Woman and the Promise of Modernity: Signs of Love for the Nation in Korea

[...] it is the blessings of Christianity that has induced her to attend church services and to engage in acts of worship along with men, giving her the conception that men and women are sons and daughters of God on equal terms. 2 So wrote the novelist Yi Kwang-su on the status of Korean womanhood and the "civilizing" benefits of Christianity in early colonial Korea. To examine this problematic of gender, nation, and novel writing, I will focus my analysis on Yi Kwang-su's Mujông (Heartless), a work widely perceived to be Korea's first modern novel. 4 Considered a classic in Korea's modern literary canon, Mujông engaged the question of national identity as a way of coming to terms with the traumatic experiences of Koreans after their colonization by Japan in 1910.