Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

Among some classes of Korean women the dressing of their hair is the most important item of their toilet, and one skilled in ways Korean, and in signs of Korean rank, can very readily determine, from a glance at her coiffure, who and what a Korean woman is. The ladies of the court wear their hair in different prescribed ways. The geisha girls have an artistic fashion of their own, and a Korean woman servant, one part of whose duty is to fetch and to carry, makes out of the braids of her own hair an enormous cushion upon which she can carry with the greatest security a huge bundle, or a vast dish of food.

The men of no other race are so amply dowered with hats as are the men of Korea. Probably the women of no other civilized country are so badly off for head-gear as are the women of Chosön, and this is not, though we might easily fancy it to be, because those women are not supposed to walk or ride abroad. For innumerable years Korea has taken her fashions from China, changing them with the change of dynasty at Pekin. But for five hundred years the Koreans have failed to change the fashion of their hats, and they remain true to the style of head-gear which was in vogue when the present Korean dynasty came into power. When the present fashion in hats was imported from Pekin, just about five hundred years ago, the Koreans neglected to learn, or were unable to learn, what the women of China were wearing on their heads, or else the women of China were going bare-headed. The result was that Korean women, having discarded their previous head coverings, and receiving no authority from Pekin for the fashion of new ones, became hatless, and have been hatless ever since. The only hat the Korean women wear now is the folded dress which I have described before. There is indeed a jaunty, little embroidered cap not unlike a modified Turkish fez, or the glorious capote of a French vivandière, which is supposed to be at the disposal of any Korean woman who cares to assume it, but it has been adopted by the geisha girls, and so, of course, discarded by Korean ladies. Korean women used to wear a huge hat not unlike a small, flat, Chinese parasol. It was perched well up on and well to the back of their heads, and was surrounded by a rather fascinating silk fringe, through which they could see and be seen—a fringe that was, perhaps, as becoming to them as our white spotted veils are to us.

A few words here about divorce in Korea, for divorce is always a matter of more importance to a woman than to her husband. This is so in every country, because as yet in every country woman is more confined to her home, more dependent upon her home, and less free to go abroad at all seasons and under all circumstances than man is, and therefore less able to escape the daily torment of married unhappiness. In the United States, and in most European countries whose laws I have at all studied, the divorce laws are very much more in favour of woman than of man. In Korea the direct opposite is true. There is little or nothing for which a Korean woman can obtain a divorce, and there is little or nothing for which a Korean man cannot. Whether it is more to the credit of Korean woman or to the credit of Korean man far be it for me to say; but it is a very rare occurrence for a Korean husband to put aside his wife. The sanctity of the home circle, the inviolate maintenance of that home circle is more than a religion, more than an instinct with nine-tenths of the people of Asia. Their idea of a home circle may be more elastic than ours, but, as a rule, they abide by it almost with the courage of martyrs. The women must, and the men do. In one respect the divorce laws of Korea are more radical than the divorce laws of the West. Incompatibility of temper justifies divorce in Korea, and is the cause of most Korean divorces. Truly nothing could be more sensible, more humane—provided one has no religious scruples—for even children lose more than they gain by living in an unhappy home. Incompatibility of temper may not be a sin, but it is the one difficulty in the path of married happiness, in Asia or in Europe, which can never be smoothed away. It is insurmountable, nor can you go around it. It seems to me that the only decent thing to do when you come upon it, again provided your conscience will let you, is to turn round and go back. A harsh word, a quick gesture, and many things that are many times worse can be forgiven readily enough, and almost forgotten, by people who have the common justice to judge not lest they be judged. But incompatibility of temper, that strange something which makes it impossible for me to teach my pet cat to eat or drink with my pet dog, ah! that is the marital thorn, the marriage plague, “past cure, past help, past hope.” And I congratulate the law makers of Korea for recognizing it for what it is, and dealing with it as it should be dealt with. To be sure, if a Korean man and wife fail to get along, perpetually fail, the woman has no direct voice in the matter; but if she and her husband agree together to untie the mistakenly-tied knot, he can very easily do so. And even in Korea a woman of average wit does not probably find it too difficult a task to make herself so very disagreeable that the husband may be brought to propose the separation which she secretly desires.

