Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

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 dinners tête-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 female devotée called Po-sal, who does not cut her hair, and whose vows are less binding than those of other nuns.