The Formation and Transformation of ‘Romantic Love’ in the ‘Chunhyangjun’ and ‘Sunjung Manhwa’
Hwang, Hye-Jin
Hansung University
Korean Language Education Research Vol. 17 pp.171-218 (2003)
Abstract
This study is about a 'romantic love' as a cultural and historical idea which is formed and reformed by cultural texts. As cultural texts, 'Chunhyangjun' shows the generational form of the idea and a series of 'Sunjung Manhwa', comic books read by teenage girls, shows the changes of the idea. Although two texts are different in media and times of creation, they share the cultural concept, romantic love. The romantic love is not a universal form of love, but a accidental and historical form of love. It combined three cultural categories, sex, love, and marriage. Doing so, it became a moral of modern family. In the 'Chunhyangjun', we can see the generational form of the romantic love. The hero and the heroine are 'Yangban' and 'Gisang' in the aspect of social position. It tells us that the romantic love was born in extramarital relationship. And the hero, a man of talent and the heroine, a woman of beauty are falling in love passionately. But the passionate love last not very long, so it needs a stabilization mechanism of the feeling. The heroine, Chunhyang uses 'Yeol'(烈), the feudalistic ethic, in the purpose of lasting of love. In the West, the Christianity played the role of transform of the passionate love into the romantic love. And the text is ended in marriage, the union of a man and an woman who are not in accordance with social positions. It settled a pattern of the romantic love, and Chunhyang is a cultural heroine who embodied the idea of the romantic love initially. In 'Sunjung Manhwa', we can find signs of change and transformation of the romantic love. In the process of romantic idealization, heroines get an ability of care for man. It tells us that in the field of emotional life, women are superior to men. Another characteristic of the text has two storyline: the one is a narrative of love affairs and another is a narrative of feelings of love. In 'Sunjung Manhwa', the latter is more important than the former. It means that the present love has more interests in the feeling of love and relation itself than the past one. Admitting that most 'Sunjung Manhwa' is ended in marriage, the last characteristic of the text is that it separates three categories, love, sex, marriage which were put together in the past. 'Sunjung Manhwa' is accepted that the most powerful media which reproduce the idea of romantic love, but actually, they are the signs of the changing romantic love. 'Sunjung Manhwa', Comic books for women, is one of the girl students favorite popular media. And romantic love is still prevailing in present culture. This study has an objection of making contents of culture-education. The traditional cultural production, 'Chunhyangjun' is shows the outbreaking form of romantic love. And it can play a important role in defamiliarization of present culture. As a result of that, an ability of self-examination will be developed.
Keywords
romantic lovecultural conceptlovesexmarriageculture-education
