Abstract
In May 1980, student protests sprung up across the South Korean peninsula in defiance of the recently established military dictatorship (Clark, 1988, pp. 10–11). In response to these protests the state decided to make an example of one rural capital, Kwangju, commanding elite army forces to besiege the city for ten days that, according to unofficial records, killed approximately 2,000 civilians (Ahn, 2002, pp. 121–3; Cumings, 2005, p. 383). Based on Ch’oe Yun’s novella, There a Petal Silently Falls (Chǒgi sori ǒpshi han chǒm kkonnip i chigo, 1988/2008), Jang Sǒn-u’s film, A Petal (Kkonnip, 1996), attempts to exorcise the horrors of the siege.1 The novella and film tell the fictional tale of the fate of an orphaned survivor of the massacre, a nameless 15-year-old girl (Yi Chǒng-hyǒn), left deranged and dumb by her traumatic experience. A Petal can be read as a modern cultural myth that channelled the inner workings of the South Korean cultural psyche at the time of an intense ‘centennial trial’ which saw former presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, imprisoned for their involvement in instigating the massacre (Han, 2005, pp. 1009–10). The legal victories that were won in the 1990s by the campaign for justice call for corresponding resolution in the psychic life of the people. A Petal answers this desire by offering up the protagonist’s herstory as testimony of the silenced voices of the survivors and her partial traumatic recovery as a metaphor for collective healing pending in the psyche of a nation coming to terms with han, or cultural trauma.
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Filmography
A Petal (1996) Directed by Jang So?n-u [VHS]. San Francisco, CA: Tai Seng Video Marketing.
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© 2013 Emily Ashman
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Ashman, E. (2013). Psychic Resilience in the Fragile Images of A Petal: A Post-Jungian Perspective on Retraumatisation. In: Andermahr, S., Pellicer-Ortín, S. (eds) Trauma Narratives and Herstory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268358_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268358_12
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