[KS] Choson History Society Zoom Talk (LEE Songhee, 3/2)

[Sean Han]

The Choson History Society is inviting Dr. Lee Songhee (Korea Univ.) for a talk titled, “From Yŏllyŏ (烈女) to Female Marshal Heroes: the Changing subjecthood of Neo-Confucianist Moral Agency in Late Chosŏn Korea.”

Date: March 2, 2022 Wednesday, 4:00pm (Los Angeles) / March 2, Wednesday, 7:00pm (Boston) / March 3, Thursday, 00:00am (Paris) / March 3, Thursday, 9:00am (Seoul)

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwpd-ispzsoGtxkEBBTqNBkZt-3hUYCZiyr <https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwpd-ispzsoGtxkEBBTqNBkZt-3hUYCZiyr>
We look forward to seeing you at the event!

About the Talk
The patriarchal system of late Chosŏn society is held responsible for the oppression of Korean women, culminating in the trope of female chastity Yŏllyŏ (烈女) women embracing death for sexual chastity. The ideological entrenchment of this oppressive female virtue occurred in the wake of two catastrophic wars—the Hideyoshi’s invasion and the Manchu invasion. The resultant societal dislocation, it is thought, drove the governing elites to double down on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and drive it down to the lower social strata by means of proliferating quotidian official rewards and sanctions. Women were defined exclusively by their relationship to patriarchal authority. It is in this context that Korean women faced stultifying moral subordination in the domestic setting and exclusion from public space.

I situate this talk on the literary genre prominently featuring female marshal heroes of the late Chosŏn period against the grain of this conventional view. The emergent narrative genre in which female characters manifest battlefield valor and apparently masculine Confucian virtues gained wide acceptance even as ruling elites debated whether females possess such faculties in the first place. In their often fabulous narrative of marshal and military prowess in the defense of the king and country, female characters represented more than just literary chastisement for masculine moral shortcomings: it captures a changing conception of female subjecthood.

In explaining this, I relate these works to their political and intellectual contexts. With King Yŏngjo (1724-1876)’s accession to the throne, the political strife at the court was dominated by the dispute of the loyal vs. treacherous subjects (忠逆是非) on the one hand, and the question over the moral agency in human nature on the other. We could identify the late Chosŏn elites wrestling with the sprawling implications of the Neo-Confucian moral doctrine that every human could and ought to exercise his or her own agency. The Noron (老論) -Nakron (洛論) faction, the most dominant political and intellectual force in the 18th Century, had put forward their belief that every human being, regardless of their sex, age, station or innate character, has internal faculties to meet the ethical demands of Neo-Confucian moral precepts, as the Horon-Nakron debate (湖洛論爭) tentatively concluded. 

With female personhood invested with moral agency equal to its male counterpart, the scope for female virtue was determined by the evidence of her own ethical achievement to pursue the universal good as defined by the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Defying the restrictive expectation, the assessment of female moral worthiness grew to the degree that rendered sexual distinction moot on a conceptual level. The result is the gradual acceptance of the representation of female heroines in late Chosŏn, which paved the way for the figure of Madam Patriot (愛國婦人) in the early 20th Century.

About the Speaker
Lee Songhee is a Research Professor in the Outreach Center for Korean Linguistic, Literary, and Culture Studies at Korea University, where she also earned her doctoral degree in 2021. Her dissertation, “노론-낙론계 윤리주체의 형성과 전개” (Formation and Secularization of Neo-Confucian Self of the School of Noron-Nakron in Late Chosŏn Korea), restores the linguistic context of moral politics of Neo-Confucian theory on human nature [心性論] in late Chosŏn Korea. Centering on the Neo-Confucian theory of the acquisition of moral agency, she tracks the intellectual debates on the metaphysical foundation of human nature in tandem with the shifting royal and court rhetoric on political legitimacy. Her research interests focus on the relation between Neo-Confucian moral philosophy and political rhetoric in Chosŏn, bridging modern and premodern ideas of political agency in Korea, and major linguistic turns in late Chosŏn related to 對明義理, 忠逆是非, and Western Learning.

More information about the Choson History Society: https://www.chosonhistorysociety.org/ <https://www.chosonhistorysociety.org/>
CHS YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndwc2pAmXCWUDx1DSsf6_Q <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndwc2pAmXCWUDx1DSsf6_Q>


Sincerely,
Sean Han
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