Beyond Death

The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea

Charles R. Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook B. Nam, Serk-Bae Suh, Charles R. Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook B. Nam, Serk-Bae Suh, Clark W. Sorensen

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295746333
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea, interdisciplinary essays explore the changing ways in which Korean historical agents have considered what constitutes a sociopolitically meaningful death and how the surviving community should remember such events. Among the topics covered are the implications of women’s chaste suicides and men’s righteous killings in the evolving Confucian-influenced social order of the latter half of the Chosŏn Dynasty; changing nation-centered constructions of sacrifice and martyrdom put forth by influential intellectual figures in mid-twentieth-century South Korea, which were informed by the politics of postcolonial transition and Cold War ideology; and the decisive role of martyrdom in South Korea’s interlinked democracy and labor movements, including Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation in 1970, the loss of hundreds of lives during the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, and the escalation of protest suicides in the 1980s and early 1990s.

PART I

Changing Practices During the Late Chosŏn Era

1

Yŏl (烈): Chaste Martyrdom and Literati Writing in Late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910)

JUNGWON KIM

Madam Yang, who had taken care of her ill husband without sleeping and eating, pledged to follow her deceased husband into the ground when he died. [First,] she swallowed poisonous herbs, in vain. Stabbing her neck with a knife, she was then thwarted by family members. However, right before the burial of [her] husband’s body, she managed to hang herself and finally died. She was thirty-seven years old and was buried with her husband.¹

In the long history of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), abundant stories and biographies of chaste women depict their formidable determination to follow their deceased husbands into death. Like Madam Yang, if their first attempt to die failed, these women continued to seek other ways to kill themselves even when their families sought to prevent them from doing so. Like many other women who followed deceased husbands to the grave throughout the dynasty, Madam Yang was honored posthumously by the government as a “chaste wife” (yŏlbu) who exemplified the utmost Confucian virtue required of women. A memorial arch was erected, and the details of her death, along with her commendable life as well as family background, were eloquently recorded by the hands of male literati. Yi Chun (1560–1635), a Confucian scholar and the author of Madam Yang’s biography, was moved by her commitment and speculated about the motivation behind her death with these words: “Perhaps [she] was inspired by her family’s [moral] instruction since she was from an illustrious family and her husband was a son of a Confucian scholar, [Kim] Hong Min (1540–94). Or was it her inborn personality of uprightness and determination?”²

Madam Yang’s biography is regarded as the first one recording the case of a wife following a husband who had died of illness. Of course, not all women who were officially recognized for their virtue chose death as the expression of their commitment. Some widows kept marital fidelity while remaining alive (known as sujŏl or suŭi), whereas others kept it by dying (sunjŏl or sunjong)—whether by immediately killing themselves or by means of deferred suicide. Although records celebrating widows’ continuing fidelity appeared prior to the Chosŏn period, it was only after the establishment of the Chosŏn state that the practice of chastity became gradually popularized as a consequence of the government’s legal, political, and moral sanctions to control female sexuality, such as the law concerning remarriage.³ In addition to publication and dissemination of didactic texts highlighting the ideal of chastity, various official reward programs accelerated adoption of the ideal among the female population. Moreover, the prolonged turmoil of the Imjin War (1592–98) and the Manchu Invasions (1627, 1637) generated a long list of women who were recognized for defending their sexual integrity to the death from attacks by invading soldiers. Scholars have noted that the Chosŏn state, with enthusiastic support from the ruling elites, endeavored to rebuild and stabilize postwar Korean society by invoking the chastity ideology.⁴

With the large number of women in need of being honored, Chosŏn society was soon awash in writings on their extraordinary actions brushed by Confucian literati. This massive production of chaste women’s biographies and eulogies in the second half of the dynasty is conventionally viewed as an outgrowth of the Confucian literati’s obsession with reinforcing the patriarchal order, and the recurring trope of chaste-women stories certainly reflects such anxieties. Also, the authors of chaste women’s biographies often made it clear that they were taking up their brushes so as to inspire people with virtuous stories. Inscribed by the hands of male literati, these stories are therefore generally regarded as blindly glorifying the women’s heroic actions while obscuring the voices and emotions behind their radical choices. However, these records do not consist solely of monolithic tales acclaiming their subjects’ remarkable virtue. It is true that male writings on chaste women hardly disclose a complex set of motives and emotions engrained in the chastity ideal, but taking them as one unified discourse equally obfuscates multiple agendas and motivations that, in fact, vary from one text to another. Beneath their formulaic language and rhetoric, these narratives also articulate—in their critique of political morality—the symbolic power of women’s deaths for the sake of the ideal of yŏl, or chastity.⁵

