About gender awareness in our time
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This is Wickley's third novel. This short story focuses on the problem of human sexual drive and perception of sex. How are social sexual ethics and individual gender perception formed?
This novel was conceived because of the incident in Room n. This incident was felt as a phenomenon of the times rather than a fragmentary incident. Hundreds of thousands of people have been involved directly, indirectly, and emotionally in this crime.
In my last essay in Brunch, I wrote that Confucian-Christian rigorous sexual ethics and sexual taboos gave rise to this distorted coming-of-age ceremony. Times only talked too heavily or too lightly about sex. They didn't talk about sex in everyday language.
Freud referred to human sexual impulse as'Libido' and viewed it as the driving force behind the formation of'ego (ego)'. The world's sexual ethics,'super ego', suppresses libido with strict standards, and it is said that if libido is not properly expressed, the ego is formed by atrophy and distortion. In severe cases, even mental illness is said to develop.
The profound correlation between sex and self is not just a psychological perspective. The philosopher Butland Russell unfolds the same argument in his essay “Why Am I Not a Christian”. He argues that Christianity condemned human reason as a guilty consciousness by recognizing sexual impulse as a original sin consciousness'', and as a result, humans became ideologically repressedslave of faith''.
Korea's sexual ethics are still strict. Confucian thoughts and Christian thoughts were added, and the ethical standards were very sharp. However, for growing children, the discourse about sex is very physiological and superficial sex education. In our society, it would be right to think that the perception of sex is actually formed by ourselves with our peers.
Sexual recognition that is good for an individual does not mean that it is bound by an intense sense of original sin, nor does it lead to the realm of disorder. It just needs to be made aware of it as a very natural and positive impulse that goes in line with the world's sexual ethics.
In this novel, “Exiled from Eden,” the characters in the play are hovering around in both extremes of gender awareness—very strict and very light.
Angel, who has just become an adult, has been raised in a very conservative Confucian-Christian family who treats sex only as evil. He has a sense of guilt as much as it contradicts his curiosity about his sex and his sexual impulse. However, he meets a friend who considers khal as a very light play and experiences a new theater company of Khal, led by his own. And, in the meantime, between the achievements as a play and the too heavy sense of original sin, he suffers a severe psychological conflict.
Through the novel, I wanted to ask the question of how humans affirm libido, coordinate their ego with the super ego, and how to shape their ego in this era.