CHAPTER V.
KOREAN WOMEN.
It has been very often said that the position of woman is more deplorable in Korea than in any other civilized or semi-civilized country. And I have comparatively little to urge against the statement. Certainly woman’s life seems narrower in Korea than in either China or Japan, or in Burmah, or Siam, or in India. Socially and politically, in Korea, woman simply does not exist. She has not even a name. After marriage she is called by her husband’s name with the prefix of Mrs. Before marriage she has not even this pretence to a name. There is one exception, and, I think, one only to this rule. The geisha girls have names of their own, but then the geisha girls have individuality; live lives, if not moral, why still, not colourless, and mix with men, if not on an equality, at least with a good deal of familiarity; and it would be rather awkward if the men who are dependent upon them for female society in anything approaching a Western sense, had no name by which to call them. The “Fragrant Iris” was the name of a geisha girl whose acquaintance Mr. Lowell tells us he made in Korea, and four of her companions were called “Peach Blossom,” “Plum Flower,” “Rose,” and “Moonbeam.”
Korean girls, long before they reach a marriageable age, live in the seclusion of the women’s quarters. After her betrothal a girl belongs not to her father but to her mother-in-law. Upon marriage she becomes the property of her husband, and is, in most cases, immediately taken to his dwelling. As in China, married sons live with their fathers. Sometimes three or four generations of one family occupy one home. But, unlike Chinese wives, each Korean wife has a room or rooms of her own. The only man who (in most families) ever enters them is her husband. Unlike the wives of China, she may not, as a rule, be visited by her husband’s father, her husband’s brother, or her husband’s grandfather. But should his father or his grandfather fall ill, it is not only her privilege, but her duty, to leave the women’s quarters, and, going to his bedside, nurse him until he dies or recovers.
There are one or two advantages in being a woman in Korea. There are very few crimes for which a Korean woman can be punished. Her husband is answerable for her conduct, and must suffer in her stead if she breaks any ordinary law.
Korean women are not uneducated, though they never go to schools; and books and materials for writing and painting are freely at their disposal.
The dress of Korean women is very much more like the dress of European women than is that of the women of almost any other Oriental race. They wear petticoats made very much in Western fashion, but stiffly starched into crinoline-like ungracefulness. The women of the poorer classes wear these skirts above their ankles. The women of wealth or of rank wear skirts touching the ground. They wear a jacket or belt shaped very much like, and answering the purpose of, a corset, and a shorter jacket which is at best but an inadequate neckerchief. And under their petticoat they wear three pairs of wide trousers. Except among the very poorest class, respectable Korean women muffle themselves in a garment like a dress or great-coat whenever they go abroad. Boys and girls are dressed alike until they are five years old.
Among the poor all the household work is done by women, but among the rich the women have no domestic duties except those of nursing and sewing. All the garments of a Korean family are made by the women of the family. The purchase of a ready-made garment, or to hire it made, would be considered a disgrace to the family, and a deeper disgrace to its women. Korean ladies sew as exquisitely as French nuns, and embroider as deftly as those Japanese men whose profession embroidery is.
Korean girls are usually married between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two; and if married to a bachelor, he is almost invariably three or five, and often even eight, years their junior. But when a widower marries, or a man takes a second, or third, or fourth wife, he invariably selects a woman younger than himself.
Among the mandarin classes polygamy is a duty, and every mandarin is expected to keep at least several concubines or second-class wives in his yamun.
In Söul, and in one other large city, children are commonly betrothed when the boy is seven or eight, but it is not so in the other parts of Korea. Korean widows must remain unmarried, or marry men who are the social inferiors of their dead husbands. And in Korea, as in China, a widow who re-marries is disgraced, and becomes more or less of a social outcast.
The customs preliminary to marriage are in Korea very like those same customs in China and in Japan. The father of a marriageable daughter or a marriageable son looks about for a suitableparti. If a husband is desired, then the girl’s father usually interviews a number of eligible youths, widowers, or married men until he finds what he wants. Then a middle-man is sent to discover whether an offer of marriage would be favourably received, and on what terms. If the bridegroom selected is unmarried he has, unless he is an orphan and the head of his family, no voice whatever in the matter, the only people really consulted being the respective fathers. If a father is on the look-out for a daughter-in-law, he sends his wife to interview and report upon the girl whom he has been told is suitable in age, dower, etc. Now comes in another of the few advantages of being a woman in Korea. She has very largely the selection of her own daughters-in-law, and if the daughter-in-law proves unsatisfactory she has only herself to blame. When the middle-man has ascertained that the proposal of marriage will be acceptable, the father who has negotiated the proceedings writes an elaborate letter to the other father, and makes a formal proposal for the hand of his son or daughter. But this letter is not binding upon the writer until he receives one in return accepting the proposal.
After that there is no drawing back, and should the betrothed man die before the marriage day the girl is regarded as a widow, and must remain unmarried all her life, or else marry an inferior and with disgrace. The man, on the other hand—should she die—is entirely free to marry, and at once.
When a lucky day has been selected for the wedding, the bridegroom sends to the bride presents in the Japanese fashion. Female clothing, bits of stuff, and sweets are the most important items among these presents. When they have been sent and received, the marriage ceremony has been half performed. Then the bridegroom is allowed to knot up his hair in manly fashion, but not until the day of marriage is he allowed to assume the garb of a man—be dressed as a man. A Korean bachelor of seventy is regarded as a child, treated as a child, and dressed as a child.
A prospective bridegroom pays visits of respect not to the relations of his bride, but to the kinsfolk of his own father. The kinsfolk of his mother do not count; indeed, a Korean wife is supposed to have no kindred but the kindred of her husband. The bridegroom’s father gives a great feast upon the night of the day on which the presents are sent. The feast lasts all night, and the quantity of food eaten, and the quantity of wine drunk, would sound almost incredible to European ears.
