몸을 재발견하고 몸-감각의 일치, 진정한 주체-삶의 회복을 역설한다.
The purpose of this study is to examine body-sense relationship that characters of Baek Shin Ae's novel have, who appear in different contexts, determining what the novelist intends to show in her work beyond the matters of the times and existence. In her novel, body is largely classified into three, the body of ordinary people, the body of new women and intellects and that of women that seems to strongly reflect what the novelist is.
As well known, ‘body’ is the space of sense that has consciousness and mental activity implied and the base on which sex difference and gender take place. As a representation of incarnated class, body is also the place where we can look for how to cope with otherness. ‘Sense’ is the origin of most of our notions that are dependent on sense organs and, through the organs, delivered into our wisdom. Sense may be seen both an experience and an object. It is sometimes united with body and, at other times, separated from body. Sense is a live meditator that makes us understand the world and open ourselves to the world.
In Baek Shin Ae's novel, ‘a little bride’, a victim of an evil custom, that is, early marriage clearly suggests that ordinary people are bodily alienated under ‘pain’ and ‘violence’. Losing the sensitive ownership of body may be seen as a form of bodily alienation. It seems that the novel intends to make us feel sympathy about the bodies of others, or those of ordinary people who are suffering disease as the most common, direct sign of human alienation. In other words, the novel intends that we should experience such alienation through our common body.
In the novel, new women and intellectual men are not still free from old-fashioned gender notions. Knowledgable and powerful, those characters are relatively free in making decisions about marriage or love than ordinary people, but they fail to develop the decisions occasionally because they are still obsessed with gender ideology. Arrested by gender and body, they can't properly notice what are needed by their contemporary times and themselves.
Through characters who seem to strongly reflect the novelist herself - a student studying abroad, a divorced women, a widow and so on - and their bodies as the source of sense, Baek Shin Ae seriously raises questions about the issues of sense and subject. This is the process of discovering individual bodies from the common body. Through this move, the novelist stresses that we should live as we are based on the unity of body and sense not by negating our existence, but by recognizing it and then going towards the world.