본문 바로가기
  • Home

Ideal Women and Men in Traditional Stories and Discourses on Marriage

  • The Research of the Korean Classic
  • 2011, (24), pp.391-422
  • Publisher : The Research Of The Korean Classic
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature > Korean classic prose

Ryu Jeong Wol 1

1서강대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper studies about ideal gender types which are expressed in traditional marriage. For the purpose I focus on marriage stories and discourses. In Korean old stories, people test to choose new family members(intentional test stories). Test for women is objective but for men subjective. In other stories, father or male relative meets a man or a woman, who becomes their new members later(accidental encounter stories). When he meets accidentally a young man or woman, he finds one good feature of him(her) and determine to marry him(her) with his daughter(son). At this moment, female's feature would be likely to be judged by one concrete behavior but male's feature to be judged by an abstract aspect. In the latter the subject of judgement has “Jinjigam[知人之鑑], good judgment of human nature” It is believed that one thing about a woman can say a lot about the rest of her. but one thing about a man can say nothing about the rest of him. In the discourses about marriage, a lot of standards to be applied for bride, phrenology for fecundity, writings to train daughters[Gnyeseo 戒女書]. But there are no phrenology or writings for groom. This imbalance of information to choose women and men means the difference of ideal gender types in traditional marriage. Aftter that, I read the imbalance with the code of substance and function and explain the reason why the information on ideal male feature is not enough in the discourse.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.