管의 전통, 그 일상의 정치

A Tradition of Donggwan(管) and Gender Politics on Daily Lives

One topic of this essay is that women s Haengjang(行狀), records of a dead person s life, and Myojimyong(墓誌銘), a kind of epitaphs, originated from a tradition of Donggwan(彤管). In ancient China, Donggwan originally meant documents that Yeosa(女史), a female historiographer, recorded daily lives of queens, and the meaning changed to a history of ideal women in Joseon Dynasty. In this essay, I regard women s Haengjang and Myojimyong as writing belonged to tradition of Donggwan as well as tradition of writing for the dead . Another topic is to discuss what value women s Haengjang and Myojimyong have as historial materials. Scarcity of materials and historical records is one of big problems in studies of women s classical literary history. In this viewpoint, Haengjang and Myojimyong are very important sources for women s history. Because so many women s Haengjang and and Myojimyong were written during Joseon Dynasty and the documents often contained many kinds of informations about women s daily lives. However, women s daily lives were usually represented as very normative forms, which spoke for gender politics in women s daily lives in the Middle Ages.