Intergenerational Uplift and Female Community: A Study on Female Narratives in the Korean Drama When Life Gives You Tangerines
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Set primarily on Jeju Island and spanning decades of post-war Korean history, the Korean drama When Life Gives You Tangerines takes Jeju haenyeo culture and rural social customs as its cultural backdrop. Centering on the lives of grassroots civilians, it depicts ordinary people's struggles and companionship amid hardships against the backdrop of modern social transformation, poverty and gender oppression in Republic of Korea. Focusing on the life trajectories of three generations of Jeju women, the drama constructs dual narratives of intergenerational uplift and female community, breaking the singular narrative mode centered on individual female awakening in traditional female-themed works.Adopting feminist narratology as the core theoretical framework, this study integrates textual analysis, interdisciplinary research and case study methods to systematically analyze the female narrative strategies of the drama from four dimensions: narrative context, narrative space, narrative perspective and narrative structure. The research reveals that the drama realizes intergenerational inheritance among three generations of women through economic support, emotional inheritance and transfer of life decision-making rights, forming a progressive intergenerational development model from the sacrifice-oriented generation, resistance-oriented generation to independence-oriented generation.Moreover, the shaping of Yang Kwang-sik as a male ally of women pioneers a new narrative paradigm for female-themed audiovisual works in East Asia. This drama also reflects the universal dilemma of East Asian women balancing self-actualization and family obligations, as well as their inner aspiration to transform traditional sacrifice-based intergenerational relations into equal and mutually supportive ones.
Author: Liu Yuxin
Institution: Ningbo University of Finance & Economics
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7203652995