Conflicts between Christianity and Korean Shamanism in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (Mother Tongue Theologies:
Poets, Novelists and Non-Western
Christianity, ed. Darren J. N. Middleton
(Wipf & Stock 2009; presented at 2006
Southeast Conf. for Christianity & Lit and at 2005 College English Assoc.)
Nora Okja
Keller’s novel Comfort Woman is one of the few major Asian American novels to treat in
detail the role of Christianity in either Eastern Asia or Asian America: Keller
uses her title character, Soon Hyo, to portray the
conflict between Korean traditions and Christianity. With the help of a
Christian mission in Pyongyang and marriage to an American missionary, Soon Hyo escapes the horrors of the Japanese comfort camps and
finds refuge in America, where she eventually raises a daughter. However, in
spite of the help she receives from Christians, Soon Hyo
never embraces Christianity herself, and it becomes a constant source of
tension in her life, especially through the attitudes of her husband, who
represents both the ambitions of the Western Church and its limitations: his
limited understanding of the Korean-Japanese conflict prevents him from
recognizing that his wife was forced into prostitution. This article
looks at three areas of interest to Keller: the role of the Church in Korean
history, especially with regards to the Japanese occupation; syncretism between
indigenous Korean religion and Christianity; and the clashes of culture that
occur between the American and Korean characters, especially problems caused by
conflicting attitudes regarding the human body and problems related to
language.
Diasporic Monasticism and Inclusive
Hospitality in Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk (Benedictines magazine 61.2 (2008): 28-37;
presented at 2006 Southern Comparative Lit Assoc.)
Kathleen
Norris’ essay-memoir The Cloister Walk describes her experiences over the course of a year as a
guest at a Benedictine monastery and college, focusing on the ways the monastic
life and tradition have helped restore her connection to Christianity. Even
though she is a lapsed Protestant, as well as a married woman, she finds that
the Benedictine practice of hospitality is generous and inclusive enough to give
her a place in which she can sort out her thoughts and gain strength for her
return to the world outside the monastic community. Her depictions of
Benedictine life focus on many of the ways that the Benedictine tradition
functions as a religious diaspora, a shared community
that is spread across the world in both time and place but which maintains a
sense of identity as being outside the world. Using conceptions of diaspora from ethnic studies, I examine the way Norris’
text illustrates the diasporic nature of monastic
life, and I speculate that this diasporic quality is
part of what enables Benedict’s command to hospitality to become a source
of healing for sojourners like Norris.
The Monkey King in the American
Canon: Patricia Chao and Gerald Vizenor’s Use
of an Iconic Chinese Character (Comparative Literature Studies 43.3; presented at
2005 American Comparative Lit Assoc.)
The past
two decades have seen the publication of at least three American novels based
on the sixteenth-century Chinese novel, The Journey to
the West,
and its central character, the Monkey King: Gerald
Vizenor’s Griever: An American Monkey King in China; Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; and Patricia Chao’s Monkey King. Each
of these novels combines the Chinese classic with allusions to the European and
American literary traditions, thus integrating the Chinese folk story into the
American canon alongside the African and indigenous narratives that are
currently stretching the edges of America’s non-European origins. Yet,
these three novels approach the original in radically different ways: Kingston
appropriates Monkey as an inspiration for her protagonist; Vizenor
also appropriates Monkey, not as an inspiration but as a cousin to his
Native-American trickster hero; Chao, however, criticizes the Monkey King
tradition by connecting him to her protagonist’s sexually abusive father.
These three novelists therefore form a convenient set for examining the
possibilities inherent in using classical traditions within modern contexts.
Setting aside Kingston, about whom much has been written, I examine the way Journey to the West functions
in the novels of Vizenor and Chao, neither of which
has received critical attention in this regard. Using the double title of the
Chinese novel as a guide, I discuss how the novelists adapt both the Chinese
characters and the notions of “journey” and of “west.”
Finally, I consider how the novels interpret the United States and American
literature.
Catherine of Genoa:
Faith as Borderland Experience (Magistra 12.2; presented at
2005 U. Miss. Renaissance Symposium)
For the last nine years of her life,
Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) suffered from an illness that bewildered both
doctors and priests and that her hagiographer described as “burning
interior and exterior flames.” The illness was never solved or healed,
but her Vita attributes it to the conflict between her body and her
spirit over the presence of divine Love. Throughout the text, these two
elements, body and spirit, are so severely opposed that it is said that the
spirit, had it not been divinely restrained, would have destroyed her body.
Because Catherine hears from God that her suffering is part of “the order
of his operations,” she is able, in spite of the intense physical pain
caused by her body’s resistance to her spirit’s communion with
divine love, to remain so happy, so filled with words of love, that people
sought her aid, seeing “heaven in her soul, and purgatory in her agonized
body.”
Using
Gloria Anzaldúa’s statement that
borderlands exist “wherever two or more cultures edge each other,”
I suggest that Catherine’s illness can be read as an experience of the
borderlands between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth. This
chapter develops this reading, examining what type of borderlands is created by
the boundary between heaven and earth, and how Catherine’s teachings, her
work in hospitals and her final illness together reveal religious faith as a
borderlands experience. Further, this chapter examines the role played by
Catherine’s gender in her experiences, as for example her unwanted
marriage and her need for a male religious to write
down her experiences. How did being a female mystic (but not a nun) contribute
to her experience in the spiritual borderlands?