[KS] KSR 2006-16:_Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries_, ed. by Young-Key Kim-Renaud

[Stephen Epstein]

Creative Women of Korea: the Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Young-Key Kim-Renaud, New York and London: M.E.Sharpe, 2004. 250 pages + 14 illustr. ISBN 0-7656-1189-9 (hard cover), 0-7656-1188-0 (pb). 


Reviewed by Keith Pratt

University of Durham

keith.pratt at durham.ac.uk <mailto:keith.pratt at durham.ac.uk> 


 

Nine of the ten papers contained in this book were discussed at a colloquium in Washington more than eight years ago and the volume itself published in 2004, so Professor Kim-Renaud and her fellow contributors may have given up hope of any further reviews. Add to this the fact that two articles, those by JaHyun Kim Haboush on Lady Hyegyong and Kumja Kim on pojagi, have also appeared in substantially similar form elsewhere, and the reader of this review may reasonably ask whether Creative Women of Korea isn't already past its sell-by date. Well no, the quick answer is that it isn't. Firstly because, even considering that some of the subjects addressed appear to pick themselves (Lady Hyegyong, Sin Saimdang, Ho Nansorhon, Hwang Chini), the fact is that unravelling 'female history' hasn't moved as fast in Korean Studies as it has over the past decade in Chinese, and organisers of colloquia and editors of books cannot yet select topics more widely from an embarras de nouvelles richesses. And secondly, and more positively, because familiar though some of the content presented here may inevitably be, the authors have generally illuminated their subjects with so much circumstantial and analytical detail that it would be a pedant indeed who would not admit to a generous level of enjoyment in reading them.

Emphasis on creativity and concentration on the Choson and post-Choson eras set fairly limited parameters for the investigation. No place here, then, for the Silla queens, the Catholic martyr Kang Wangsuk, or even Queen Min to hit the headlines; no limelight for the legions of anonymous kisaeng or shamans to stake general claim for their professions to cultural or social creativity, though they do get more than passing mention here and there. And we still have to await future creative work by archaeologists and historians to bring Korean women of the first one and a half millennia out of the shadows. Unlike China, which has Ban Zhao's second-century CE Nujie, Korea has no obvious textual starting point. So far, it has no disinterred corpse like that of Changsha's second-century BCE Lady Dai, nor even a host of elegant pottery figurines to match those made for Tang tombs.

So this book starts in the 15th century, with Queens Chonghui, grandmother and regent to King Songjong, and Sohye, his mother. Sohye was the author of the Naehun, the oldest known surviving work by a Korean woman (pub. 1475). It was a morality handbook, yet John Duncan's clever interpretation of its organisation and contents points out how much more to it there was than that. Revealing implications that would not have escaped the work's original readers, he shows that despite the difficult political context in which capable women found themselves at court, they might still participate in the decision-making process. Yang, Sohye was saying, needs yin, and the giving of advice to the king by his consort was part of the sensitive and responsible female conduct on which the smooth operation of male life depended. This kind of virtuous behaviour required both literacy and an understanding of the Chinese Confucian texts. Duncan argues that without overtly challenging the accepted constraints of her position, Sohye showed how women could express a view on such currently 'hot' topics as the chastity of faithful wives and the persecution of Buddhism.

Sin Saimdang needs no introduction as the first (known) Korean female painter. In a culturally illustrious pedigree she was mother of the great philosopher Yulgok and grandmother of one of Korea's best-known female poets, Ho Nansorhon (infra). Neither Sin nor her granddaughter could have worked from life - they didn't have the freedom to see the countryside or themes from nature they chose to describe. Instead, Yi Song-mi's analysis of Sin's pictures shows how familiar she was with the work of earlier Chinese artists. Without decrying the quality of her painting (or her embroidery), Professor Yi suggests too that her later reputation owed a good deal to the approbation of Yulgok's heir Song Siyol.

Kichung Kim gives an interesting insight into the life, hard times and poetry of Ho Nansorhon. Her verse speaks of the unhappiness experienced by married women, with whom she clearly empathises even though, Kim argues, the tone of her poetry suggests that her own situation may have been more fortunate than the norm. I must admit I find the title ('Ho Nansorhon and "Shakespeare's Sister"') and opening passages of this paper rather contrived: there are obvious objections to comparing a historical figure and social milieu with a fictitious one, and none of Kim's few references to Virginia Woolf's invented English persona seem to me to add anything to the points he makes about his Korean subject.