Departing from the conventional approach to chaste-women records, this chapter explores the concept of yŏl as manifested, contested, and shifted in the various writings of male literati on chaste suicide in late Chosŏn Korea. Whether composed individually or on behalf of a collective voice, I take these records as critical accounts in which Confucian scholars reconfigured political spaces that embodied chaste suicide as a political moral symbol. A careful revisiting of writings on—and reactions to—widows’ suicides not only explains why Confucian men committed themselves to the ideal of chastity but elucidates the rationale behind widows killing themselves, which was legitimized in the name of chastity despite the fact that suicide violates the very core of another Confucian more—filial piety.⁶ Delving into these questions sheds light on one of the key inquiries this volume addresses—that is, what constituted an honorable death, or martyrdom, and how the meaning of yŏl has shifted over historical time. As we will see, the ideal of yŏl that was foregrounded in women’s chastity was both shaped by the political culture of the time and entrenched within the commemorative space in Chosŏn society.

YŎL AND THE DISCOURSE OF FEMALE CHASTITY

Having been linked to the actions of and the discourse on martyrdom in Korean history, the word “yŏl” (Ch. lie 烈, to be chaste or fierce) is hard to capture in a single definitive term. Historically, yŏl has been used to describe people such as yŏllyŏ (烈女 chaste women) and yŏlsa (烈士 chaste martyrs) who voluntarily harm or sacrifice themselves in pursuit of an ideal or virtue that they aspire to. The notion of yŏl thus occupies the same space as that shared by violence, self-sacrifice, passion, honor, and virtue. Moreover, whereas a chaste martyr could be anyone, regardless of gender, a chaste woman referred to a woman of fidelity, indicating the exclusive connection between the ideal of yŏl and female sexuality. In Confucian morality, “yŏl” is normally defined as the wifely virtue that was interwoven with and parallel to political loyalty (ch’ung). As Confucian scholars made explicit, a wife’s fidelity to her husband was juxtaposed with male loyalty to the state; hence the notion of female chastity was sophisticated and politicized throughout the Chosŏn era, especially in times of political disorder.

Not long after the conclusion of the devastating Imjin War in 1617 the Tongguk sinsok samgang haengsil to (The illustrations of the new edition to the conduct of the three bonds) was compiled by the Chosŏn government, complete with 441 cases of chaste women directly related to the war, whereas the names of only fifty-nine loyal subjects are registered therein. Of those 441 women, 437 had perished—or chosen death—while avoiding sexual assault by Japanese soldiers. The government’s investment in printing the eighteen volumes of the Tongguk sinsok samgang haengsil to despite dire postwar economic conditions reflects its pledge to honor deaths that were deemed meaningful.⁷ The fruit of the commemorative projects embarked upon by the Chosŏn government, the Tongguk sinsok samgang haengsil to, with its many records of chaste women’s deaths, ultimately became an endorsement of the political legitimation of the state.⁸ Given the specific time when this work was published and the shifting criteria of commemoration, the large number of posthumously honored women compared to the much smaller number of male loyal subjects thus reveals that yŏl as female chastity was tantamount to, and permeated by, political moralism in postwar Chosŏn society.

Korea’s traumatic war experiences with Japan and the Manchus not only perpetuated commemorative activities in postwar society but also shaped literary production and narratives on the war dead. And because death was powerfully imprinted on the minds of men and women alike who survived the wars and witnessed the fates of their martyrs, the ideal of yŏl became gradually enmeshed with the bodily performance of killing. Although earlier writings on chaste women had hardly embodied death as the ultimate expression of their virtue, physical sacrifice resulting in death began to become more dominant in literature across genres during this period.