But where the Korean law seems to me very inconsistent is in not punishing, when the marriage is a failure, the geomancer who selected the wedding day. The method of this sage is so simple that it ought to be infallible. He adds the age of the bride to the age of the groom, and after determining which star rules the destiny of their united ages, he decrees that the wedding shall take place upon the day sacred to that star. How a day so chosen can ever fail to be auspicious, and to be the beginning of many days of uninterrupted happiness it is hard for a simple Western mind to understand. To do the geomancer justice, it is perhaps because of his occult wisdom that divorce plays so minor a part in Korean life.

One Korean law concerning women seems to me uniquely cruel. A woman may not die in the arms of a man, nor may a woman hold in her arms a man who is dying. Husbands and wives love each other sometimes—even in Korea. Mothers love their sons, the wide world over, and sons their mothers. Korean fathers yearn over their daughters, and are loved tenderly by those daughters in return. What a barbarous law! how infamous; how unworthy of the East or of the West! what a reflection upon humanity; what a stain upon Korea! That inferiority of sex (sex—that unexplained accident of our physical existence), inferiority, real or imagined, should separate man from wife, father from daughter, son from mother, even by a hair’s breadth, at the moment when Death, the merciless, the relentless, pronounces the great, and perhaps eternal separation!

Though a Korean woman nominally counts for nothing in the ruling of her own household, and, as far as the workings of the State go, does not exist, she is invariably treated with the manner of respect; she is always addressed in what is called “honorific language;” to her the phraseology is used which is used to superiors, people of age, or of literary eminence. A Korean nobleman will step aside to let a Korean peasant woman pass him on the street. The rooms of a Korean woman are as sacred to her as a shrine is to its image. Indeed, the rooms of his wife or of his mother are the sanctuary of any Korean man who breaks the law. Unless for treason or for one other crime, he cannot be forced to leave those rooms, and so long as he remains under the protection of his wife, and his wife’s apartments, he is secure from the officers of the law, and from the penalties of his own misdemeanours.

It is often said that the men of the East regard women not only as their inferiors, but as burdens, as superfluous, useless, and despicable. This is a mistake, as large a mistake in speaking of Koreans as of any other Oriental race. The potence of sex, the impotence of either sex alone, is the great underlying thought of all Eastern philosophy, I had almost said, of all Oriental ethics. Which of the great Eastern religions ignores it, or passes it by lightly? Study the symbols in the old caves of India: read Confucius. Every educated Oriental believes that without women life would not only be impossible but worthless. They regard her sphere of usefulness as important as their own. An Oriental mother is almost an Oriental deity. This is as true in Korea as in China, in Japan, in Persia, in Hindostan, and in Burmah. The thinkers of Asia differ from us in what they regard as the most appropriate and the most essential spheres of women’s usefulness, but they never ignore, nor do I think they underrate, the importance of woman’s work. Mr. Griffis, who is not over partial to the Koreans (perhaps if he had ever lived among them he might have liked them better), himself says:⁠—

“With the ethics of the Chinese came their philosophy, which is based on the dual system of the universe, and of which in Korean, yum-yang (positive and negative, active and passive, or male and female) is the expression. All things in heaven, earth, and man are the result of the interaction of the yum (male or active principle), and the yang (female or passive principle). Even the metals and minerals in the earth are believed to be produced through the yum-yang, and to grow like plants or animals.”

Even so clear, so cool, so sympathetic, so cultured, and best of all, so unbigoted an observer, a thinker, and a writer as Percival Lowell, seems to me to have blundered a little in his summing up of the position of woman in the East. He says:⁠—

“The lower man’s place in the scale of nations, the lower, relatively to his own, has always been that of woman. Woman, being physically less strong, naturally suffers where physical strength is made the basis of esteem. But as men have advanced in civilization, gradually a chivalrous regard has been paid the weaker, but fairer sex. Now, though the countries of the Far East have had their age of feudalism, in a general parallelism to those of the West, loyalty took the place of chivalry as one of its attendant feelings. At the point where woman elsewhere made her début upon the social stage, here she failed to appear; and she has not done so since. The history of these races has been a history of man apart from any help from woman. To all social intents and purposes, woman has remained as she was when she followed as a slave in her Lord’s wanderings. She is better fed now, better clothed, cleaner and more comfortable than she was; but, relatively to the position of the people, no higher. She counts for nothing in the life of the race at the present time, as she has counted for nothing in it from the beginning.”