The tragic oral-narratives present the mythologic themes of the separation from the sacred world and of the failure of revival. The tragic event that the female lays bare the secret of her son or her husband is one of the gradations of the law of cau...
The tragic oral-narratives present the mythologic themes of the separation from the sacred world and of the failure of revival. The tragic event that the female lays bare the secret of her son or her husband is one of the gradations of the law of causality of tragedy that lead to the results of the separation and the failure in the narratives.
In two typical stories of ‘Agichangsu’ the mother commits the blunder disclosing the secret of Agichangsu’s revival-he has wings under his axillae and can fly, or prepares to be born again as a strong and brave warrior riding on horse under ground- and her son dies or fails in rebirth because of her mistakes, for she cannot recognize his divine nature.
The geomancer-the person has the art based on the geomantic system of topography used in choosing auspicious sites for graves and houses-’s wife also exposes the secret of her husband-the geomancer and his son are to put the geomancer’s corpse into the public well in town-to her neighbors, so their project to intend to raise the honor of their family by the dead geomancer’s coming to life again under ground ends in a failure in the story of ‘Umulmyoungdang’.
In these stories woman’s divulging the secret acts as a part of the steps composed according to the tragic causality in the layer of narrative, but only the female image as the secret divulger to bring about tragic results immediately stands out in bold relief in the layer of performance. The tragic narratives raising the problem of human-existence become to function as the discourses of gender politics generalizing and justifying the ideology of ‘the male domination’, through the performing course led by the male or the subject of virilism and based on the androcentric social reality and the patriarchy.
The first of the discourse strategies of symbolic domination is drawing a distinction between the sacred and the secular in the narratives according to genders of the male and the female. The female that belongs to the secular world is to give rise to human ontological limits of the separation from the sacred world and the failure of revival by violating taboos, for she cannot understand meaning and value of the male being that belongs to the sacred world. This is involved in the second discourse strategy of symbolic domination. In the course of the performance, the female subject violating taboos is further recognized as the sinner to have to account for the tragic results totally and it is only said that the female is too incredible and careless to tell a secret to her, with her image as a figure representing human being passed over on purpose.
The third discourse strategy of symbolic domination is to form the performance from the point of view that the female subject must be accused of causing the crisis of the community though she was already estranged and excluded from the community based on the androcentric system and the patriarchy at first, and to justify the alienation and the exclusion on the grounds of her mistake. Although the crisis of the community results from the androcentric system and ideology, not from the intention and purpose of the female subject, the women are blamed for wrong effects in the layer of performance. The criticism against the women is beyond the logic of narratives themselves, and it is the punishment for nonobservance of rules that mythology of the motherhood insists all the women being someone’s mother to observe. This is the fourth.
But the performances of these narratives don’t work only as the gender-political discourse to justify the male domination. The tragedy that exists in these stories makes the performancer to reflect and raise a doubt of the adaptation to the androcentric social reality. It is the heterogeneity between the layer of narrative and the layer of performance that presents the possibility of resistance to break the solid ground of the male domination.