The Search for Agency

Partly thanks to class assignments, I have recently started looking at some of the gender focused history of East Asia. I’m still only scratching the surface but I’ll share a few of my initial responses so far.

Last week for my Chosôn history class we watched Im Kwon-taek’s movie Sibaji, or The Surrogate Mother (Warning: the end is given away below). In this movie we are told the story of Ok-nyo, a poor country girl and hapless victim of yangban society who had her body “rented” out to bear a male heir for an elite family in return for ten patches of land. Ok-nyo’s mother, who also shares her daughter’s tragic history as a surrogate mother urges her to bear her suffering quietly, be obedient in performing her tasks, and above all, not to fall in love with the married man who would become her temporary paramour. This she is helpless to prevent and she even believes foolishly that after giving birth to a son, she will be allowed to see her son one last time before her return to the valley of her home.

The movie concludes with Ok-nyo’s suicide. As we see her dangling from the tree she hanged herself from, we are warned against the dark legacy of Korea’s desire for male heirs. If I was to plaster my own “moral of the story” sign at the end of the movie, I’m not sure that is exactly how I would put it (the subtitles I was reading weren’t that good so they may be partly at fault). There is more at stake than simply the desperate pursuit of having male successors. That said, the movie is certainly effective at mocking some of the aspects of the Chosôn period. There is an excellent scene in which Ok-nyo has a raunchy rendezvous with the yangban who has “rented” her in the bushes while we listen to a discussion among older scholars about the details of ancestor worship. The movie also shows all sorts of less confucian “superstitious” practices surrounding pregnancy.

When all is said and done, though, this movie is true “woman as victim” history. The spunky young country woman who is the movie’s protagonist loses all her individualist subjectivity as she is imprisoned in her lonely room as a “surrogate mother.” There is no “agency” whatsoever for Ok-nyo, except in her final act of defiant suicide and, perhaps, in her rebellious late night wanderings and secret viewing of some colorful masked dancers who mock yangban practices (perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie).

The movie and this view of history certainly laments male dominance in society, but only accomplishes this through the mobilization of pity. It is based on a portrayal of women as completely subjected and essentially passive victims in a game where men hold all the keys to power. In this way, history performs a continual reenactment of male dominance and female victimization. I am thus wholeheartedly sympathetic to an effort by a number of scholars of pre-modern Korea, China, and Japan who want to reach beyond this “script” and, “walk a fine line between highlighting the hegemonic power of structures and emphasizing women’s agency,” and who attempt to break down the temporally and conceptually uniform concepts of “Confucian” and “Woman.” (Ko, Dorothy, Haboush, Jahyun Kim, and Joan R. Piggott eds. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2) They do this by re-centering the discussion on the women themselves, their internal motives and perceptions, and by emphasizing the process of “negotiation” by which these power structures are formed and adjusted. Unfortunately, this is a task which faces huge obstacles, not the least in the history of the Yi dynasty, where my limited reading so far has done little to help me identify the ways in which women “negotiated” with these power structures in such a way which reveals anything but their own lack of power.

In comparison to some of of the reading I have done by Jahyun Kim Haboush and John B. Duncan, one scholar in this fairly new re-centering approach, Martina Deuchler, is a little more reserved in her ambitions to excavate women’s agency. She unabashedly admits that the “sphere of activities” for women of Yi Korea were even more limited than their counterparts in China (Ko et al. 165), and that they had to react “to the functions and values ideology imposed upon the women’s world.” (Deuchler, Martina The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 281)

However, she tries to find agency for women at several points. For example, she opens her essay in Women and Confucian Cultures by using active verbs and moving women to the subject of the sentence. Instead of opening her work with “This chapter deals with how the social values and norms were imposed on women by men,” she says the chapter, “explores the extent to which [women] absorbed and embodied the new social values and norms imposed on them…” (Ko 142) She concludes that, “for most women it cannot have been a question of merely surviving in a patriarchal society…elite women were apt to develop an inner disposition that allowed them not only to find a meaningful place in this order but also to retain a sense of their own identity.” (Ko 165) Interestingly, she seems to be trying to convince herself even more than the reader, since she has changed her mind on this issue, or at least shifted her emphasis, since her book on the acculturation of Confucian values some ten years earlier. In this earlier book, in her conclusion in a chapter on women in the Chosôn period, she notes in her conclusion that, “Within this system, women had to develop strategies to secure for themselves and their offspring the best means of survival. When the curtain of ideology was lifted, realpolitik dominated the domestic scene.” (Deuchler 281)

In her earlier work, she emphasizes the need for survival, and ideology is merely a curtain for the realpolitik struggle for this survival. In her later work, survival is merely the first step, and we can interpret the struggles of women not as realpolitick disguised as ideology, but an expression of identity and the pursuit of a “meaningful place.” I find nothing problematic with the latter, and it is certainly more plausible, if not palatable.