The Confucian literati’s records of the lives of chaste women coincided with such changes, with the zenith of chastity discourse being reached in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Confucian scholars had begun writing about chaste women earlier, these two centuries saw an unparalleled number of records on faithful women’s lives occupying a strikingly visible place in the collected works of literati (munjip), whereas few such records had appeared in the early years of the dynasty. Out of about 165 biographies of chaste women produced during the Chosŏn Dynasty, only six appeared prior to the seventeenth century, with seventy-three being produced in the eighteenth century and sixty-seven in the nineteenth. When other genres or types of records are included—ranging from eulogies, epitaphs, funerary essays, prefaces, poems, circular letters, and petitions to short and long stories included in the collected works of literati—the numbers are far greater. One Confucian scholar, Sŏng Haeŭng (1760–1839), for instance, left about twenty pieces honoring chaste women in his literary collection.⁹ Although the diverse writings on female chastity cannot be classified into a single genre, the bulk of them are in the form of a biography (chŏn) detailing the life of the woman concerned.¹⁰ In these works, as in the account of Madam Yang’s suicide quoted at the outset of this chapter, most of the women who are profiled are depicted as martyrs and heroines of marital loyalty. At the same time, these writings by male elites reveal their own ideological perspectives in defense of the violent choices made by women, while dramatizing the metaphorical power of chaste suicide in Confucian morality.

WRITING CHASTE SUICIDE AS A POLITICAL STATEMENT

The righteousness [ŭi] of the past meant giving up one’s life to fulfill moral obligations, as a wife serving a husband and as a subject serving a king. Strangely, in these days those serving a king enjoy wealth and fame by receiving a stipend while the king is alive, then betray the king after his death, forgetting the benefits [they had]. This is the case for every man who is only seeking profit. How can such a person uphold integrity upon facing hardship or sacrifice his life by encountering danger? Women are not like this. Suppressing [their grief over] the lamentable deaths of their husbands, [successive generations of] women have continuously killed themselves to follow their deceased husbands. Alas, for those [men] named scholar-officials [sadaebu], are you not ashamed when confronted by women? Why has Heaven bestowed the spirit of yŏl on women alone, and not on the so-called scholar-officials? The reason I always record incidents of chaste women, by composing biographies, is to remind the subjects in the world of their shameful status in forgetting the grace of the king.¹¹

Why did individual writings on chaste women thrive more in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than immediately after the Imjin War and Manchu Invasions, and what motivated so many male literati to describe women in such a dramatic fashion? Kim Yagyŏn (1720–1802), an eighteenth-century Confucian scholar, criticizes the loss of morality and the spirit of the past among his contemporary scholar-officials in the excerpt above from his biography of the chaste wife Madam Kim. Upon the death of her ill husband, Madam Kim told her parents of her decision to die, took care of her husband’s funeral, committed suicide, and was buried with her husband in the same grave, as she had wished. Honored as a chaste wife (yŏlbu) who had fulfilled the supreme Confucian virtue required of women, Madam Kim’s determination to die and her extraordinarily virtuous life path were powerfully recorded by the literatus Kim Yagyŏn.

What distinguishes Kim Yagyŏn’s commemoration of Madam Kim from typical biographical records of chaste women is, however, his reflection on the morality of the scholars of his time. In a lengthy preface to the biography, Kim laments the fact that the ideal of yŏl is hardly upheld by his contemporary male scholar-officials. Taking loyalty and chastity to be gendered and interlocking, Kim understands that the ideal of yŏl is entrenched equally within the moral realms of men and women. Further, seeing both loyalty and chastity as embedded in “righteousness,” he endorses the idea that the moral obligation of chastity should be performed through one’s physical sacrifice. Kim Yagyŏn’s preface makes it clear that he is not highlighting the astounding degree of heroic action displayed by Madam Kim as an ordinary wife simply to celebrate her fidelity but to disparage the decl...

Table of contents

• Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Part I: Changing Practices During the Late Chosŏn Era
• Part II: Colonial-Postcolonial Transition in South Korea
• Part III: Democracy and Labor Activism in South Korea
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index