'위안부' 연극의 여성주의적 미학의 재현 가능성: 라본느 뮬러Lavonne Muellar의 <특급 호텔Splendid Hotel>을 중심으로

Abstract

In late 1980s, the ]apan military sexual slaves broke the silence after 50 years have passed. Until then, they were erased in the history. No interest, research, discourse had been taken about them. The very act they declared themselves they were comfort women, meant to inscribe themselves in the history as the subject. Since then, there were many kinds of social movement, academic research, and governmental activity to restore their human rights, to compensate for the failed lives, and to recover the soiled names. Nonetheless, the comfort women' still remained in the margins of this society being regarded as the national shame as well as hers. The present representations of the comfort women' have been consigning them to life-long shame, silence and pain. To correct the social discourse as the prejudice against the comfort women, this paper aims to find the possibility to represent them in a positive sense. In a third persons gaze Lavonne Muellers Hotel Splendid proves itself as a play text suggesting a kind of possibility to the feminist aesthetic approach. First, Hotel Splendid represent the comfort women' as the subject in a feminist writing style. The soliloquy, aside, and the dialogue re-construct the history to their views. The poetry is used for the V-Effect to cut out the voyeuristic gaze. The sisterhood has been developed during the plot achieving a solidarity across the diversity. Kamikaze soldier is also included as a war slavery in brotherhood. As a result the dialectic of the coloniaVthe imperial, Korea/Japan, men!women, soldier/cornfort woman, and object and subject are subverted in a third space. Lavonne Mueller's Hote! Sp!endid suggests a positive possibility to represent the comfort women in the feminist aesthetic approach. Nonetheless, it has embedded a limit as a text written by a third westem person. The national identity of Japan and Korea is generalized to the westem eyes. The sisterhood is regarded monolithic without consideration about the specialized situation of comfort women.' Still an ideology reveals the westem culture are developed, strong, and omnipresent for the oriental. America appeared as a subject at the tum of the history in the play. Eventually, HoteZ Splendid blurs the intention to hand the comfort women the subjective role as well as to subvert the male dominated discourse about the history.