[KS] The Unmarried Foreigners

[Adam Bohnet]

I don't do any work on the 19th century, which I assume is the period 
which Robert Neff is investigating.

But I wonder if the question needs to be reworked. Sorry to answer a 
question with more questions, but some obvious follow-up questions include:

1. Western diplomats are outside of the  ordinary status system anyway. 
By the late nineteenth century, they were also backed up by gunboats, 
and so existed, in a sense, above the ordinary status system. How would 
ordinary Koreans even encounter the married or unmarried lives of 
European diplomats?  Are there particular circumstances that you are 
thinking of? For that matter, any particular diplomat?

2. And, sorry to nitpick,  "ordinary Koreans" also sounds a bit vague to 
me. I am guessing that, beyond Korean politicians and diplomats, the 
only people who would have a close enough encounter with a diplomat that 
they could actually determine marital status would be various types of 
domestic workers + shopkeepers.  The former, especially, were presumably 
not likely to be the sort to successfully claim yangban status, and 
speak disapprovingly about unmarried status of their masters - for that 
matter, they may not have had terribly regular marital lives themselves, 
since during the eighteenth-century, at least, the base-born frequently 
did not live terribly Confucian lives. Otherwise, there might also have 
been Korean Christians at the churches that the diplomats attended, but 
they, of course, were very much not ordinary in their religious beliefs

How one would set about discovering the thoughts of domestic workers is 
another question again, of course. It would be lovely to know more.

3. The most famous community of unmarried Westerners in Korea were, of 
course, Roman Catholic priests. I am too lazy to look this up, but I 
vaguely remember the unmarried status of priests being one of many 
reasons that Catholic priests were criticized. Of course, there were 
other reasons to criticize a priest, especially before opening, but that 
might be a point of departure. Especially before opening Catholic 
priests were living within the villages, and, far from keeping a 
diplomatic silence on the subject of their marital status, were loudly 
proclaiming the vital importance of chastity for priests  (something 
they shared, in any case, with Buddhist monks). So it is not surprising 
that this might be noticed.

4.  Back to the question of how would anybody even know. Before the 
opening, Japanese, Chinese and other envoys would not, I think, 
generally bring their wives along on a diplomatic mission (I suppose 
Tumen valley Jurchen wives might have tagged along, legally or 
illegally, during the early Choson - I should look this up) nor did 
Koreans bring their wives on trips to Beijing. The fact that an old 
European diplomat was wandering about Seoul without a long-suffering 
diplomatic wife to help arrange the party at the consulate strikes me as 
something which would cause more of a fracas within the Western 
diplomatic community than within Korean society. In fact, I have been 
told quite recently of the enormous value of a good diplomatic spouse - 
in this case, for a Canadian diplomat.

Those are my thoughts on the subject, at least.  It sounds like an 
interesting topic, but I wonder if the question should be reworked.

Yours,

Adam