A History of Korea (49 page)

The high officials belonging to the Westerners faction immediately protested
en masse
to this move, arguing that Queen Inhy
n was young and thus could still bear a “legitimate” crown prince. Not only did King Sukchong react angrily to this protest by purging some of these officials, he immediately ratcheted up the confrontation to another level by divorcing Queen Inhy
n, stripping her of her title as queen. He accused her of insufficiently embracing, both figuratively and literally, the baby boy, and further rationalized this move as necessary for the crown prince when he eventually became king. The uproar that followed induced another purge of the Westerners, this time killing the faction’s intellectual leader, Song Siy
l, who was forced to drink a bowl of poison. In 1694, however, King Sukchong, fickle as ever, changed his mind again and returned Queen Inhy
n to the palace, demoting Queen Chang back to her original status as a palace lady. This would not be the end of the drama, however, for Queen Inhy
n, still without having borne a son, died suddenly in 1701. When it was discovered that Lady Chang, in her attempt to regain the monarch’s affections, had constructed a shamanistic altar where she put curses on Queen Inhy
n through the use of figurines, King Sukchong blamed her for his queen’s death and had Lady Chang executed. But Lady Chang, as if remaining true to her reputation, would not go quietly and fiercely resisted any dignified death. The executioners had to force feed her the poison.

If we take a step back from the titillating combination of sex and politics that enveloped this long-running drama, we can rightfully place it in the larger currents of Korean history and even draw comparisons to similar situations in other parts of the world. To many readers, this episode will evoke thoughts of the notorious behavior of King Henry VIII of England from a century-and-a-half earlier. Like King Sukchong, Henry was willing to go to extremes in order to divorce his queen for a favored concubine and, like Lady Chang, Anne Boleyn in the end paid the ultimate price for the monarch’s inconstancy. In the meantime, the political order was upended and led to the execution of the widely revered great man of letters, whether Song Siy
l or Thomas More, who led the righteous opposition. And in the wider consequences as well, there are important similarities. While a new religious order like the Church of England did not materialize from this episode in Korea, in both countries the larger stakes concerned the country’s place in the realm of the dominant religio-ethical civilization.

In this sense, Song Siy
l and Lady Chang stood as the dueling parties in King Sukchong’s most important triangle. In determining the future direction of Korea’s Confucian civilization, the monarch had to balance his personal desires against the two extreme priorities represented by Chang and Song. Song Siy
l, in fact, had served as the resilient ideological fount of classical East Asian and Neo-Confucian orthodoxy for much of the seventeenth century. Since the 1640s, he had engaged in prominent battles against scholar-officials arguing for Korean exceptionalism in the Confucian world order. The latter view, given the fall of Ming China to the Manchu “barbarians” in 1644, emphasized Korea’s position as the lone standing source of civilization and called for an adjustment to orthodoxy that would accommodate historical change and national interests. Song, on the other hand, in condemning such “heterodoxy,” always maintained that Korea, precisely because of the fall of Ming China, must firmly adhere to the traditional understanding. Little wonder, then, that Song is sometimes cited as “Korea’s Zhu Xi,” in reference to the great Chinese scholar credited with formulating the foundation of Neo-Confucian doctrine in the twelfth century. In stark contrast,
Lady Chang can be seen representing the nativist impulses of folk religion, the primacy of the crown, and the complications of hereditary social hierarchy. She also represented the heritage of strong-willed Korean women whose public prominence reached a high point in the mid-Chos
n era.

FAMOUS FEMALES

Neither Lady Chang nor Queen Inhy
n, who have always been joined at the hip in historical lore, wished to be swept up and exploited by the political combatants of the day. Likewise, neither likely could do anything to prevent their fates from being determined, in the end, by a mercurial monarch. But in other ways, these two opposing females served as models of strength in Chos
n Korea, albeit in very different ways. Queen Inhy
n has always stood as the paragon of Confucian female virtue. Unable to gain the affection of her husband due to the lack of a son, she subsumed her personal feelings and interests by inviting Lady Chang back into the palace. And when Lady Chang gave birth to a boy, Queen Inhy
n again selflessly supported the monarch’s designation of the baby as the crown prince. Lady Chang, on the other hand, has traditionally been portrayed as the evil opposite—the stubborn, licentious, and decadent
femme fatale
. But she could also be considered a model of the boisterous, passionate, clever Korean female who more recently has been celebrated, especially in popular culture, as a forerunner to the confident modern woman who takes her fate into her own hands.