Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea by Ksenia Chizhova (introduction)

K S E N I A C H I Z H O VA

KINSHIP NOVELS of Early Modern KOREA Between Genealogical Time and the

Domestic Everyday

Introduction

The Lineage and the Novel in Chosŏn Korea, 1392–1910

Vernacular Korean lineage novels (kamun sosŏl ) begin in exactly the same way. These texts, which elaborate the intricacies of the kinship system of late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), open with the unveiling of the genealogical subject— an emotional self socialized within the structures of prescriptive kinship. Unfolding the genealogical context of the lineages they center on, these novels connect the familial and the political: the hereditary moral excellence of the lineage members and the security of the dynastic royal house, which they serve. The status attributes—proximity to the affairs of the court and absolute dedication to moral virtue— are pinned to the figure of a notable ancestor:

During the reign of Yŏngjong[1] [Ch. Yingzong, r. 1427–1464] of the Great Ming, the Imperial Grand Mentor (K. hwang t’aebu, Ch. huang t’aifu ), the Grand Secretary (K. sugangno, Ch. shoukolao

) Lord Chin’guk Chŏng Han’s courtesy name was Kyewŏn, and his nom de plume was Munch’ŏng. He was the descendant of Songhyŏn, Master Myŏngdo. This glorious lineage (sŏngmun ) stretches to the Yuan dynasty [1271–1368], when the lineage descendants distinguished themselves from the ordinary folk: they loved learning and read books, possessed benevolence, wisdom, filiality, and brotherly love. Their virtues and sagely conduct were never marred by the ways of the world. With no desire for worldly fame, they were

inconspicuous as dust that covers all four directions. After T’aejo of Ming [Ch. Taizu, r. 1368–1398] unified the realm, and all under heaven came together, they did not leave their dwellings in deep mountains and remote abodes, thinking wealth to be no more than grass and dust. But when it came to the sagacious reign of Emperor Mun [Ch. Wendi/Yongle, r. 1402–1424], in his quest for virtuous officials immediately after enthronement, the emperor followed the examples of King Mun (Ch. King Wen), who finally met Yŏ Sang (Ch. Lu Shang/Jiang Ziya)[2], and Yu Bi’s [Ch. Liu Bei] three-time visitation to the grass- thatched cottage.[3] Therefore, he recruited Lord Munch’ŏng [Chŏng Han] into his service and treated him with utmost decorum so that no one dared turn against him. Lord Munch’ŏng’s loyalty to his sovereign and ability and virtue in all manners of conduct were unparalleled in the world.4

Like many other Chos ŏn- dynasty novels, The Pledge at the Banquet of Moon- Gazing Pavilion (Wanw ŏ l hoemaeng yŏ n ) is set in Ming China but unmistakably elaborates Korean historical realities. The Pledge begins with an account of the Chŏng lineage. In just a few lines, we learn all we need to know about the lineage’s distinctness from those who seek power and recognition and its intimate connection with the emperor, who seeks the wise council of the patriarch Chŏng Han.5

Notably, however, the towering figure of the patriarch is never at the center of a lineage novel’s narrative. The patriarch hovers above the described events: he presides over family banquets, issues wise words of warning, and dispenses punishment for his especially unruly children. Together with the earlier generations of the lineage, signaled in the genealogical opening, the patriarch remains on the narrative horizon, never directly involved in the protagonists’ adventures, passions, and actings out. The patriarch is a living, even if formal link between the accumulated ancestral virtues, which constitute a social and familial legacy and define the structure of kinship obligation, and the lives of the young lineage members, whose journey through life is charted by their predecessors’ example.

The genealogical subject 6 foregrounded in the lineage novel embodies the process of socialization of the emotional self through the structures of patrilineal kinship. This book contends that the lineage novel is integral to our understanding of the Chosŏn kinship system, which determined the

aspects of political, social, and cultural life of the period. In the lineage novel, the genealogy embodies the incontestable kinship values embedded in the prescriptive social positions of patriarch, mother and child, husband and wife, step-parents and stepchildren, father-in-law and son-in-law. A person’s correct fulfillment of these roles, which remain unchanged from generation to generation, guarantees domestic harmony and secures the smooth functioning of society and the state, conceived— in the lineage novel and in the political ideology of late Chos ŏn— as a moral project of bringing correct order to human relationships. The genealogical opening of the lineage novel is matched by the genealogical closure, which enumerates the generations of the lineage that spring forth after the novel’s narrative reaches conclusion. This generational framework establishes the timelessness and stability of kinship.

