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A Study on Legend of Jangjamot Pond

Oh, Jeong-mi 1

1전북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

“A Legend of Jangjamot Pond” is one of the widespread legends in the country, which is categorized as the taboo tale. Previous studies on “A Legend of Jangjamot Pond” define women’s ‘looking back’ as the violation of taboo, and interpret daughter-in-law’s fossil as the result of correction. However, it is not satisfied that a good daughter-in-law donating rice to a monk without telling her father-in-law was corrected with a vulnerable man. Moreover, a problem that the fossil, a result of correction, is hallowed is also a lingering dilemma. A question of the Jangjamot Pond tale’s structure is started from here. Indeed, is the Jangjamot Pond tale the structure of taboo violation? And, is the fossil of daughter-in-law a result of correction? This research is going to review the structure of “A Legend of Jangjamot Pond”, look into the meaning of prohibition inserted in the middle part of the story again, and resolve the problem that the fossil of daughter-in-law who violated prohibition is hallowed, at the same time. A tale of Jangjamot Pond is divided into a total of 6 paragraphs: ‘it is talked that there is a miser in a town’; ‘a monk visits the miser’s house and demands offering to a temple, but the miser denies it and gives the monk excrement instead’; ‘the miser’s daughter-in-law donates rice to the monk without telling her father-in-law’; ‘the monk tells her to follow him, but not to look back and climb a mountain’; ‘the town goes to a watery grave, and the daughter-in-law looks back’; and ‘she finally becomes a stone.’ It was found that each of these paragraphs means lack-test 1-passing test 1-test 2-passing test 2-satisfying the lack, and it has the similar type of the martyr’s structure proposed by Alan Dundes. After all, the tale of Jangjamot Pond is identified it is not a structure that is composed of taboo, violation of the taboo, and punishment of the violation, but a structure of identifying compassion and giving it sacredness with repeated and gradual tests of goodness. And through this interpretation, it is discovered that the meaning of ‘taboo’ in the structure of a tale gets out of the previous studies defining its meaning just as a device for identifying the god’s authority and the taboo’s meaning can vary according to the composition of paragraphs in the structure of a tale. The taboo ‘Don’t look back’ in the tale of Jangjamot Pond is a temptation to test goodness and a test, and women’s looking back can be interpreted as passing the test by overcoming the temptation. Women are the achievers who passed tests two times and a fossil is the result. Sacredness of fossil particularly exposed in the other stories eventually shows the meaning of ‘taboo’ in the tale of Jangjamot Pond is a ‘test’. That a fossil to be seen as another expression of the daughter-in-law has an ability to conceive a life and is recognized as another religious belief proves the daughter-in-law is not a woman who was corrected but had achieved sacredness.

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