조선시대 여성 유서(遺書)의 사회문화적 기능과 의미 탐색 - 남성 유서와 비교를 중심으로

Abstract

The will contained the last message of the dead for the living. so it is basically part of a private sphere related to personal death. As wills are mostly for families, the historical character of the will is very prominent on the surface as well. On the other hand, This will cannot be separated from the social and cultural context of the time. Women's wills, in particular, are not free from women's social status and roles, and from the morality and ethics conferred on women. This paper noted the function and value of the will in the public domain. The main purpose of this paper is to research the sociocultural function and meaning of women’s will, sorted from men’s will in the Joseon Dynasty. Therefore, this paper examines possibility and necessity of the research first with studying the sociocultural nature of the will, then has the basic for researching the sociocultural function and meaning of women’s will by analyzing the sociocultural context in which women’s will was created. And this paper summarized the sociocultural functions and meanings of women’s will upon the prepared basic. The women’s will is a text with strong attributes of confucian patriarchy just like men’s will. However, female will was created and consumed in a different context from male will due to gender differences. It is also quite related to the differences in many ways, such as writing age, writing form, and delivering method and consuming method etc. And this difference changed the function of the will, the female will primarily functioned to strengthen the ethics of women. In particular, the function of women’s will was strengthened by combining with bijimun(碑誌文; text engraved on a monument) or Jeon literature(one of the Korean traditional literature genres) organized by men in the Joseon nobility. On the other hand, female will also played a role in overturning female ethics from the inside. This paper tried to identify various emotions and desires projected on women’s will and Jeolmyeongsa which is the extended version of the women’s will. Then this paper defined the sociocultural meaning of women’s will in the Joseon Dynasty based on the results of this research.