Lineage novels appeared on the literary stage just as the Korean patrilineal system was taking shape in the late seventeenth century and continued to circulate until the first decades of the twentieth century. The Confucian vision that underlies the Chos ŏn kinship system “naturalizes the family as the site in which ethics are established.” 7 In this moral scheme, familial bonds constitute the essential matrix for social architecture and emotional performance, stretching outward to the totality of social interactions. The hierarchy and affection of the father– son bond serves as a model for the relationship between ruler and subject. The husband–wife bond is fundamental for gender politics, mandating separate realms of activity and identity— domestic and public— to men and women. The Confucian moral framework that traveled from China to Korea was not just a philosophical system but also a practical tool of interstate relations during the long- standing alliance with China, a framework for institutional construction, and a foundation for political culture. The kinship system that took the form of patrilineal lineage in the late seventeenth century was key to the proliferation of Confucian ethics at the everyday level; the Chos ŏn elites ( yangban ) used these precepts to buttress their social privilege, negotiating Confucian ideals against the configurations of Korea’s local social and cultural terrain.

Martina Deuchler’s principal works on the history of Korean kinship—The Confucian Transformation of Korea and Under the Ancestors’ Eyes — trace the interlinked development and proliferation of kinship ideology and the Confucian culture that during the Chos ŏn dynasty acquired a distinctive Korean interpretation and interacted with local

ways of life. 8 As Deuchler details, lineage in Chos ŏn “emerged above all as [a] social and ritual entit[y] that fused agnatic kinsmen into groups for worshipping their ancestors. . . . By celebrating their ancestors in grand ritual displays in front of graves, in domestic shrines, and in memorial halls, the lineage members invoked ancestral blessings and put themselves under ancestral protection. A lineage lived literally ‘under the eyes of its ancestors.’ ” 9

Kinship ideology was intimately linked with the Chosŏn state’s project of ordering society according to the models outlined in the Confucian classics. This moral vision of the state became the source of ascriptive empowerment for Chos ŏn elites, who aspired to be the most upright moralists. The fleshing out of the patriline transfigured the social structure formed during the preceding Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). The changes largely concerned the lives of elites, and their effect on women was especially dramatic. During the Koryŏ dynasty and early Chosŏn period, women were free to divorce, inherit property, and reside in their natal households after marriage. Starting in the late seventeenth century, however, elite women began to lose these social freedoms,10 and their lives became enclosed in the domestic space of their husbands’ families, where their primary responsibilities included domestic work, household administration, filial service to parents-in-law, and child rearing. Although women could still petition the courts on behalf of family members,11 they no longer had legal and social autonomy, and their mobility outside home was restricted. These changes were intended to weaken women’s natal affiliations, which were further diluted by the lowering of the mourning grades for affinal kin. Patrilineal succession was secured by designating one primary consort as the legitimate mother of status- eligible issue. After more than two centuries of change, the patrilineal lineage system of Chos ŏn took shape in the late seventeenth century.12

The lineage structure was socially exclusive and hierarchical, and one’s kinship standing determined how— and often whether— one participated in the key aspects of social life: education and scholarship, officeholding, court politics, agriculture, burial practices, daily life in the rural society, and interaction with the variegated local population.13 Social histories of Chos ŏn convey an important lesson: kinship organization is the key to nearly all levels of social and cultural life of the period. Any discussion of Chosŏn Korea is incomplete without the knowledge of its kinship system, and the kinship system, as this manuscript contends, is not intelligible

without its aesthetic archive, which extends beyond ideological and institutional frameworks.

The populous domestic communities of Chosŏn Korea had a rigid structure. They embodied a moral, state- endorsed vision of idealized human bonds and regulated the exclusivity of the status system. Viewed from the perspective of institutions and ideology, the kinship system that emerged in seventeenth- century Chos ŏn Korea is understood in terms of patrilineality, primogeniture, virilocal marriage, and ancestor worship, all of which are elaborated in some detail at different points in this book. But kinship is what people do in their everyday life, how they view the world, and how they perceive the meaning and ground of social relations. How did people of Chosŏn do kinship? And how can we access its everyday affective content from the vantage point of the twenty-first century? This book addresses the question of Chosŏn kinship from the perspective of nascent affective responses to established ideological structures by tracing the structures of feelings embodied in the aesthetic archive of kinship, conceived dynamically but centered on the lineage novel.