Hwang Chini is our third sixteenth-century woman. Like the two previous authors, Kevin O'Rourke is partly intent on recovering what can be known for certain about a subject later invested with a fair degree of romanticism, and partly on providing an up-to-date evaluation of her powers. The story of the kisaeng's possible affair with Yi Saeng may have intrigued earlier generations, but the quality of her eight surviving hansi and (perhaps only three) definitely attributable sijo convinces O'Rourke that it is the quality of her writing that justifies her place in history, alongside male literati in the hall of literary fame. She is, he tells us, 'a speaker who knows her own mind' and is not afraid of challenging male supremacy in Choson society or of dissecting, even mocking, her own emotions.


In contrast to the above authors, who each deal with the work of a single individual, Sonja Haussler sets herself the daunting task of assessing an entire literary genre, the 'tens of thousands of poems' written by yangban women from the late 18th century onwards and known collectively as kyubang kasa ('songs of the inner chambers'). Remarkably, current research suggests that these poems came exclusively from homes associated with the Southerners' Faction (Namin), especially in the Yongnam area including Andong. In the early stages of their development, a majority dealt mainly with Confucian moralistic and didactic themes and were directed towards young married women. A second popular category was named hwajonga ('enjoying flowers songs'), and as time passed poems were written on a widening range of subjects. If the admonitory poems reveal the strains of married life only by implication, many hwajonga describe their writers' unhappiness more openly, and as literate women ventured into poems about history, politics, travel, and other aspects of daily life, they began to lay down a challenge to male domination of the poetic world.


Two essays examine the work of post-Choson female writers. After a prolific literary career in which she daringly championed women's rights in the Japanese colonial period, Kim Iryop (1896-1971) entered a Son nunnery at the age of 33.  Contrary to the rules of her profession she went on writing, and it is pieces from within the cloister that Bonnie Oh considers in her slight but revealing study. Drawing lessons from the turbulent experiences of her early life, Iryop sunim reached out and identified herself with women of all kinds. Through her quest for an end to suffering and a signpost towards salvation, and by showing Buddhism's concern for women, she helped gain it a measure of respect that had perhaps been lacking ever since the fifteenth century.


Hahn Moo-Sook (1918-93) wrote novels, short stories and literary criticism (but not poetry), and began to publish in 1943. After a relatively liberal upbringing she had been married into a conservative and strongly patriarchal family. There she found a ready target for her barbs of criticism. Yung-Hee Kim concentrates on two short stories and one novel, concluding that Hahn's goal was not to denounce the past and its values, but to prove the need for a new synthesis of old and new, the rational and the spiritual, the Korean and the Western. No Korean could be so iconoclastic as to denounce his/her own culture and unthinkingly to embrace westernisation, but the resolution of contradictions (as Mao had famously described the process) could be a transcendent, liberating experience. In its way, Hahn's holistic life-view is but another take on Kim Iryop's.


We have seen ways in which women struggling to cope with a sense of frustrated political, intellectual and social capacity sought self-fulfilment and used writing and painting to prove their worth as individuals and as a sex. JaHyun Kim Haboush's expert study of Lady Hyegyong's four sets of memoirs shows how one woman could match her male contemporaries in formal history writing, achieving the very goal that Chinese and Korean scholars had aimed at over centuries, a mirror onto the past for the guidance of future leaders. But even Hyegyong's careful phraseology lacks the aesthetic, one might say emotional, attraction of the ubiquitous yet delightfully varied pojagi that so rightly enthuse Kimja Kim. It is in these patchwork and embroidered wrapping cloths, she writes, that 'the creative talents of Korean women are best (my italics) illustrated'. And pojagi most definitely do not reflect gender repression. One might almost say that they celebrate feminine exclusivity and originality.







Citation:

Pratt, Keith 2006

Review of Creative Women of Korea:  the Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Young-Key Kim-Renaud (2004)

_Korean Studies Review_ 2006, no. 16

Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr06-16.htm