Korea is the country of bachelors. There are two reasons for this. The majority of the people are very poor and cannot afford the expense of daughters-in-law. Then, too, polygamy is so extensively practised among the rich that the supply of girls in the marriage market is never equal to the demand, and the average Korean would far rather see his daughter become the second, or the seventh, or the eighth wife, or concubine of a rich or powerful man, than the one wife of a labourer or low-class man. Marriage usually takes place three days after the presents are sent. These three days are very busy ones to the Korean bride, for out of one of the pieces of stuff sent her by the bridegroom, she must herself, and without assistance, fashion the elaborate robe which he assumes on the marriage night, and which is his first garment made after adult fashion. Thus the three days before marriage are spent by a Korean girl in performing her first duty as a wife. And the sending of the garment signifies that she, with the assistance of whatever wives he may afterwards marry, will, so long as they both live, make all the clothing required by him, his children, and his women.
When the marriage day arrives the lucky hour is chosen, and the bridegroom departs for the house of the bride. The bridegroom’s procession is as long and as splendid as his purse, or the purse of his father, can possibly permit. Everyone in that procession rides on horseback, and in single file. First comes a servant-man on a horse richly caparisoned; this servant carries a life-sized image of a wild goose. It is covered by a red scarf, and the servant must hold it with both hands—a circumstance which makes his horseback riding interesting, if not perilous. After him comes the bridegroom, splendidly arrayed, and followed by a groom and all his other servants. After them rides the bridegroom’s father, and he, too, is followed by all the servants he possesses or has been able to borrow. Relatives and friends in great quantity of persons and great quality of garments bring up the splendid rear.
In a marriage procession, or at a marriage, the poorest and lowliest man in Korea is allowed to wear robes and hats as rich as those ordinarily worn by the highest dignitary in the land, if he can manage to get them, and of the same distinctive style and shape.
When the girl’s house is reached, the servant who has carried the goose dismounts, the others remain on horseback. He goes into the house and lays the goose upon a bowl of rice that is standing in a convenient place. Then, without speaking, he leaves the house. The bridegroom’s father dismounts next, then the bridegroom, then all the others. Before entering the house they take off their boots and their hats, and their outer robes. The bride’s father now comes out of his house, bids them welcome, and leads them in. He is immediately followed by the bridegroom, and then by the bridegroom’s father and the others. They all sit solemnly down, and then ensues a scene not to be beaten for noise, no, not even in all Asia, which, I assure you, is saying a good deal.
The bridegroom has been accompanied, as far as practicable, by all the youths or men who are, or were, his fellow-students, or who belonged to the same literary degree as himself. These seize upon him with shrieking, and laughter, and singing, carrying him off to some distant part of the house or compound, and refuse, under any circumstances, to give him up, or to allow the marriage to proceed. The girl’s father, after some time, offers them a present of money to depart, and leave the chief actor in the proposed function free to play his part. After a good deal of haggling, and when the bribe has reached as high a point as the rollickers think it probably will, they accept the money and depart with it, to spend it in a day and a night of roystering and banqueting.
A feast elaborate, and to European notions tedious, is then offered to the bridegroom, his father and their attendants. After the feast the bridegroom’s father and all the servants depart. The bride’s father leads the bridegroom to the room in which the ancestral tablets of the family are enshrined; for ancestral worship is as universal and as sincere in Korea as in China. Before these tablets the prospective husband must pay homage long and earnest.
Late in the evening the bridegroom is taken into the room of the bride, whom he has not as yet seen. The room is empty, and he is immediately left there alone; but the room is fragrant with iris, or sweet with great bowls and branches of cherry-blossom, and splendid with wisteria or magnificent bunches of the Korean peony. Two great bowls are there heaped with rice, and in the centre of each bowl stands a brilliantly yellow candlestick, holding a taper that is perfumed and lit. After a time, the bride comes into the room, led by her mother, and surrounded by all her kinswomen. No one speaks; the mother and the relatives go out, as soon as they have fairly come in. The door is closed, and the bride lifts her veil. On the following day, the young wife divides into two the hair which hitherto hung down her back in one long plait. She twists one part of it on to the left side of her head, and one on to the right, and so she wears her hair for the rest of her life, taking it down only to dress it or have it dressed, or to dishevel it about her shoulders as a sign of mourning, on the death of her husband, or one of his relatives. On the third day after the marriage the young couple repair to the house of the bridegroom or the bridegroom’s father. They may, however, elect to remain a little longer in the home of the bride’s people, but unless they leave on the third day they are compelled to remain where they are for an entire year.
Thirty years before Christ it was customary for a bridegroom to dwell under the roof of his father-in-law until the first son had been born, and attained to years of manhood. This is still the custom in some parts of Korea, and among some Korean families. Whether the husband and wife go to the home of his family three days, one year, or many years after marriage, they must, upon entering the door, at once go to the tablets of his ancestors, bend before them innumerable times, and repeat to them innumerable prayers and benedictions.
Korean marriage certificates are rather quaint. They are on red paper, of course, for red is the colour of happiness, and is used throughout China and Korea for the records of births, marriages, for calling cards, and all such things. These marriage certificates are inscribed with the usual Chinese characters, but what makes them peculiarly interesting is the fact that during the marriage ceremony they are equally divided, one half is given to the husband, and one to the wife. It is the only instance I know of a country in which it is thought necessary to provide the bridegroom with a certificate of the marriage. But in Korea marriage is even of more importance to men than to women. Marriage makes all the difference possible in the life of a Korean man—it does not alter so very much the life of a Korean woman. He passes from boyhood to manhood in the twinkling of an eye; he takes precedence of all bachelors whatever their age; can insult them or jostle them in the streets with perfect impunity. Marriage alters the daily life of the woman very little. It opens to her all the possibilities of maternity, and secures her the occasional society of her husband, and, as I have said, it puts up her hair. But I can think of no other material way in which it affects her. She passes from one Korean house to another Korean house, and the two are probably identical in their interior arrangements, furnishings, and decorations, at least, so far as the women’s premises are concerned. She eats the same food that she ate with her own mother and sisters. She reads the same books, does the same needlework. If her husband be poor, she performs the same drudgery. She hears the same talk, thinks the same thoughts, and has, or lacks, the same amusements that she has all her life. To be sure she sees about her the faces of, for a time, strange women, but their lives and their minds are so similar to those of the women she has always lived with, that their companionship cannot possibly make any violent difference in her or in her existence.
