The key word in Madame Freedom is “freedom.” In Korean society in the 1950s, “freedom” was both “a sign of the flood of Americanized culture” and “a fashionable term that metaphorically expressed the cultural confusion of postwar society.” The decade’s immersion in this “flood of the word freedom” can be understood as an inevitable stage in the modernization of Korean society.

The 1950s Madame Freedom suggests that author Jeong Bi-seok succeeded in his strategy of enlightening his era. Yet its image of the democratic household sought in postwar society is conservative, returning to a premodern family structure that remains stable only when husband and wife occupy a vertical rather than an equal relationship. Unlike many women of her time, the protagonist Oh Seon-yeong gains freedom while living with the progressively minded Professor Jang, moving freely between home and society. Dance expresses bodily desire and allows contact with someone of the opposite sex other than her husband. Under the historical conditions of the postwar Cold War, imposed anti-communism and nationalism suppressed individual freedom and rationality; through dance, people expressed their desires for personal freedom and sexuality.