문헌설화에서 ‘투기하는 부인[妬婦]’의 형상화와 의미

Abstract

There are some few of stories about jealous wives in literature tales of the Joseon Dynasty. Women's jealousy is forbidden in that days and jealous wive were considered immoral. But the feature of the women in some literature tales is positive. There is a gap between social ideals and textual characterizations. I study the cultural meaning of the difference. To do that, I focus on the textual characterizations. The stories of jealous women are found in the funny stories or anecdotes. The former is tend to be short and fictional but the latter long and nonfictional. However the boundary is not clear. In the funny stories the jealous wive are expressed in the features who have individual (sexual) desire for their husband while in the anecdotes they are represented in the features who have mixed two virtues. One is negative, as you know, 'jealous' and the other is positive, for example, 'confident', 'perspective', 'judicious'. I relates this different characterization to the discourse to forbid women's jealousy. Since the 17th century, a lot of texts were published to educate young women. These texts emphasized the teaching of Confucianism for women. I think this discourse couldn't succeed to forbid jealousy. These texts didn't consider the position of the readers who had experienced real and strong jealousy. The Joseon Dynasty allowed concubinage system for yangban[兩班]. As a result, in the spite of social attempt to forbid jealousy, the Joseon Dynasty produced a lot of jealousy wive. In this context, the characterization of literature tales could wave the fixed meaning, man/woman, top/bottom and jealous/non-jealous, good/evil. These stories make a very narrow gap in gender and patriarchy of the Joseon Dynasty.