「바리공주」와 「니샨샤먼」비교 연구: ‘여자’이면서 ‘샤먼’으로 사는 운명적 패러독스를 중심으로

Abstract

This study compares Princess Bari with Nishan Shaman, two representative female mythical stories of Korea and China. Nishan was a shaman of Manchuria, who traveled the other world and saved ghosts. Princess Bari is a Korean shaman who was born as a baby girl, lived a miserable life, but acceded to the Shaman Ancestor Goddess through obedience, mercy and devotion. Studies of comparison of the two works have continued since the 1990s. This study extends the existing research results and attempts to reveal the homogeneity between the two works, focusing on narrative structure and thematic consciousness. This approach is an attempt of an in-depth analysis with a focus on classical universality rather than understanding under the presumption that the two works are an oral mythic epic of a shaman or a shaman ancestor myth. Especially, this study notes that the point where aesthetics of the two works is produced is the paradoxical perspective of their being a ‘woman’ and ‘shaman.’ Here, the setting of being a ‘woman’ symbolizes a social relationship and private network while a ‘shaman’ represents a social function or the vocational world as self-realization. The relationship between Nishan Shaman and Princess Bari is ‘intuitively’ captured, but concrete studies of the actual works result in bringing into relief the differences between the two works, reversely. Actually, Nishan is mainly involved with a story of an adult shaman’s travel in the other world, but Princess Bari is a story of a girl who was abandoned because of her being a girl. While Nishan is an active and autonomous woman, Princess Bari lived an obedient and devoted life. In spite of these differences, this study notes that the two works obtain the same tragic universality when they are analyzed, focusing on their narrative structure and thematic consciousness. Nishan Shaman reaches her peak as a shaman, but is locked in a well and dies because she did not save her husband that she saw in the other world, and Princess Bari, too, saves her father by getting married for him, but refuses prosperity in this world. In this sense, the two works deal with the cost women should pay in order to assimilate into the rules of this life, born as a woman. In other words, woman’s duties and life as a shaman connect to each other as a paradoxical contradictory relationship. Also, this circumstance is a woman’s dilemma, which still subsists in the present. In addition, this constitutes a classical and universal aesthetics of the two works.