Another essay I read recently which adopts this new approach is John Duncan’s “The Naehun and the Politics of Gender in Fifteenth-Century Korea” (In the book Kim-Renard, Young-Key Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2004) Duncan also objects to the way “in which women have often been depicted as simply objects, victims with no voice of their own.” (27) His answer is also similar to other essays I have seen. He wants to “explore how elite women of the Chosôn period sought, within the strictures of the Confucian gender system, to define a space wherein they could play meaningful social, cultural, and political roles.” (27) He does this by looking at a text, the Naehun (Instructions for Women), which is compiled by in 1475 by Queen Sohye (1437-1504). The text puts together selections from various Chinese Confucian primers for women, the contents for which are often perfectly representative of the kind of subordination and belittling of women you might imagine, and adds a vernacular Korean translation and some commentary. However Duncan doesn’t see Sohye as simply a passive compiler of these texts which describe the limited roles women should occupy and the many rules they should follow. In what might be his strongest case, he shows how she chose to include passages which might carve out a role for women as political counsellor for their husbands, albeit only in limited circumstances and only when the two are along. And yet, Duncan later admits that she also reproduces a passage from the Yan Family instructions in which women are told to focus their efforts on food and not politics. (43) I suspect that this latter passage is much more representative of the kind of material in the compilation.

How much does this scholarship us escape the reality that women in Yi dynasty Korea had precious little room for “negotiation” with the institutional power structures which robbed them of the somewhat less repressive and unequal position they had enjoyed in the Koryô dynasty, let alone the more distant Silla period which even included a few female monarchs. Even discussion about resistance in the Yi dynasty’s to changes in institutions which might be seen as favorable to women, such as the custom of uxorilocal (with the bride) residence, actually tell us little or nothing about the ways in which women can intervene or negotiate their power relationships. If anything, the story of how Chosôn elites were resistant to changing marriage practices can be told as the story of resistance of native or non-Confucian practices, or even better, simply traditional practices, to the onslaught of ideological indoctrination at the hands of a newly hegemonic neo-Confucian doctrine.

My concern with the new historical literature I have seen so far on women’s responses within their clearly limited spheres of action in the Chosôn period is that I wonder what exactly is to be gained from shifting the emphasis onto ways in which women “absorbed” structures of power which increasingly limited their spheres of action, or to how women found “meaning” or “identity” in their gradually shrinking realms. I understand and appreciate that the modern “liberation” mode of gender writing assumes an overly static, if not entirely invisible pre-modern “woman” who only emerges to defend herself in the gender power struggles in the 20th century. This participates in the erasure of women from premodern history, or seeks out only the incredibly marginal or historically distant examples of powerful women while leaving out the huge majority of women of other ages. Duncan’s essay shows an example of how they might be able to “tweak” the system to include some roles not usually permitted them, but how much mileage can we get out of it?

This new scholarship does indeed “walk a fine line” because its emphasis on how women actively participated and celebrated their positions, or how they protectively guarded the borders of their own shrinking spheres, can also result in showing how women were complicit in reducing – rather than preserving, their own power. I know this is a bit of a crude comparison, but imagine writing a history of world slavery in which we discussed the myriad ways in which slaves took pride in serving their masters or how they sang songs or told stories which told young slaves how they were such inferior in comparison to their masters, or urged them to read the stories of the suicide of loyal slaves after their masters’ death, etc.

I have only started reading this material, and the Chosôn period Korean case is probably just much harder to make for these scholars than those working on Ming/Qing China and Tokugawa period Japan. However, I admit some skepticism about how much can be gained from the search for agency among elite women in Yi dynasty Korea. The case of non-elites or smaller groups and marginal figures such as the female shamans might hold much more potential, but sources may simply not be available.