개화기 소설에 나타난 회심(回心)의 두 유형 - 최병현의 「성산명경」과 애니 베어드의 「따라 따라 예수 따라 가네」를 중심으로

Abstract

The Kae-wha-ki novels were written also in the period that Christianity (Protestantism) had been in the prime of being imported and pervaded into Korea. These two novels, the Sungsanmyunggung of Byung-Heon Choi and the Dara, dara, Yeisoo dara kanei of Annie Baird which had been written in 1910s, have brought together literary interests because these had revealed two processes of contrastive conversions of each other. Byung-Heon Choi as the first Korean Methodist clergy who had learned enough Confucianism made the conversion of figures who had represented traditional religions(Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism) of Korea in his time into Christians by his arguing with them in his novel, and Annie Baird as a missionary described very concretely processes of the conversions of Korean people who had abandonedly lived in ignorance of Christianity in her novel. The conversional tendencies in these two novels had shown themselves as different patterns of each other as contrastive tendencies that had appeared between the authors’ social positions(as a traditional confucianist as well as a clergy, and as an American missionary) and the conversional subjects(as the religious who had learned and been specialized, and as the people who had been faithful to their own real lives and living emotions). If the authors’ conversional type was to belong to the ‘gradual conversion’ as the conversion of them into Christianity by rational dialogues and arguments, the subjects’ conversional type was to belong to the ‘sudden conversion’ that its affective power had resolved their conflicts and pains at a breath. The subject of the rational and intelligent conversion as well as of the conversion being accompanied by real and intensive emotions is also to be the ‘Healthy-Mindedness’ as well as the ‘Sick-Soul.’ These are able to be divided into so called ‘the men who have no question if they are born only once’ and ‘the men who have to be born again.’ These contrastive types would have functioned as standard references of explaining types of the conversion of characters in the korean modern Christian literary works that had been developed after the Kae-wha-ki novels.