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Love Conflict in the Hajinyangmunnok and the Self-censorship of the Female Reader

Lee, Kyungha 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article aims to re-examine the characteristics of the main male and female character of the Hajinyangmunnok. It also attempts to re-asses the meaning of the conflict surrounding their love. Previous studies on Korean heroine novels have tended to focus on the heroic actions and internal anguish of the main female character. However, it is argued that, in the case of the Hajinyangmunnok, the main focus of the story is the love struggle between the two main characters. Therefore, Hajinyangmunnok should be regarded, above all, as a romance novel. The fact that it is the hero character that is ‘willing to do everything to obtain the love of one woman’ is also pointed out. It should be stressed that this type of character is rare in Korean novels of the Joseon period. Based on an examination of the above, it is argued that the love conflict which appears in Hajinyangmunnok should be approached as a kind of self-censorship by upper class females who represented the main readership of the novel. Since upper class females were the most sexually oppressed group of the late Joseon period, it is maintained that the authors and readers of the romance novels had to regulate expressions regarding love according to the universally accepted limits of the time. In this context, the love conflict between the male and female character can be regarded as representing the conflict between love-lust and sexual morality which existed within the mind of the upper class female reader.

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

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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