Min Sook Wang-Le’s scientific contributions

Korean women writers today take part in the transformation of literary world and contribute through their works to the change of their own status and of other women’s status. They highlight the complexity of the mother’s image in a new perspective. Sometimes rejected, sometimes valued, motherhood becomes in some of them a preferred subject in the quest for their identity. This study emphasizes the case of the women writer Jeon Hey-sung (1960-), author of the Mayonnaise, with the aim of understanding how she envisages the relationships between mother and daughter. The novel demystifies the image of the sacrificial and/or asexual mother. The mother is not here in a position of form-subject, limited to the sole function of motherhood, but of an independent subject assuming her autonomy. By the voice of the narrator, the writer puts foremost the femininity of a woman before her motherhood.