This study examines identity construction and placeness formation
through an oral life story of a woman from a Yangban family. Identity
and placeness are not separated ideas. Those ideas keep changing based
on what events the subject experience and how he or she signifies such
experiences. Also, their qualitative meanings differ based on what places
the past and later experiences are placed in. The teller had lived before
her marriage in an environment of concealment and oppression. It was
the environment of the times and the old generation’s compulsion that
caused such emotions to be formed. The teller however showed her own
will of choice in such an environment constructing her identity. The teller
experienced spatial movement after her marriage in which course she
was given a new identity. She felt anxious and alienated in the strange
environment, and such feelings were a cause that freshly defined the
placeness of her original family that compelled concealment and
oppression. However, her anxiety and alienation in her family-in-law did
not remain constant. Responding to the new environment, she
accommodated and reestablished her given identity. Her family-in-law
was not a place she wanted to escape from. It was a place that
guaranteed and proved her existence, and hence she should preserve it as the subject. The teller’s oral life story contained her identity that had
been varied in the time flow, and showed with such variation of identity
that space became a place, which in turn was diversified into various
placenesses.