Week 3 Analysis: Close reading of The Song of Ch'un-Hyang

I chose to do my close reading about the bottom paragraph on page 80 of "The Song of Ch'un-Hyang." The following passage encompasses the pain we see Ch'un-Hyang dealing with all throughout the story from parting from her husband, and despite all of her pain, she remains faithful in him and her marriage even when it gets her into trouble with the governor and brings bodily harm to herself. The sentence "The voice of the deserted girl was compulsively raised in sad moans and wails, and anybody who saw or heard her was wounded in his own heart" does several things to evoke different feelings. Referring to Ch'un-Hyang as "deserted girl" provokes feelings of sympathy, referring back to being separated from her husband and also even foreshadowing her position at the end of the story (80). She has spent a majority of the story in solitude, and to refer to her as a "deserted girl" truly captures the way she's consistently portrayed throughout the entirety of the story. In addition to the way she's referred to, the sentence further causes us to understand her misery and sympathize with her with the way it's written that her voice was "compulsively raised in sad moans and wails" (80). She's been silent and trying to sleep out of the desire that she might she her husband in her dreams. To say that her voice was raised "compulsively" shows how sporadic her ability to control her pain and sadness was, and it also illustrates just how powerful and hard it was for her to try and contain her feelings (80). She would express her sadness with nothing but "moans and wails" because she doesn't feel like speaking and "moans and wails" are both sounds that don't require thinking, but are perfectly capable of conveying emotion (80). And to mention that "anybody who saw or heard her was wounded in his own heart" shows that other people understood how much pain she was in (80). The specific word choice of wounding a heart emphasizes how painful it was to see or hear her, and in knowing how painful it was for other people we can only imagine exactly how painful it must have been for Ch'un-Hyang.

The next sentence in the paragraph also caught my attention. "Her longing for her husband took the taste from her food, and robbed her rest of sleep; yearning for him drew her skin tightly over her bones and made her weak" (80). Throughout the entire story, she's constantly had her husband in mind, and maintained her faith in marriage with him no matter the cost. This sentence specifies that her pain is in fact, because of how much she misses him, and it further expresses the pain she's dealing with as a result. She missed her husband so much to the point where food didn't even taste good; her sadness had actually desensitized her to an extent where she couldn't taste anything. She was also "robbed" of her sleep (80). To use the word "robbed" in this case creates this sense that she is truly being targeted and attacked by how much she misses her husband (80). She didn't "lose" sleep or become "unable to" sleep, she was "robbed" (80). This victimizes her and deprives her of sleep. Her skin tightens so much to the point where it "made her weak" as if it were choking her (80). She's become both physically weak, as we can see from her skin tightly wrapping over her bones, and mentally weak as seen from her constant crying and sleep deprivation.

"The Song of Ch'un-Hyang." The Norton Anthology World Literature, edited by Martin Puchner, third edition, vol. D, W. W. Norton, 2012, p. 80.