Chiyoung Kim

10.18399/acta.2013.16.1.006

colonial Korea Conceptual History Love Institution of Marriage Modernization Coloniality Family Structure Yi Kwang-su Yu Kil-chun

This study is intended to track the historical process of how the concept of ‘yŏnae’ (love) was formed, and how it evolved until the late colonial period. ‘Yŏnae,’ which was coined to refer to a modern form of love, first used in Sŏyu kyŏnmun [Observations on travels in the West], was published by Yu Kil-chun in 1895 with a value-neutral tone. However, the signifier ‘yŏnae’ won enthusiastic support later in the late 1910s as a channel for expressing the subjectivity of modern ego, by bringing ‘emotion’ and ‘intellect’ into its semantic field as requirements for marriage and turning the spotlight upon inner emotional issues, within the context of free marriage. In the first half of the 1920s, the signifier ‘yŏnae’ began to be aestheticized as a divine virtue with an image of lofty civilization, so that the word ‘chayu yŏnae’ (free love) was even highly appraised, transcending its negative nuance of free sex and bringing about a vogue of the ambiguous word ‘sinsŏnghan yŏnae’ (sacred love). However, the word yŏnae ultimately functioned as a disengaged ideology rather than as creative energy to portray individuality in reality, since the concept was infatuated by abstract images of civilization. Connecting the concept with traditional custom and combining it with real life practice from the late 1920s, the concept of yŏnae rapidly degraded into a stage of dates, aiming for marriage. As a result, the concept became subjugated under the gender hierarchy and colonial middle class’ secular familism, in which they could distinguish their identity from the older generation and make nuclear families based on conjugal relations, which was actually confidentially supported by the colonial regime. In this way, the concept started to become conservative, losing its innovative connotations in the late colonial period.