明代 女性의 貞節에 대한 觀點들

Some Viewpoints about the Woman's Fidelity in the Ming(明) Dynasty : Especially of the Xiao-shuo-jia(小說家) and Officials in the Ming(明) Dynasty

As every researcher should know, definition of a certain period with some conceptual frame demands an enormous challenge and controversy. Furthermore, it is now well-known that the choice of concepts itself plays a crucial role in the process of bringing the period into focus. When an investigator starts to research certain historical period, his or her first job may often be to examine the "authentic perspective" derived from the corpus of officially published data. However, as these data were written and brought up by official historians, they were sure to imply the dominant ideology of the rulers, and there is a high chance that this immanent ideology is to encroach the perspective of the investigators. From this fact does transpire the necessity of reviewing the popular novels that had been for a long time excluded from the authentic history. Novel functions the society like a mirror does the objects. In other words, the stories of a walk of people, high and low, include their lived experience of the society somewhat different from those manifested in the serious authentic history. Therefore, this study is aimed, through the review of Ming Dynasty view of women's chastity, to delve into the other world underlying the dominant authentic history. Ming Dynasty was well-known to push ahead with the hard-line Confucius policy since Taizu(太祖) Zhu Yuan-Zhang(朱元璋) came up to the throne. As a result, Women were forced to keep chastity throughout the whole life. On the other hand, in the Ming(明) Dynasty the tendency to emphasize the integrity of the human nature was generally prevalent with the advent of Yang-ming-xue(陽明學). Zhu-zi-xue(朱子學) stressed the feminine chastity, claiming that the loss of chastity was an ignominious affair, even not comparable with the death by starvation. In contrast, Yang-ming-xue evaluated positively the affection between men and women, therefore showing the more generous attitude than before, towards the expression of the affective affairs on the part of women. Remarkable is that those women characters in the novels shows somewhat care-free attitude towards the ideological demand of Confucius ethics. They not only flirted with extra-marital relationship; furthermore, they were often exempt from the social blame. This fact shows that now we have two conflicting versions of records, the authentic history and popular novels. According to the first version, the Ming Dynasty was more oppressive to the woman than any previous dynasty, while the second version indicates that the awareness of the female inequality was widely recognized. This co-existence of two rival versions challenges us to decide which version is nearer to the real lived experience of the Ming Dynasty women. However as the truth may not lie in any one version, but in somewhere between the two versions, attention will be also paid to plural aspects of the society, based on these contradictory data of authentic history and popular novels. Finally, it is hoped that this work may be a small step to understand a historical phenomenon in the conjuncture of conflicting and negotiating cultures.