A History of Korea (59 page)

Image 12
   “Wrestling”, by Kim Hongdo, eighteenth century. (Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea.)

POPULAR CULTURE AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

One of the most remarkable aspects of these developments in late Chos
n popular culture is that the subject matter of these works seems to have mirrored the lower social status of those responsible for their production, standardization, and dissemination. When we dig a little deeper, however, we find that actually the creative forces—whether court painters like Kim Hongdo and Sin Yunbok, clerks promoting the mask dances, or the
p’ansori
“composer-authors” like Sin Chaehyo—came not from common or low-born backgrounds, but rather from secondary status backgrounds: families of technical officials in Seoul, hereditary clerks in the countryside, or the descendants of concubines. While the secondary status groups played an integral role in maintaining the Chos
n structures of state and social authority, they also suffered from the restrictions of the aristocratically driven hereditary status system (
Chapter 10
). They were caught, in other words, between a fervent desire to emulate the rituals, behaviors, and education of the aristocracy and thereby be considered social elites themselves, and the frustrations at the fruitlessness of most such efforts to attain true recognition for their talents. This explains, perhaps, why their artistic works rarely featured themselves, but rather focused on mostly downtrodden commoners and the low-born. Even in the genre paintings there are subtle hints of the social critiques that were more openly expressed in the tales, songs, and mask dances. Neither revolutionaries nor even effective agitators, the artists and intellectuals of secondary status background had to achieve a delicate balance between social recognition and social reality.

The former tendency of emulating the aristocracy can be seen in their emphasis on the Confucian values of filial piety, loyalty, reverence for political authority, and chastity (for female characters) in these works. Even Sin Chaehyo’s
p’ansori
librettos, full of allusions to the Confucian canon, point to his absorption of the dominant
value system. The capital-based poetry societies of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also reflected this sentiment. While a separate literary movement was necessary for talented figures of non-aristocratic background who wanted to organize themselves, these authors did not produce vernacular verse on themes of social injustice, but rather poetry in literary Chinese on traditional themes. Meanwhile, the subject matter of their contributions to the vernacular poetry form,
sijo
, remained mostly the yearning for love, nature, and contemplation.

The reflective tendency of subtler protest against social discrimination, however, also spawned an undisguised effort among the secondary status groups to proclaim a higher place in the social order. And here the genre of choice was not poetry but rather the more mundane prose of biography. Works of literary biography had long taken their position as central elements of what can be considered this era’s contributions to a “national literature”—in the true sense of the term given these works’ use of the vernacular. They included the “court diaries” written by palace ladies as well as fictionalized or partially fictionalized biographical novels of historical figures. While the biographical compilations that the secondary status groups produced were mostly in literary Chinese, they were equally important because of their subject matter: a focus on people beyond the examples of heroic and court figures. The secondary status groups had begun these efforts with profiles of those from their own ranks. A history of hereditary clerks, for example, emerged in the late eighteenth century, featuring the lives of exemplary figures mixed among appeals for greater social recognition. Genealogies for secondary status groups also appeared, mimicking the form of traditional aristocratic genealogies.

The real breakthrough, however, in not only the social history but also the literary history of the late Chos
n, came via the biographical compilations, such as
Observations from the Countryside
, of people from all non-aristocratic backgrounds. These works truly reflected an ideology of social rectification in the guise of popular culture. The profiles of “Interpreter Hong” or “Filial Lady Yi,” for example—among close to 300 separate biographical portraits in
Observations
—provide examples of lives worth remembering as
well as a clear sense of these people’s adherence to common values. As the author of
Observations
notes in his preface, “Since long ago there have been wise and good people throughout the countryside who have gone unnoticed [because of social status]. How could the disappearance of their memories not be lamentable?” It was precisely such a sentiment that pervaded the growth of popular culture in the late Chos
n.

13

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Nineteenth-Century Unrest

CHRONOLOGY

1811–12	Hong Ky ngnae Rebellion in P’y ngan province
1862	Uprisings in southern Korea, beginning in Chinju
1866	Final mass persecution of Catholics
1866	Attack and destruction of the General Sherman
1866	Attack by a French expedition off Kanghwa Island
1871	Attack by an armada of American marines off Kanghwa Island
1876	Signing of the Treaty of Kanghwa, opening of trade relations with Japan
1880	First in a series of organizational reforms in the Korean central government

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN MERCHANT SHIP, THE GENERAL SHERMAN, 1866

In the summer of 1866, residents of Pyongyang saw something very strange in the middle of the Taedong River: a black, iron-clad merchant steamship, with cannons, carrying mostly Chinese and Malay sailors but headed by a few pale-faced men. This American ship, called the “General Sherman” in honor of a union commander in the recent American civil war, had become stuck on a sandbar in the middle of the river. Impatient with the progress of negotiations regarding their demands for trade, the officers of the ship began firing on the shore and even abducted a Korean negotiating official. Soon, the order from the authorities came down to attack the vessel, and after a few days of fighting, Korean soldiers managed to set the ship afire. The crew members who swam to shore were all killed. The Pyongyang governor who directed the attack was none other than senior high official Pak Kyusu, grandson of
the famed eighteenth-century scholar-official Pak Chiw
n. As it turned out, the
General Sherman
was not simply a wandering intruder, but rather the harbinger of an ominous phenomenon. It marked the onset of imperialism, a force that had already engulfed China and induced great internal disruption in Japan, and would soon push Korea onto the currents of a new world order. Within a month, in fact, Korea would be attacked again, this time from French forces.

The arrival of imperialism, and all that it implied for Korea’s existence as a nation and state, dominates historical consideration of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It marked the beginning of Korea’s unwitting entrance into the cutthroat system of competing nation states that would eventually strip the country of its autonomy. While imperialism ushered in the transition to the modern era, however, significant internally driven upheavals also proved essential to this process. Both sets of developments also stimulated, however, the rise of a concerted reform movement that questioned almost every aspect of Korean society and eventually led to the formal “opening” of the country through the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. Pak Kyusu, the Pyongyang governor at the time of the
General Sherman
incident, found himself in the middle of several seminal moments of this period. His role in guiding the government through the winds of change, like the events of the era as a whole, complicates any easy judgment on the nineteenth century, which has long been dominated in historical memory by perceptions of decay and decline.