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Multiple Loyalties: The Life of Lady Hong
| Article
# : |
12620 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
4,683 Words |
| Author
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JaHyun Kim Haboush
JaHyun Kim Haboush is assistant professor of Korean history
and culture at the University of Illinois at Champaign-
Urbana. She is completing an annotated translation of
Hanjungnok. This article was presented at the annual meeting
of the Association for Asian Studies, held in Chicago, March
21, 1986. |
"Why had this lady writ her own life?" Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, asks in her autobiography, True Relations of My Birth, Breeding and Life, first published in 1656. We could ask the same question about Lady Hong, the author of Hanjungnok, an eighteenth-century Korean memoir. In the present autobiography-crazed era when autobiographies and memoirs by luminaries are rumored to fetch seven-figure sums, the question may appear superfluous. One would most likely answer, quite matter of factly, "For money, or course."
The current craze notwithstanding, autobiography is not a genre universal to all cultures or times. Hanjungnok, for instance, is the only known Korean autobiography of any significance written by a woman before the twentieth century. Admittedly, biographies of women were written. Nevertheless, a culture that produces biographies does not necessarily produce autobiographies. Biography requires a view which sees man as playing a distinct role in the making of history, not merely a passive agent in the grand scheme of things. This view, however, often leads to assessing a man's life mainly by his role in and his contribution to society. The subjects of biographies are then chosen for and defined by their historic and social roles. For they immortalize great and famous persons, and translate their merits and accomplishments into inspiration and paradigm. In Korea, biographies of women mostly belonged to this category: Subjects tended to be types, rather than individuals, and lives, illustrations of virtues or examples of successfully fulfilled social roles.
Autobiography, on the other hand, flourishes in a culture that values the singularity and internality of each life beyond its historic significance. The writing of autobiography requires a consciousness of self; a sense that one's life is worth writing about and that one's own view of it has intrinsic value. In this sense, Korea during the Yi dynasty was not conducive to the writing of autobiography by women. Korean men wrote autobiographies of some kind, although it was not a particularly popular genre. But women did not write about their lives; if they ruminated upon them, they did so in silence. Why then did Lady Hong write her memoirs breaking centuries of silent Korean womanhood? What did she want to impart? What could we learn about the author and Korean womanhood from her work?
Lady Hong's Predicament
Lady Hong was the wife of Price Sado, the only son and heir of King Yongjo, the eighteenth-century Korean monarch who reigned from
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