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Discourse Strategies in the Yuyeon Prison Case -Focusing on Two Female Characters in Yuyeon-jeon-

  • The Research of the Korean Classic
  • 2026, (74), pp.319~350
  • Publisher : The Research Of The Korean Classic
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature > Korean classic prose
  • Received : July 13, 2026
  • Accepted : August 13, 2026
  • Published : August 31, 2026

Jung Inhyouk 1

1가톨릭관동대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study reexamines the Yuyeon prison case represented in Lee, Hangbok’s Yuyeon-jeon[柳淵傳] from the perspective of the discourse strategies employed by two female characters. The women considered here, Lady Baek and Lady Lee, are not treated as merely silent or subordinate beings under patriarchy. Rather, they are understood as character who simultaneously possessed the status of members of elite literati families and were subject to institutional constraints as women. This study defines them as situationally constrained agents marked by a form of situational subalternity and analyzes how they transformed their restricted speech into discourse endowed with legal and textual public efficacy. Lady Baek, Yuyeon’s elder brother's wife, employed a discourse strategy that controlled the scene in which the identity of the man claiming to be Yuyu was to be verified and shifted the nature of the case from ‘the identification of a husband’ to ‘a crime against the Confucian moral order involving the murder of an elder brother.’ The exchange and concealment of letters between Lady Baek and Chae, Eung-gyu, her refusal to confront him in court, the presentation of intimate bodily information, her repeated appeals, and her request to transfer the jurisdiction of the case, as represented in the Yuyeon-jeon and Leesaeng-songwonrok[李生訟寃錄], can all be understood as procedural discourse strategies through which private information for identity verification was reconstructed as the public language of legal accusation. By contrast, Lady Lee, Yuyeon’s wife, did not allow her husband’s grievance to remain confined to vernacular family records and personal memory. Instead, she entrusted it to authoritative ‘knowers of words[知言者]’ such as Lee, Wonik and Lee, Hangbok, who possessed public and institutional authority, thereby transforming it into the authoritative classical Chinese narrative of The Yuyeon-Jeon. In particular, Lady Lee’s appeal did not remain a mere expression of emotion; it acquired persuasive force as public discourse by being translated into legal and administrative vocabulary such as ‘a person wrongfully put to death[强死人],’ ‘the severest punishment[極典],’ and ‘redressing injustice[雪冤].” Building on previous scholarship on the textualization of Lady Lee’s testimony, this study further argues that such textualization was made possible through the juridicization of affective language and the establishment of an institutionally authorized mediating speaker. In this respect, The Yuyeon-jeon may be reconsidered not as a transparent record that restores the truth of the Yuyeon prison case, but as a women’s narrative that reveals the process by which the limited speech of two women acquired public efficacy through judicial and literary apparatuses amid competing claims surrounding the case.

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