The New Woman and New-Style Weddings in Colonial Korea

Wedding ceremonies of the early modern period became newly invented wedding "traditions" in a nascent form of transculturalism as Christian, Buddhist, and other "modern" wedding ceremonies, collectively called sinsik gyeolhon (new-style weddings), first emerged in the 1890s and became commonplace by the early 1920s. Some of the most noticeable changes in wedding ceremonies were the ways in which they became hybridized invented traditions, selectively choosing aspects of both "old" and "new" weddings. Weddings also became commercialized affairs, an emblem of urban middle-and upper-class culture in colonial Korea. When we examine all these aspects, we can see that weddings reflected not only social trends, but also the anxieties of the times. In addition to more recent works on weddings, I rely on primary sources such as newspaper and magazine articles as well as photographs from the colonial period to see how Koreans negotiated transcultural influences to produce weddings as invented traditions and how wedding practices became commercialized. By looking at hybridity and commercialization as closely related processes, this paper examines ways in which wedding ceremonies transformed in form and symbolism from the late nineteenth century through the colonial period.