This paper explores how women resisted, assisted, and coexisted with the power hierarchies imposed on them in the colonies and the home in Yuasa Katsuei’s “Document of Flames” and Kang Kyong-ae’s “Salt.” The thesis focuses on how gender, class, and ethnicity shape these women’s lives under colonial rule. I place emphasis on how the patriarchal colonial power structure affects the nuclear family, notably within the context of the “good wife, wise mother” gender ideology. Additionally, I seek to understand the roles that are available to the protagonists in “Document of Flames” and “Salt” when this construct is deemed faulty or inaccessible. Both mothers experience a breakdown in their identities and families at the onset of either novel and, as the stories progress, a further devolution in and even destruction of their identities as mothers outside the home. However, in “Document of Flames,” this deterioration owes more to internal factors, while in “Salt,” the causes are more external. This suggests that the colonial system, while portrayed in “Document of Flames” as corrosive in different ways to both the oppressor and the oppressed, is nonetheless still fundamentally more accessible for poor Japanese women than for poor Korean women, who are alternately excluded and antagonized by the system in “Salt.”
Presentation deriving from senior honors thesis with Kim Kono, professor of Japanese language & literature.