시집살이 민요 스토리텔링의 치유적 효과 - 강원지역 민요를 중심으로 -

Starting from the premise that the folk song Sijibsari (meaning a woman's married life) had the function of dealing with women's emotional distress in traditional society, this paper studies the therapeutic aspects of the folk song Sijibsari and examines the possibility of its healing effects in modern society. Womens folk songs were a kind of medium through which women's expressive desires could be revealed in traditional society. The roots the stress and rancor in the song Sijibsari all derive from discrimination against women, as Sijibsari initiated under Confucianism manipulated and oppressed women's lives. This study takes a close look at the variety of stories behind women's lives under Sijibsari, whose contents tended to both specific and individual as well as universal. It then focuses on outward expressions of the difficulties, bitter feelings, and stresses resulting from Sijibsari through the folk song Sijibsari and any emotional therapeutic effects as they appear. At last, the paper attempts to see if the therapeutic effects of folk songs' can be adopted to healing women's stress, particularly daughters-in-law, in modern society. The folk songs provided women, blocked out from self-expressive opportunities, with an open space to express them. Thus, women soothed their own feelings of oppression and uneasiness brought on by linear human relations while manifesting their stories by singing the folk song Sijibsari. That is, women were in charge of treating themselves by unfolding their own entangled emotions through the folk songs. Hard Sijibsari and toil along with impersonalized treatment must have given them excessive amounts of stress, which made it difficult for them to maintain a normal mentality. Those who were unable to express their feelings and intentions developed psychological disorders, and the stress internally accumulated while they wandered in fetters of pain tended to create grudges. Folk songs were the methods such women took to cure themselves. Through the medium of folk songs, women broke off their discontent feelings of pain, experienced catharsis, and communicated with themselves. In short, singing folk songs helped them ease off feelings of oppression and uneasiness stemming from their hard lives. Although modern society differs from the traditional Confucianist one, the conflicts related to Sijib, the husband's family, still exist. Thus this paper examines the possibility of using the folk song Sijibsari to treat modern women's stress in keeping relations with her husband's family. The findings show a possible effects in that a daughter-in-law might look at her situation from a more objective perspective, come to better understand her mother-in-law's point of view and reduce the gap between two different stand-points.