<주생전>의 배도 연구

Abstract

This paper examines Baedo, one of the main characters in Jusaeng-Jun. It attempts to solve problems left by existing studies which have misunderstood the true nature of Baedo by overrating her will to recover social status. Baedo had been a kisaeng(妓生) when she first met Jusaeng. Now in her mid or late twenties, she is about to retire. She has financial, physical, and emotional lacks and chooses Jusaeng as a spouse who might help her to cope with physical and emotional lacks. She displays her will to recover social status only as a strategy to talk Jusaeng to courtship while neither of them believes in the possibility to rise to a higher standing. Thinking of herself as an equal partner for Jusaeng, Baedo fairly demands he should love her alone and strongly resists any attempts to disturb her monogamous relationship with him. Baedo's generous consent for Jusaeng to marry Sunhwa shows that 1) she does not die of disappointed love; 2) she knows that Jusaeng's relationship with Sunhwa is actually impossible; 3) she wants to reconcile herself with Jusaeng. In the end Jusaeng accepts her offer and creates a beautiful eulogy. This eulogy is not true, but secures significance in that it is the truth Baedo and Jusaeng have agreed to believe. The characterization of Baedo is free from feudalistic moral ideas. It was a rare example of positive representation of this kind of character, which became possible for a sixteenth-century romance in China.