There is one very important reason why his half of the marriage certificate should be, and is, zealously preserved by the husband: without it he cannot procure another wife should his first die, or be divorced, or prove inadequate. Her half of the brilliant paper is no such talisman to the wife. Divorced, she can never re-marry; widowed, she can only re-wed with degradation.
The marriage ceremony differs somewhat in different parts of Korea, among different classes of people, and among different families. Often the noisy students take no part in the function, and the bride is present at the marriage feast. The bride in this case remains veiled, eats nothing and says nothing, until the repast is over. Indeed, in many parts of Korea the bride must not speak during her wedding day. At the end of the feast the bride and groom bow to each other three times, and then the bride throws back her veil, and they are man and wife.
In an antique paper or essay on the moral and domestic condition of Korea, a paper written by one of the old French missionaries who penetrated into Korea long before European commerce, or European politics, had dared to do so, or at least, succeeded in doing so, I found a description of a wedding ceremony differing somewhat from either of the above. And yet so the marriage ceremony often is even to-day in parts of Korea. The translation is very free:—
‘On the nuptial day both bride and groom cease to wear their hair as children wear it. Her hair is arranged by some maiden of her kindred—his arranged by some bachelor of his blood. These two amateur hair-dressers are called “hands of honour,” and after the bride and groom, and their respective fathers, are the most important personages at a Korean marriage.
‘The bridegroom, accompanied by all his male relatives and all his male friends, on the morning of the marriage day, goes to the bride’s house. There she is given to him, and he carries her off to his house, or to the house of his father. In the best room of that house a platform or marriage altar has been arranged. It is very rich with embroidered cloths, carved pieces, vessels of metal, jewelled ornaments, and as many of the wonderful Korean flowers as are in season. Platters of rice and fruits, and of sweetmeats and nuts, are usually there too, and incense-sticks; and candles must by no means be absent. The bride and the bridegroom step up on to the platform from opposite sides; both are elaborately dressed, perfumed, and be-jewelled, and the bride is heavily painted. She wears a veil and innumerable odd ornaments at her throat, about her neck, at her girdle, on her breast, and on her back. The bridegroom wears a marriage hat, for in this strange peninsula, not only every rank, and every age, and every season, but almost every event calls for a hat of special shape and material. The couple bow to each other profoundly a number of times, and then leave the platform—she going to the home of her new seclusion, the women’s quarters of her husband’s house, and he going to his own rooms or to those of his father. All the women present follow her; all the men follow him. For a week or longer, if the father of the groom or the groom be a man of wealth, a great feast is held both in the women’s quarters and in the reception rooms of the men. Often the guests remain throughout this period, or if they go home occasionally to sleep, they are sure to return in a very few hours for more to eat, and more to drink. During the ceremony, and during the week of rejoicing, the bridesmaids are busy filling “the cup of mutual joy” with nuptial wine. From this cup the bride and the bridegroom drink together during the ceremony, but afterwards it is sent from the apartments of the one to the apartments of the other, andvice versâ. At the marriage feast there must be a goose, a dried pheasant, emblems of braided or twisted straw, arrack, and gourds, and other fruits tied with tinselled and crimson ribbons: for these are the Korean symbols of marital felicity.’
Often the girl of eight who is betrothed to a boy of five, or a girl of twelve who is betrothed to a boy of eight, goes at once to her father-in-law’s house, and is then and there lost to her own family. So entirely does a Korean woman become a member of her husband’s family, that after marriage she wears mourning for him and his relatives only, and gives no sign of grief at the death of her own relatives, should she chance to be informed of it. During the period of betrothal the bride and bridegroom must each mourn for the death of any of their kindred, and the marriage cannot take place while either of the parties are in mourning. Korean mourning is as long, or longer than Chinese mourning. Parents are mourned for three years or more, and other relatives for shorter, but not short periods. It will be readily seen that a goodly number of deaths in both families delay a marriage far beyond the limits of all human patience, save that which characterizes the Far East. It is not unusual for a marriage to be delayed for ten years in such a way, and betrothed couples have been kept waiting thirty, and even thirty-five years, before one or the other, or both of them, could lay aside the robes of mourning for the brilliant vestments of marriage. This is the reason, I believe the chief reason, why for hundreds of years the population of Korea has not increased. Other reasons are the fearful infant mortality, and the horrible and periodical recurrence of epidemics.
Next to being a woman, perhaps the most unfortunate thing that can happen to anyone in Korea is to be poor. But if there are several advantages in being a woman even there, there is, at least, one in being poor. Among the poor it is often the custom for the bride and bridegroom to meet a month or more before the marriage, and if either of them is dissatisfied they cannot be forced to fulfil the engagement.
Korean wives have one rather desirable prerogative—a prerogative which the wives of China do not share with them, nor I fancy, do the wives of Japan. A Korean man cannot house his concubines or second-class wives under the roof that shelters his true or first wife, without her permission. Strangely enough, the first wife very rarely objects to living in rather close companionship with the other women of her husband’s household. Perhaps the longing for human companionship is stronger than jealousy in woman’s breast. And perhaps it is because the companionship of men is forbidden her, that a Korean wife comes to not only tolerate, but to enjoy the companionship of the women who share with her, her husband’s affection, attention, and support.
