자녀희생효설화에 나타난 ‘효’와 ‘모성’의 문제

Abstract

Filial piety tale of sacrificing offspring is the story of victimizing one's children to serve their parents with devotion. In this type of story, the issue is raised on the matter of filial piety and maternal instinct with the fact that female characters are playing key role in determining on decision and execution on doing filial piety and sacrificing children. The fact that incompatible conflict between filial piety and maternal instinct not being evolved into discussion and but resulting in superiority of filial piety manifest family order focusing more on filial piety than maternal instinct. With this, filial piety is gaining legal position permitting even inherent violence to preserve its values. On the other hand, maternal instinct is detected as the sincerity of filial piety of daughter-in-law in tale. Maternal instinct is proposed as fundamentals determining whether daughter-in-law is stably recognized in patriarchal family order by victimize offspring for filial piety and being credited from family and society or being excluded as disparate existence. The story in the layer of prologue is constantly in pursuit of absoluteness of filial piety. Having said that, in subsequent prologue we will able to find out the chasm between filial piety and maternal instinct with the protest of sympathy against unilateral renunciation of maternal instinct, criticism and alert against coercion of unconditional filial piety by tale supporters. Moreover, male story tellers, by putting focus on consensus itself between couples on decision of sacrificing offspring and indifferent to children's return in the end, have understanding mainly on fulfillment of filial piety about filial piety tale of sacrificing offspring. On the contrary, female story tellers have tendency of making unrealistic of children's death by emphasizing on the fact that daughter-in-law played key role in decision making process of sacrificing children and making children's safe return. To sum up, female story tellers by internalizing position and experience of female characters in the story, are aiming for harmony of filial piety and maternal instinct and want to evade sense of guilt and self-hatred resulting from abandonment of maternal instinct.