‘戰亂 家族敍事’의 여성 형상화 양상과 그 의미 -병자전쟁 배경의 야담을 중심으로-

Abstract

This paper aims at studying the aspect and meaning of characterization of female character in tales of parting of husband and wife against the backdrop of Byeongjahoran. Byeongjahoran, which broke out forty years later since Imjinwaeran had ended, produced far more prisoners of war than any other wars, and it led to many parted couples as well. Since then, a series of stories reflecting such reality were created and one of the significant common features among those stories was that they put a strong emphasis on ‘chastity of women’. In such era, it was considered natural that a wife who became a captive should maintain her chastity to her husband by killing herself. In this backdrop, if the wife comes back alive after being captured, she would often be compelled to divorce for harming chastity. But most of the tales that are based on the subject of separation and reunion of couples during wartime have a happy ending that a female character manages to keep her chastity after parting with her husband, meets him again, and happily live together in the end, instead of reflecting a dark reality as above. This aspect shows a huge difference with the Chinese novels that also describe parting and reunion of a husband and wife in war times but are comparatively free from obsession with chastity of women at the same time. The fundamental cause for such difference is considered the particular political conditions of Joseon where chastity of a mother had an inseparable relation to success of her son in becoming a public officer. In other words, the Joseon Dynasty attempted to reinforce instrumental motherhood by associating chastity of a mother with success of a son in point of law to maintain and strengthen an ideology of female chastity. Thus, such historical circumstances is one of realistic conditions that inevitably premises ‘chastity of women’ in the tales of the Joseon era that depict not only parting and reunion of a couple but also the success of their son.