Korean women have not always lived in the strict seclusion in which they live now. Some of the older historians, Chinese and others, describe the appearance of the women and their manners without any hint that seeing them and knowing of them was anything unusual. And Hamel boasts that his blonde beard and that of his fellows, and their blue eyes, found great favour with the women of Quelpaert. In the days of Hamel, as now, the inhabitants of Quelpaert were purely Korean. Almost ever since Korea obtained Quelpaert from Japan, the island has been used as a sort of penal settlement; a place of confinement for foreigners who are unfortunate or unwise enough to land upon the shores of the peninsula, and for grave Korean miscreants who escape the death penalty. But it has also had always a goodly number of inhabitants, of the freemen and the official classes, and all of these, as well as the great bulk of prisoners, have been unmixedly Korean. And the freedom and publicity enjoyed by the women of the island, in Hamel’s time, was doubtless also enjoyed by the women of the peninsula. On the other hand, Hamel may have written only of the women of the labouring class. But even so his testimony—and when has Hamel been proved untruthful?—proves that during the last two hundred years times have greatly changed for Korean women. To-day no Korean woman, however lowly, would look up at a strange man long enough to like him; much less “look to like, if looking liking move.”
In every Korean house of any pretension the women’s apartments are in the most secluded part of the building. They open on to a garden, and never on to a street. The compound is walled, and no two families ever live upon the same compound. And no Korean may go upon the roof of his own house without legal permission, and without giving due notice to all his neighbours. The roof may leak, and the roof may crack in the middle, but before the owner of the house or any mechanic in his employ may go up to see what the matter is, and to remedy it, the occupiers of every house, the garden of which can be seen from his roof, must be notified, and ample time given for the ladies of those various establishments to leave the gardens. So a Korean woman is as hidden from the world, in her husband’s garden or summer-house, as is a nun in her cell.
The wives and daughters of well-to-do Koreans spend a great deal of time in their gardens, sharing naturally enough the intense love of their menkind for nature, and probably finding their peculiar lives more endurable among the trees and the birds and the lotus ponds, than they do in their queer little rooms, through the paper windows of which they cannot look unless they poke a hole with their fingers first—rooms in which there is little space and less furniture.
After the curfew rings it is illegal for a Korean man to leave his own house, unless under circumstances which I have stated in a previous chapter; then it becomes legal for Korean women to slip out and take the air and gossip freely. But both the law and the privilege have fallen somewhat into abeyance, especially in Söul. There are now so many foreigners in Söul, members of legations, and servants connected with legations, that it has been found impossible to keep the streets of Söul free from men after curfew, and so the women of Söul have very greatly lost that which was, a few years ago, one of their few, and one of their most dearly prized privileges.
If thedramatis personæin Korean society are all men, not so thedramatis personæin Korea’s history. As in China, and as in Japan, important parts have been played by women in the great historical drama of Korea—a drama that began centuries and centuries ago, and that is not ended yet, or only now ending. Korea has had many remarkable women who have left their as yet indelible stamp upon the customs and the laws of their country, and upon the thought of their countrymen. Korea has had at least three great queens. Korea has had her Boadicea. The present King of Korea owes his kingship, in large part at least, to his great-grandmother, Dowager Queen Cho, who adopted him, and in 1864 was largely instrumental in securing for him the throne to which the royal consul had elected him.
The most powerful women of whom we can read in the history of India, from the time of the Rock Temples to the time of the Indian Mutiny, were purdah-women; and the woman who has perhaps had more influence and more power over her own husband than ever other woman had over other husband—the woman who was perhaps at her death the most sincerely mourned, and the woman who was entombed as no other woman has ever yet been entombed, and probably as no other woman will ever be entombed—the beautiful Arjamand Banu—lived in the strictest purdah. And until the breaking out of the Chino-Japanese war, the most powerful person in Korea was, and for twenty years had been, a woman, the king’s wife. Queen Min, for even she has no name, and is known only by the name of the race from which she has sprung, comes of one of the two great intellectual families of Korea; and the great family of Min has produced no cleverer woman or man than the wife of Li-Hsi.
A very large proportion of the literature at our disposal, which treats in any dignified way of Korea, has been written by missionaries. This is inevitably so of any Asiatic country whose first Western invaders have been soldiers of the Cross. Fortunately for the interested student of Korea, the missionaries who have gone to Korea seem almost from the first to have been mentally, socially, and in culture, equipped above the missionary average in other parts of heathendom. Whether they have had a corresponding moral superiority it would be interesting to know, but I am the last person in the world competent to judge the moral status of a missionary. This of the European missionaries in Korea—from the Jesuit fathers old France sent there to the Presbyterian brethren recently sent from the United States—a surprising number of them had the gift not of writing (for scribbling seems to come as naturally to the average missionary as to the average nineteenth-century woman), but of writing well, and with great discretion. If we would learn the history of Korea, we must learn it very largely from the writings of European missionaries, unless, indeed, we are able to read Chinese, and have access to the fuller, more ably written, and probably more authentic histories of Korea, written by Chineselittérateurs. It is a matter of course that the Chinese, who are akin to the Koreans, and who may almost be said to have brought them up, should make fewer blunders in writing of Chosön than men of utterly dissimilar race and thought habits. Then, too, the writing of the Chinese histories of Korea has been largely contemporaneous with the enactment of that history. And no man can write with entire breadth of a people to whose religion he is bitterly antagonistic.
One blunder is conspicuous in most of the valuable books written by Europeans—written on Korea. They state almost to a volume that the women are uneducated and never pretty.
Educated after European methods they certainly are not. But why should they be? And that they are not—does that prove that they are not educated at all? There are more systems of education than one.
