Over the past two decades, cultural and economic shifts such as a preference for individualism, educational attainment and job insecurity may have resulted in an increase in singlehood in the female population, but representations of single women in literature, less of post-marital singlehood, have perhaps existed before Henrik Ibsen's late 19th-century masterpiece A Doll's House that concludes with the character of Nora Helmer - a wife and a mother - leaving her family.
In most modern as well as late-modern societies, including Japan and South Korea, where marriage and giving birth are associated with the idea of "settling" and singlehood - even voluntary - with deficit or deviance, narratives like Cho Nam-Joo's 2016 novel, Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, are considered incendiary. The novel traces the college-educated titular character's descent into depression and a subtle craving for a return to her single status as a result of the disproportionate distribution of domestic and childcare work.
This indagation hopes to shed light on recent East Asian texts concerning the female protagonist experiencing a seemingly temporary but perpetual or vice-versa relinquishment of freedom, financial dependence, loss of career, isolation, lack of intimacy, and the sense of not being “a unit” with her partner, despite legally and socially not accorded the label of single. This paper will attempt to underline the negative impacts of stereotypical gender roles that have glorified wifehood and the self-sacrifice of motherhood in East Asian societies, with a particular focus on South Korea through the said novel, using Sam Hyun Yoo's demographic study on the pattern of late singlehood and marriage delay among women, and its correlation to education as the theoretical framework. Statistical data presented by Yoo in "Postponement and recuperation in cohort marriage" and interviews recorded by Nancy Rosenberger in Dilemmas of Adulthood (2013) will be utilized throughout.
