남성성에 따른 여성 욕망의 수용 양상과 의미 - <상사뱀> 설화를 중심으로

Abstract

This study focused on the ways that women's desire was treated in the Sangsa Snake tales, some of Korea's stories transmitted through generations. The tales present a story in which love desire and the realization patterns of desire have direct connections with gender in that its premise is love between man and woman. Sangsa Snake tales have an ending narrative of obsessive love, refused love, transformation driven by desire, and death or sublimation, telling stories that exhibit the sexual desire of man and woman most directly and show extreme situations of desire through the material of transformation. Complete Works of Korean Oral Literature includes total 22 Sangsa Snake tales that have been transmitted and recorded. They consist of five male-pattern Sangsa tales, in which men admire a woman and become a Sangsa snake, and 17 female-pattern Sangsa tales, in which women admire a man and become a Sangsa snake. The fact that female-pattern Sangsa tales are twice as many as male-pattern ones shows the subversive attribute of oral literature along with the transmission of the tales in the form of oral literature in a feudal society where women's desire was a taboo. Male Sangsa snakes develop desire one-sidedly and unleash it physically. Their all-out contact and physical domination end in the death of women that they have desire for. In female Sangsa snake tales, female characters are from all classes of society including nobility, common people, and the lowest class. Men that they have desire for are all nobility except for two cases. Their impulse of craving driven by their sleeping or promise with men is other-like. Their parents or male teachers make an intervention to let their desire known and block their desire. In female Sangsa snake tales, men's reactions to women's desire are categorized into three types: the type of "recognition and acceptance" involves men recognizing women's desire and making physical relations with them when women's desire is changed into a snake body; the type of "caution and acceptance" involves men making physical relations with women and accepting women's desire for their safety; and the type of "refusal and disregard" involves men persistently rejecting women's desire. This classification is based on the acceptance of desire. A look at the masculinity of male characters from the gender perspective can provide a new interpretation of a popular viewpoint of male characters those days. In her Men and Masculinities(2010), R. W. Connell examined masculinity in the viewpoint of "gender as a structure of social practice" instead of the old sociobiological concept and argued that physical and temperamental differences between man and woman are amplified into universal male dominance through culture. Masculinity is classified into four types of hegemonic, subordinated, complicit and marginalized masculinity according to dynamic relations among masculinities. Based on the attitudes of people responsible for the oral transmission of Sangsa Snake tales, there is destructive punishment for hegemonic masculinity. That is, men's families, academic hierarchies, and bodies are all dominated, which leads to their death. Subordinated masculinity gets a warning that even the traces of men's existence will be erased. Marginalized masculinity presents cases in which men help in driving other men toward collapse. Complicit masculinity secures the prosperity of men's families and even the success of their posterity.