Mother-in-Law–Daughter-in-Law Relationship in the Current Korean Society
One of the prevailing themes in Korean novels and dramas is the fractured relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, caused to a great extent by Confucianism, which preaches submissiveness of women to their parents, husbands, and in-laws. Given the tremendous economic, technologic...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Scientia Publishing House
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://acta.sapientia.ro/content/docs/163-01.pdf |
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| Summary: | One of the prevailing themes in Korean novels and dramas is
the fractured relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law,
caused to a great extent by Confucianism, which preaches submissiveness
of women to their parents, husbands, and in-laws. Given the tremendous
economic, technological, and cultural development of South Korea in the
last fifty years, the question that arises is whether family ties have undergone
an equal progress. This study aims at identifying whether the matriarch in
the Korean household, i.e. the mother-in-law, still holds the reins or whether
there is a shift towards more freedom and independence of the daughtersin-law. The data employed to this aim are Cho Nam-Joo’s (2018) novel
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which follows the life of a married woman in her
thirties and a K-drama titled Marriage Clinic: Love and War that depicts the
problems of married couples, among which the bad treatment daughters-inlaw receive from their husbands’ mothers. The theoretical framework for
the analysis is a combination of critical discourse analysis (Wodak & Mayer
2001, Fairclough 2010), which is employed for “investigating language in
relation to power and ideology” (Wodak 2001: 2) and Foucault’s (1983) theory
related to power and the subject. The findings indicate various manners in
which Korean mothers-in-law in twenty-first-century South Korea exercise
power over their daughters-in-law and also ingenious ways in which the
latter manage to counteract this dominance. |
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| ISSN: | 2067-5151 2068-2956 |