Let us take the poor women of Söul, and compare them with the poor women of Liverpool or of London, and with the women of many tongues, who flock into New York through the portals of Castle Garden. The Korean women can read and write, the large majority of them. They cook well, cleanly, and economically. Out of a few simple ingredients (which her Western sister would scorn), and with a few simple implements (that that sister would not understand)—often almost without implements and with little fire—fire that must be coaxed and humoured, and humoured and coaxed, the poorest Korean woman will prepare a meal which no hungry European, prince or peasant, need scorn to eat. It will be savoury, wholesome, clean to daintiness, and pleasantly served. They can sew, make all that they, their husbands, and their children wear, can these poor, ignorant, heathen women. They are expert washerwomen. Most of them can make pictures with sharp sticks, or with brush, and almost all of them are more or less skilled in midwifery, in the care of the sick, in sick-room cookery, and in the care of children. They know how to keep their tempers, hold their tongues, control their appetites, to make much of little, and to enjoy to the full and with thanksgiving any small pleasure that falls to their scantily pleasured lot. Now let us turn to the Seven Dials, or to the Five Points—No, on second thought let us not!
As for Korean gentlewomen, they are skilled in Korean music, in Chinese and Korean literature. They are unsurpassed mistresses of the needle, more than able with the brush, and thoroughly acquainted with every detail of the complicated Korean etiquette. They are deft in the nice ceremonies of the toilet. They know the histories of Korea, of China, and perhaps of Japan. They are familiar with their own folk-lore, and can repeat it glibly and picturesquely. They are nurses and mothers and wives by nature, and wives, mothers, nurses, and accoucheuses by training. Above all, they are taught (and they learn) to be amiable. They are instructed in the art of charming, and in the grace of being gentle, as soon as they are taught to walk. I have known advanced women in Europe who could scarcely boast of being more highly educated. And the happiest women I have known have not always been the most learned. I think that we are apt to underrate the education of women in the East because it differs so essentially from ours: but then so do their physique and the country in which they live; its flora, its climate, and its sociology. A Korean once told me (he was a kinsman of Queen Min, a traveller, a linguist, and a man of—cosmopolitanly speaking—most considerable attainments) that his wife was more widely and more thoroughly versed in Chinese literature, modern and classic, than he. And Chinese literature is indisputably the greatest literature that Asia has ever produced.
The Queen of Korea is, with the possible exception of the Dowager Empress of China, as well educated as any royal lady in Asia.
As to the national lack of beauty among the women of Korea—why, it is neither more nor less than nonsense, ignorant, and rather stupid nonsense. I know no race in which the women who earn their individual slice, and a goodly share of the family loaf, in the sweat of their brows retain their beauty long. The women seen on the streets of Söul and in the fields, and on the mountain slopes of Korea, belong—if I may for the sake of emphasis repeat myself—belong to the hardest-worked, the most weather-beaten, burden-bent, and ill-fed class in Korea. Their personal appearance is no indication of the real type of Korean womanhood. They are painted by the sun and the wind, disfigured with trouble and back-ache, and their once pretty faces have been profaned by many tears, and they are hideous. But the women of the Korean leisure class are, as a rule (a rule with only just enough exceptions to prove it), undeniably pretty—pretty with a prettiness that is closely akin to the prettiness of the women of Japan and Burmah. The Queen of Korea is quaintly pretty, and among the three hundred women who are, nominally at least, the concubines of the king, and among the very many female attendants of their two Majesties, there is scarcely a plain face. Of course many Europeans who have been resident in Korea, and have written of their residence, have not had access to the court, much less to the Queen and her ladies. But surely any wide-eyed man who has spent some time in Korea has seen and seen again the geisha girls. Who that has lived in Korea denies their beauty? And would it not occur to an observer of somewhat less than abnormal reasoning power that since the only female members he had ever seen of the Korean leisure class were beautiful, that it was fairly presumable that the Korean women who worked even less, and lived in greater luxury, and under more healthy conditions, were at least as beautiful?
Korean women (those of them who have not been scarred by over-toil, nor deformed by privation) have remarkably small, and remarkably pretty hands and feet, and of nothing are they prouder than of their dimpled fingers, and their shapely, delicate feet, But the feet of a Korean woman are small by nature, never by art. They have lovely eyes—these women—musical voices, and are graceful of motion.
The Queen is pale and delicate-looking. She has a remarkable forehead, low but strong, and a mouth charming in its colouring, in its outlines, in its femininity, in the pearls it discloses, and sweet with the music that slips through it when she speaks. She dresses plainly as a rule, and in dark but rich materials. In this she resembles the high-born matrons of Japan. And in cut her garments are more Japanese than those of other Korean women: she wears her hair parted in the middle, and drawn softly into a simple knot or coil of braid. She wears diamonds most often; not many, but of much price. They are her favourite gems. In this one particular she is almost alone among the women of the East; for pearls are the beloved jewels of almost every woman and girl-child that is born in the Orient.
Queen Min has been as assiduous as she has been powerful in advancing the interests of her family—the family of her birth I mean, for her marriage—unlike the marriages of other Korean women—has no whit divorced her from the people of her blood. All the desirable offices in Korea were held for years by her kinsmen.
Queen Min has not only been the power behind the Korean throne, but she has been, even more than the King, the all-seeing eye of Korea. Her spies have been everywhere, seen everything, reported everything.
Two things that are true of the Queen are peculiarly significant of the grip that Oriental customs have upon the most autocratic of Oriental minds. She—the most powerful Korean in Korea—is content to be nameless; a sovereign with almost unlimited power, but without a nominal individuality; and to be called merely by the family name of her forefathers, and to be designated only as the daughter of her fathers, the wife of her husband, and the mother of her son.
