The Construction of Korean Female Images in the Korean War Novels From an Orientalist Perspective

Abstract

The Korean female images as prostitutes, bar girls, refugees, and victims of sexual violence are often found in both American novels and Korean novels of the Korean War. This essay tries to analyze how the exotic portrayals and images are constructed in American novels in accordance with Western indigenous culture and the general conception of Eastern inferiority in comparison to the superiority of Western civilization. With the pervasiveness of ethnocentrism, the Korean female images are portrayed as the Other and exotica of the East. Consequently, what they suffered in the calamity of war has been erased. However, similar female images that appeared in the Korean novels of the Korean War are far more complicated. They are relegated to a peripheral status in the national calamities wrought by the war. They are constructed within the frame of the absence of men's support in families, extreme poverty, and the legitimization of prostitution and breakdown of traditional Korean society and culture. In a word, the construction of these Korean female images conveys strong cultural and historical influences.