고전소설에 나타난 군자형(君子型) 인물에 대한 고찰

Abstract

Confucian sacred texts had presented the Confucian gentleman(君子, jun zi) as the most exemplary person. In the period of Ha-eun-ju(夏殷周),), the word ‘君子’ had been used to indicate the nobleman. Since Confucius, Confucian gentleman referred to the intellectuals who tried to attain the perfection of their personality and to practice their ideals in reality through study and self-discipline. This paper aims to examine how the Confucian gentleman type characters were represented in the classical novels of Chosun dynasty and interpret the meaning of it. For this purpose, firstly the concepts of the Confucian gentleman were explored. In Chosun dynasty, those words such as seonbi(선비) which means a man of virtue, eunsa(隱士) which means a retired scholar, and chuhsa(處士) which means a retired scholar were similarly used to refer to the Confucian gentleman. The Confucian gentleman type character appeared in Sohyunseongrok, a long piece novel written in Korean in the 17th century. It is notable that in the novels of Chosun dynasty, the Confucian gentleman type characters became to turn into the hero characters. This remarkable change might be caused by the tendency that Chosun dynasty preferred the characters who were loyal to their own desires to the Confucian gentleman characters who focussed on cultivation of their personality and the commitment in reality. For women, it is worth noting that while those females called the Confucian gentlewoman(女中君子) who had attained both knowledge and virtue really existed in Chosun dynasty, novels did not represent those kind of women. This absence of the Confucian gentlewoman character in the novels of those times might result from the tendency that female characters acted not through fulfilling their own ethical choice but through the obedience to the Confucian ideals and their discipline.