A Study on the Grotesque Features Represented in the ‘Fox Sister’ Folktale

This study investigates the “inconvenience” and “uncertainty” of the Fox Sister folktale through the concept of “the grotesque.” Beyond the visual grotesque of a specific scene, I tried to examine the grotesque in the mere existence of the fox sister and the grotesque that occurs in the tale itself. First, the parents’ wish for a daughter makes things coexist that cannot coexist, given that it is already a wish that defies the society in the story and the “common sense” of the transmitters. The parents’ wish for a daughter eventually becomes a curse that ruins the family, resulting in a conflict between the wish and the curse, as conveyed in the discourse. In addition, as the fox sister is an unnatural being, a hybrid of two heterogeneous species, she is a grotesque being that amplifies collisions with the human world in a state of incongruity rather than converging them, which leads to disharmony. The fox sister’s livestock predation embodies a grotesque in which familiar targets cause confusion. Distrustful of their grown-up sons, the parents also reveal their confusion between uncanniness and familiarity, and the fox sister’s brutal predation also reveals the clash of appearance and behavior and the grotesque of physical immoderation. The fox sister’s grotesque status reflects the character’s lack of specific aims. These grotesque interests and pleasures are related to “liminality” in that they do not pursue any value or high-level aesthetic consciousness. Furthermore, in the scene where the fox sister chases after her brother and is eliminated, the contradictory utterance of eating an inedible object (a person who is called “brother”) is repeated, and the grotesque of disharmony appears. Even if the fox sister is killed, the unresolved state remains in that the complete family cannot be recovered, which shows the “unresolved” in the grotesque.