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One of the best-known Korean folk fairy tales, ’Woo-Rung-Yi-Kak-Si(The Periwinkle Bride)’ contains material common to old East-Asian stories. It is very advisable and useful to interpret a fairy tale with a view to helping us understand the inner world of human beings. There have not been so many studies on the interpretation of folktales and fairy tales in Korea as there have in the Western world. We interpreted this folk fairy tale by applying psychoanalytic theory to it. The outline is as follows : A young former living alone brought home a periwinkle, it behaved both as a young woman and also as a periwinkle itself. One day he found that the woman had prepared a meal and washed his clothes in secret, and he then forced her to live with him as his wife against her will. The King, who was attracted to the Periwinkle Bride, proposed three bets in order to take her away from our hero, but the Periwinkle Bride asked her lither, the Dragon King to help the hero win all the bets by using magical ring. Finally, the king drowned, and our hero and the Periwinkle Bride lived happily everafter as king and queen. The periwinkle symbolizes the woman’s breasts, and it also plays the role of the mother in the oral and anal stages. The relationship between the hero and the bride was a dyadic one before the King appeared, but it became triangular thereafter. The King is a symbol of the father, and the Periwinkle Bride, a preoedipal mother in the first half of the story, being forced to raise the young son as her duty, and a seductive oedipal mother to her son in the second half, because the ring is a symbol of woman’s genital organ. Betting three times shows us that the story is about the oedipal situation, sexuality, security, and individualization. The thirst of the three bets was who could chop down trees in the mountains more quickly. Numerous dwarves popped out a dipper which the hero received from the Dragon King and beat the king and his many soldiers by climbing the mountain and quickly chopping trees down with axes. Axes, a dipper, dwarves here symbolize the phallus, testicles, male gender or some power, respectively, and climbing a mountain suggests bringing on sexual excitement. As a result, the erectile function, the strength, penetrating power of the hero’s phallus are superior to the tither’s which means that the son surpasses his father in potency. The second bet is to race across the river riding a horse. The hero crossed foster on the horse received from the Dragon King, which was thinner that the king’s big horse, and the king in hurrying was nearly drowned. The big horse and the thin horse each represent the father’s big phallus and the son’s small and weak one. The pool in the river is a symbol of the female as well as of the stream of urination. The bet means that, although the phallus of young hero is much smaller, it is superior to that of the old king in the function of urination and potency. In the last bet, racing across the sea by boat, the hero beat the king in his beautiful boat using a small one which be got from the Dragon King, and the king was drowned in a storm. The sea and the boat symbolize a woman and her genital organ, respectively. The word for boat in Korean has two homonyms, which are the word for abdomen and ship, and the phrase ’riding a boat’ can mean sexual intercourse with a woman. The last bet has the meaning of the oedipal triumph, in which the son defeats his father to possess the mother. The Dragon King, as a grandfather who has already freed himself from the oedipal conflict, is also the image off good father in contrast to the King, the symbol off bad father. This Korean folktale is the story of a boy reaching the oedipal period, and of a girl growing up to the mature stage. In other words, this is a story for both a boy and a girl. It is not only a story for a boy who has reached early and mid-childhood but it also depicits the psychological development of a girl evolving from a lower animal into a queen. This notion is presumed to be associated with the past korean custom of mating a young groom with an older bride and with the remnants of matriarchy.
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