It strikes an Occidental as even more strange that a woman so supremely powerful with her husband and king should be so graciously tolerant of the women of his harem. She not only tolerates them, she seems to like them, to take pride in them, and she is on the friendliest terms with Li-Hsi’s eldest son, who is also the son of a concubine. True her own son is the crown prince, but it is probable that his elder brother and not he will be Korea’s next king, if the present dynasty be destined to have another king. Li Hsia—Queen Min’s son—is not the imbecile he has been reported, but he has not the greatest mental strength, and less strength of body.
Queen Min is admirable and affable in her home circle. She is a woman of no great physical strength. But she has considerable courage, moral and physical, and both have been well tried.
Queen Min has always advocated the opening of Korea to foreigners, and the establishing of relations with foreign Powers. Whether this shows her wisdom or her folly it is too soon to say: but it certainly proves her—woman of the Far East that she is—to have a mind of her own, even though she lacks a personal name.
No one man or woman who wishes to have a part in the solving of the great and complicated woman-question should fail to make an, as far as possible, exhaustive study of the women of Asia. The women of the East differ from the women of the West, chiefly in being more secluded from public places, public duties, and public influence; in being more confined to, and more absorbed in their own firesides; in being less on a nominal equality with man, and in being more definitely, if less happily and less highly placed in the State and in the family. They differ from the women of the West in the manner of their education, and in the aims of their education.
Before we consider whether these differences are to the advantage or disadvantage of Eastern women, it is only fair that we (we Western women who are interested in working out, not only our own salvation, but the salvation of mankind) should consider very carefully how the position of woman in the East has affected man in the East, and the Eastern races in their entireties. Does the absence of woman from the general daily life of a race render that daily life less refined, and more brutal? One might, at first thought, have concluded so. We may assume for a premise that women are more refined, more gentle of heart, and more graceful of manner than men, and it is, I believe, commonly thought among the great mass of people in the West, who are almost altogether uninformed and altogether ill-informed about the East, that the men of the East are brawlers, half-savage, and uncouth. No grosser mistake could be made. Probably the two most brutalizing passions are envy and jealousy. There have been in the history of the world, I think, no two other causes of so much bloodshed, so much brutality, so much infinite cruelty, and so much horrible vulgarity. The wrangling over women, the rivalry for women, and the suspicions and the enormous heartburns occasioned by these rivalries have, in the lands where the women mingled freely with the men, more than counterbalanced the refining effect produced by the fact that the men of these countries have wished to appear at their best before the women, and have been on the whole inspired to civility and gentle behaviour in the presence of women. Because an Oriental’s wife is his property, unquestionably so, she is the cause of no bloodshed, no jealousy, and her refining influence is more proved in the breach than in the observance. The Korean gentleman, the Chinese mandarin, or the husband of a high-caste Hindoo woman who goes to a dinner-party, has the soothing consciousness that his wife is safe at home. Under lock and key, perhaps: certainly debarred, by the strong prejudices of centuries, from going abroad, or showing her face to men. He can devote himself with placid heart and undiverted mind to the meat and drink set before him and the men sitting about him. No torturing wonder as to which of his wife’s platonic friends has dropped in to have an after-dinner cup of coffee with her can come to destroy his appreciation of the fine flavour of his soup. He can glance around that dinner table with eyes fearless and proud, for they will not encounter his wife flirting, ever so harmlessly, with someone else’s husband: a sight calculated to make any man whose heart is not made of dough, and his brain of pulp, choke over his cutlets, and end his dinner miserably in a fit of ill-humour and indigestion. True, on the other hand, he is not able to flirt with his neighbour’s wife. The social arrangements are such, in the East, that no fairly well-to-do man need lack ample female society both at home and abroad. But the female society which is open to him outside of his own house is not the society of wives, mothers, nor of maidens. And moreover, the majority of men enjoy a good stag-dinner very much more than they do an equally good feast which is shared with them by a number of women. When a party of gentlemen dine together, in the East, or in the West, I very much fear that their table-talk is far more intellectual, entertaining, and altogether worth while than the table-talk of women who dine with each other, or of men and women who dine together. And I am sure that it is quite as refined, free from undesirable insinuations, coarse witticisms, and imbecile pleasantries. I am not speaking, of course, of dinnerstête-à-tête, nor would anything I have said apply to them. I have been an unseen spectator of many stag-dinners in the East, and I was once an unseen, but all-seeing, guest at a stag-dinner in the West. And in my salad days I have often broken bread with women, women, only women. It is my conclusion that the European men who dine at their clubs, and the Asiatic men who dine with their fellows, gain almost as much as they lose, and I can partly understand man’s preference for the table companionship of men. I believe that good digestion waits on appetite more often in dinner parties of the East than in dinner parties of the Occident.
The Eastern man rarely or never commits the sin of coveting his neighbour’s wife, because he rarely or never sees her, and so, at least, we cannot say that the unrighteous laws governing the relative positions of the sexes in the Orient, lead the men of the Orient into the worst of all temptations. Among the very poorest classes in Korea the men invariably see more or less of the women; but those men are too poor, too hard worked, too absorbed, body, brain, and heart, in a struggle for existence to covet other men’s wives, or, often indeed, to have wives of their own.
