여배우의 사회문화적 구성과 이월화

Abstract

The actress is a female performer on the theater stage portraying women, and also a societal and cultural construct performing an actress in the society. The actress is not confined solely to the theater, but transcends the boundaries of the stage, navigating both the public life of a performing artist and the private life of an individual. In doing so, she traverses the realms inside and outside the theater, intertwining the worlds of performance and personal existence. In our modern theater history, actresses were perceived as entities capable of realistically and authentically portraying femininity based on their biological bodies. The gaze towards these actresses was influenced by the repressed gender consciousness of the modern era. While actresses were seen as new women actively engaging in the public sphere, their presence was considered dangerous and unconventional in societal terms due to their perceived defiance against patriarchy, particularly as women with strong sexual desires. The case of Lee Wol-hwa, regarded as the first actress in our modern theater history, exemplifies this well. Lee Wol-hwa was the first actress who gave profound impact on theater public by playing a role of Katchusha in Tolstoy’s famous work The Resurrection. And since then, she became a representative figure of actresses portraying liberated, sexually appealing, and sometimes perilous female characters. However, outside the stage, she was reproduced as a problematic woman. She did not establish a stable household by marrying a man. Instead, she continued to engage in free relationships and had to work for life by running a restaurant and working as a dancer and Kisang(妓生). However, her personal life was scandalized, depicting her as having strong sexual desires, engaging in numerous relationships with men, and being characterized by excessive extravagance and vanity. Furthermore, actresses were perceived as sexual objects and associated with parasitic and promiscuous professions through Lee Wol-hwa. Yet, as argued by Lee Seo-gu(李瑞求), this was the result of societal bias.