Reading Park Kyung-ni's Kim's Daughters from the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism: Focusing on Ethical Representation and Ethical Knots of "Otherized Subjects"

Park Kyung-ni was a Korean novelist who gained international fame with her epic novel The Earth. She mainly focused on the lives of an unhappy women in her literary works. This study investigates the multi-layered narrative of a family's tragic fate and unstable social system in Kim's Daughters. While Kim's Daughters opens with a shocking death, one should not solely focus on the superficial layer of this death. This is because, in the novel, the unethical incidents and political affairs that lead to death do not originate from a single relationship between the subject and the other, but rather represent otherized subjects in family histories and historical time. The ethical texts embedded in Kim's Daughters are appropriate to read through the lens of ethical literary criticism, which dissects each ethical choice model and analyzes the motivations and processes thereof. This study explores the (non-) ethical behavior and internal chaos of the characters in Kim's Daughters, and analyzes the intertextuality reflected in the specific modern Korean history and location. This study presents a new research methodology for reading the worldview of Park Kyung-ni by deconstructing the ethical problem and examining the ethical knots in the novel. Furthermore, by applying sub-concepts such as ethical standards, ethical environment, ethical selection, ethical enlightenment, ethical taboo, and ethical dilemma, this study illuminates the ethical issues that change between life and death and are inherent in the subjects or specific events of the novel.