Oriental polygamy seems so delicate a subject, such thin conversational ice to the average Western mind, that the best informed writers are rather in the habit of skating about its edges and of speaking loosely and indefinitely, and with the greatest confusion about the wives and the concubines of the East. I have spoken of the well-to-do Korean as having a plurality of wives. This is not so. And that such a mis-statement has been made by writers of eminence, and ordinarily of great exactness, is no excuse for me. A Korean can have but one wife, one true and absolute wife, but (and here comes in the fact which is hard, very hard, of comprehension even to intelligent Europeans, who have not lived in the Orient) he may have as many concubines as he can afford, and their position, though not so high of rank, is as honourable, and as respectable as that of his wife. The word concubine, in the sense given it by our English dictionaries, can no more justly be applied to the women of a Korean’s seraglio than it can be applied to Hagar. I use the word, because it is the word used by all European scholars to indicate the women of whom I am writing, and is also the word used to designate them in the countries of the East. As I have said, they are not on a social equality with the wife, but they are, to the best of my belief, on a moral equality with her, both in the eyes of Oriental law and in the eyes of morality itself. I see no difference ethically between the woman who consents to marry (as every well-born Korean woman does consent to marry) a man who she knows has, or will have, a well filled harem—I see no difference between her and the woman who consents to make that harem her home.
A Korean’s concubines are almost as absolutely the handmaidens of his wife as of himself. They must serve her and do her bidding, and can only escape from this in the rare instance when one rises in the man’s eyes to higher favour than the wife.
The children of a concubine do not as a rule rank with the children of a wife, but they are neither despised nor shamed. They are born to a slightly lower rank, it is true, but that signifies little, for in Korea every man must carve out his own niche in the social rock, and they, the children of the handmaidens, have as fair a start in life, and as clean a name, as the children of the wife. In this, at least, Korean civilization puts us to the blush.
I am not advocating polygamy. It seems to me an evil only less than the evil which makes innocent children nameless, and unfortunate women homeless and hopeless. It is an evil, I am convinced, that can never work in the West, never be endured by the women of the West. But it does work in the East—works fairly well. And I think it just possible that with the Orientals, with their quickly developed bodies, and their slowly developed minds, it is, under existing circumstances, the lesser of two evils, one of which would be inevitable. In Utah I have known a great many Mormons. I knew Brigham Young when I was a child, and I have since known several of his wives, and many of his children. With the exception of Brigham Young himself and one woman, who was, in the most brazen sense of the word, an adventuress, I have never known a Mormon of even average intellect. Yet, even so, I never knew the wives of a Mormon man to live in peace together. The men were degraded and brainless; the women degraded, almost imbecile and discontented. But it is not so in the Orient; high caste or high class men are refined, gentlemanly, clean of person, and keen of intellect, and the women in their lesser and feminine way are very fit mates of those men. The women of a Korean household are, as an almost invariable rule, happy together. There is less differentiation between the personalities of an Eastern race than between those of a Western, and this is especially true of the women, I think. The wife and all the concubines of a Korean have tastes in common, habits in common, likes and dislikes and accomplishments in common. It is a matter of course to them to live under the same roof, and at the disposal of the same man, and it never occurs to them to question either its fitness or its desirability. All must yield unquestioning obedience to the husband, and, in his absence, all the concubines must yield and do yield as implicit obedience to the wife. She in return is very apt to make them her playfellows and her bosom friends. The Sarahs of the East are far more just, far more kind to the Hagars of the East than Sarah of old was to the mother of Ishmael. Would that the women of the West, who are secure in their sole wifehood—secure at least in the sole legality of their position, had more humanity for the less fortunately placed women of the West. Whatever the social conditions of the West, the women of the West are, in part at least, responsible for them; not the outcast women, not the women who have made a public failure of life, but the women of assured positions, of intellect, and of moral weight. Whatever the position of woman is in Korea, however low the standard of morality in Korea, the women of Korea, to-day at least, are in no way responsible for it, in no way—in no direct way at least—able to alter it, and I think it greatly to the credit of Korean wives that they treat with no pharisaical contempt, with no feminine injustice, and with no inhumanity, the women who like themselves are, comparatively speaking, moral and social puppets in the hands of a social system in the regulating of which they have no direct voice.
I think I have said repeatedly, and I am going to again say in a succeeding chapter, that Korea has no religion. Whether the facts I shall be able to give will prove my statement to the majority of readers, I am not quite prepared to say. At all events, there is certainly no civilized country, not excepting China, in which religion counts for so little, and in which the professors of religion are under so positive a social ban as they are in Korea. Yet, strangely enough, in Korea there are not only monks and monasteries, but nuns and nunneries. Both monasteries and nunneries seem to have existed almost as long as Korea has existed in anything like its present social condition. Hamel speaks of two nunneries in Söul, and says that the nuns in one were exclusively women of high birth; that the nuns in the other were maids born of the common people. Their hair was shorn as was the hair of monks, and they performed the same duties, obeyed the same rules as did the monks. There were then, and have been since, a number of other nunneries scattered throughout Korea. But it is certainly several hundred years since any body of nuns defended their house from an invading army, or took any part in Korean warfare, local or otherwise, and I very much doubt if they ever did so. But it is probable that in every other way their lives resembled, as indeed they now resemble, the lives of the religious men. In the days of Hamel the nunneries were maintained by the bounty of the king and some of his principal subjects. The king who was reigning in Korea a little over two hundred years ago (the same of whom Hamel speaks), gave the nuns of Söul permission to marry. There are now no nunneries in Söul, but there are still several in Korea. Besides the nun who is shaven and shorn, there is a femaledevotéecalled Po-sal, who does not cut her hair, and whose vows are less binding than those of other nuns.
I merely mention the fact that there are nuns in Korea, while on the subject of Korean women, because it is a curious item of what I have been able to learn about the women of Chosön, and is uniquely in contrast to almost all the other items that I have been able to gather.
And now almost last, a few words more about the dress of Chosön’s women-folk. As I have said, it is less Oriental-looking than the dress of the women of any other Eastern race, and this is remarkable, if not surprising, because the women of Korea to-day dress exactly as the women of China dressed before the present Chinese dynasty came into power, and the race from which it sprang conquered China. In dress, at least, indeed in many other ways, the Koreans have strictly maintained the habits and the fashions that they adopted from, or that were forced upon them by old China. This is why the men wear no queues and the women do not pinch their feet. In dress and in toilet habits the Koreans of to-day are probably an exact replica of the inhabitants of China, before China became dominated by the Tartars.
