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The Meanings of the Birth of Villains in 「Unyoungjeon」 and 「Dongsungi」

Kim, Jeongsuk 1

1단국대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

The cliche confrontation between good and evil is generally pointed out when discussing classical novels, but it is with the Hangul popular novels after the 18th century that the good-evil confrontation became general in classical novels. The conflicts in Cheongi-soseol cannot be simply explained with the confrontation between good and evil. It was after the 17th century that the abstract evil called reality began to manifest itself specifically in Geumo-sinhwa and Mongyurok. The Cheongi-soseol in the 17th century can be characterized by the tendency toward a longer and popular story, in which the number of characters increased, the space got expanded, and conflicts among characters became concrete. It is those days that villains started to appear in specific forms in Cheongi-sosel, and there were Unyoungjeon and Dongsungi at the forefront. While the order represented by Anpyeongdaegun in Unyoungjeon, Unyoung’s desire against it violates the Neo-Confucianist ideology. It was at this point that the desire grew to see confrontations and hesitations between personal and community values and regard individual life as something of more good than community life. However, the desire failed, not getting over the community values, which is depicted in Unyoungjeon. Even Anpyeongdaegun was a politically alienated figure, which means his function in the novel was not a villain. Thus the composition was completed in a way that the villain called Teuk was blamed for all the faults and punished by Heaven and that Unyoung and Kim Jinsa met in Heaven as part of the reward. Despite the composition, however, the overall sense of sorrow of Unyoungjeon does not go away. There are confrontations between good and evil in Unyoungjeon, but the boundary is blurry and the villain is different from that of a popular novel. There are two villains named Angi and Hosondalhee in Dongsungi. Their mere function is to highlight the aspects of Dongsun as a virtuous woman, and they claim no further significance in the novel. Unlike in Unyoungjeon, Dongsun’s love does not violate the community values, which means the two villains harm the community values rather than the personal values of Dongsun. It is noteworthy that the goal of Dongsungi, a novel written in classical Chinese language, was not to reward good and punish evil like a Hangul popular novel, which is demonstrated by the fact that the Hangul Dongsungi ends the story with the happy ending and reward for Dongsun and Seo Mun-jeok unlike its Chinese language counterpart. In the two works, the villains functioned as an alternative instead of playing the unique roles of a villain. However, given the discussions above, they can be regarded as the prehistory of villain characters between classical novels and popular ones.

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