The women of Korea’s poor almost invariably wear the same colour as do the men of the same class: a blue so pale, so indefinite, and, from a short distance, so imperceptible, that it has generally been called white. Even so exact an observer and so careful a chronicler as Mr. Curzon speaks of “the white-clad Koreans.” Mr. Curzon may, by-the-bye, have made several mistakes in writing of the East; but, with the best intentions in the world, I have not been able to discover another of his making. One may differ occasionally from his opinions; one may not always share his likes or his dislikes; but I assure the student of things Eastern that he can depend absolutely upon the truth of Mr. Curzon’s statements of facts, and their exactness.
Korean women of position wear almost every conceivable colour. In China, pink and green are set aside for women, and are sacred to their wearing. I do not think that the women of Korea have the sole right to wear any colour, but they certainly have the right to wear, and the habit of wearing, almost every conceivable colour. Purples and greens are their high favourites, and green is almost invariably the hue—and a bright, deep green at that—of the generously-sleeved dress which the middle-class Korean woman (or on rare occasions, a lady) throws about her head and shoulders when she walks abroad. This green dress, which is used as a cloak, is almost exclusively the garment of the women of the middle class—the women who are not so poor that they are obliged to draw water, or to engage in any other forms of hard labour which would make the covering of their faces impossible—but who, at the same time, are occasionally obliged to go abroad on some matter of household business. Wives and concubines and daughters of mandarins and of men of wealth do not often leave their own (by courtesy) house and gardens. When they do, they go in palanquins. They enter the palanquin in their own court-yard; the blinds or curtains are tightly closed. The chair is borne away on the shoulders of coolies, and is usually followed by one or more female servants or waiting women, who run closely behind it, looking on the ground, and carrying a fan, which indicates the rank of the palanquined mistress.
In some parts of Korea, among some classes of the poor, the women wear a very short white jacket which barely covers the upper part of the bosom. This jacket looks like an exaggerated caricature of the pretty white jacket worn by the Singalese women.
The dress of a Korean lady is as elaborate as the dress of a Korean working-woman is plain. The example of simplicity set by Queen Min is followed by almost none of the Korean women who can afford to do otherwise. The wardrobe of a Korean lady contains garments of silk, surprising in quantity, and covetable in quality, but satins are unknown, and the glimmer and glitter, which is so dear to the eye of every Oriental, must be made alone by the lustre of silk, and enhanced by as much tinsel, as many jewels and ornaments as the wearer can possibly afford.
I have spoken of the brown interspace which is often seen between the jacket and the skirt of a Korean woman, but it is only seen among the very poorest, and I believe is a lack of material, and a matter of indifference, rather than an intentional exposure of person. I have never seen a Korean lady—I have never seen a gentlewoman of any Eastern race—décolleté, except Japanese ladies in European dress. It seems strange, at first thought, that races, whose standards of sexual morality seem to us so far beneath our own, should be so universally modest in their covering of their persons. I am inclined to think that it is not modesty at all, but rather a peculiar phase of Oriental dignity which causes the people of the East to drape themselves as entirely as possible. Mr. Lowell, whose inimitable book on Korea must be a source of almost endless enjoyment to anyone who has known and delighted in the quaint peninsula, says so exactly what I think we ought to understand about the standpoint from which the Orientals regard dress, and how they have come to so regard it, that I take the liberty of borrowing a page from his volume; one of those books which constantly tempt one to quote them from cover to cover. In discussing the manner in which dress in Eastern Asia has been influenced by woman, Mr. Lowell writes:—
“Her absence has been as potent a force there as her presence has been elsewhere; for I think we must admit that to her indirectly is due the following singular feature of Asiatic thought.
“The way in which the far Oriental regards dress is somewhat peculiar. I can think of no simile so descriptive as the connection we tacitly assume between spirit and body. We hardly, in ordinary life, think of the one as devoid of the other, and we regard the latter as at least the sense-impression to us of the person within. So do they with dress. To their eyes it forms an essential part of their conception of the man. Somewhat in like manner we are ourselves impressed by dress, in the customary take-at-what-we-see estimate of our fellows. They differ from us in carrying the real into the ideal.
“This is very strikingly seen in the matter of painting. Perhaps one of the most notable features about far Eastern paintings is its utter ignoring of the human figure. There is a complete void in that branch which among Europeans has always claimed attention—the study of the nude. To them artistically man is nothing but a bundle of habits in the sartorial sense. The practice is not due to an excess of what we call modesty. We may, perhaps, define modesty as the veiling from public gaze of all of ourselves, in person or in mind, except so much as is sanctioned to exposure by conventionality. Substitute ‘necessity’ for ‘conventionality,’ and you have the far Eastern definition. Convenience, not convention, is the touchstone of propriety. They have not the smallest objection to being seen in a state of nature where occasion demands it; and, on the other hand, nothing would induce them to exhibit any portion of their persons for the purpose of display. To them to be clothed or naked is a matter of indifference; it is merely a question of temporary comfort. The reason why they disregard the body is other than this. It is simply that they have never been led to regard the body as beautiful. That this is so, is due to the low position of woman. She has never risen high enough in their estimation to attain even to that poor level of admiration—that of being an object of beauty. All that should be her birthright they heap as a dowry upon Nature.
“The study of drapery has benefited at the expense of what it encases, and plays a certain part even in the expression of the emotions.”
I must pause right here, much as I admire his work, and much as I owe him, to quarrel with Mr. Lowell, who says that the people of the East, of the Far East at least, have never been led to regard the body as beautiful.
Is it possible that Mr. Lowell is unfamiliar with, or unappreciative of, the literature of Hindostan, the dramas of China, and the poems of Japan?