Framed by a genealogical, multigenerational structure, the gist of the lineage novel is constituted by plots of unruly feelings, which follow the struggles of young protagonists with kinship norms. Feelings (K. ch ŏng ; Ch. qing ) in the lineage novel are the materials of social cohesion and intelligibility. When aligned with the objective rules of moral conduct (K. kong ; Ch. gong ), feelings enable the sincere (K. sŏ ng ; Ch. cheng ) performance of prescribed relationships. Transformed into private selfish (K. sa ; Ch. si ) urges, feelings threaten to undermine the smooth relational fabric. Performed, exteriorized emotions constitute the system of social intelligibility, within which unruly, selfish feelings mark the most problematic junctures of kinship. This tension between objective rules and private feelings constitutes the ground for the articulation of genealogical subjectivity that implies negotiation and the coming to terms with the norms of kinship that are foundational to social order.14 Lineage novels, however, show that the plots of private, unruly emotions are not just impediments to social harmony; indeed, they are integral to personal life stories. The lineage novel is in this way a discursive site where the genealogical subject of patrilineal kinship is articulated from a perspective that affirms the significance of private emotions.

The genealogical resolution of lineage novels creates a teleological horizon of monumental time, which ultimately mandates the sincere

convergence of the person with the social norm. The narratives of rebellion as socialization—the microcosm of the protagonists’ personal life stories— create a temporizing opening in the monumental fixity of the timeless lineage structure. By introducing the private life history— a process of contestation and negotiation of the social norm—the lineage novel problematizes the norms of kinship but ultimately endorses them as the valid ethical form of social life. The genealogical and the private temporalities not only coexist on the pages of the lineage novel but are inseparable.

More than a genre study, this book uses the aesthetic archive centered on the lineage novel in a historical sense as a site that illuminates socially productive notions of literacy, gender roles, and boundaries of domestic culture while also revealing the imaginative ordering of the contemporary historical milieu. Chosŏn kinship was as much a textual as a practical reality because social status was derived from cultural capital and public memory. Moving away from ideological and legal formulations of kinship, this analysis pays attention to the genres that focused on the domestic life. These genres reveal the domestic everydayness that remained outside the purview of public- oriented kinship textuality.

Lineage novels are vernacular Korean texts transcribed by elite women and circulated through kinship networks. Neither the authors nor the details of the manuscripts’ circulation are known, which means the history of the lineage novel can be conveyed only in broad brushstrokes. Dozens of titles and thousands of surviving manuscript volumes capture the epic of Chosŏn kinship life.

The lineage novel captures the structures of feelings that embedded the ritual, economic, and moral imperatives of Chos ŏn kinship in a life world, a space for living. This aesthetic archive provides a glimpse of the symbolic dimension of kinship that guided and embodied the affective itineraries of men and women who navigated this system. It illuminates what Lauren Berlant has called “the conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life.”15 By capturing the structures of feelings,16 the “method[s] of comprehending reality,”17 and the “imaginary solutions to existing social contradictions,”18 this aesthetic archive prompts us to rethink the space of kinship in terms of affective contours, domestic intimacies, and the centrality of women’s bodies, work, and writing for the operations of the domestic realm. Centering kinship textuality on the lineage novel allows this book to explore the women- centered, domestic, vernacular Korean culture of the Chosŏn elites; connecting the

lineage novel to other genres of kinship writing, such as funerary texts and family tales, opens up the trajectories and exchanges that shaped the centuries of the lineage novel’s history. Several preliminary highlights arise from the study of the aesthetics of Chosŏn kinship life. First of all, the historical dimension of Chos ŏn kinship captured in lineage novels draws attention to the misalignment between blood-based filiation and the moral vision of human bonds that conceives them as transposable.19 Two fundamental but problematic relationships— between father-in-law and son-in-law as well as between stepmother and stepson— are uniquely elaborated in the lineage novel and rarely mentioned elsewhere in Chos ŏn- dynasty sources. Marriage required the redirection of a woman’s allegiance from natal family to in-law family and a transfer of her obedience from father to husband. Lineage novels show how this relocation of patriarchal authority, which hinged on a woman’s transition from her status as daughter to that of wife, was fraught with contradiction. Although adoption was meant to guarantee the uninterrupted succession of title and property in families that failed to produce a male heir, it nevertheless resulted in a relationship that was not built on the foundations of “natural,” blood- based affinity. In this context, it is important to note that lineage novels are to a large extent preoccupied with reconciling the moral vision of kinship with the tenacity of “feelings of flesh and blood” (kolyuk chi ch ŏ ng ) that did not easily yield to ethical reformulation. 20

Second, as the quintessence of women- centered elite vernacular Korean culture, the lineage novel allows us a glimpse of the domestic culture of the time. Lineage novels’ texts feature encyclopedic accounts of domestic life cycles and relationships as well as vivid presentations of bedroom scenes, childhood, domestic gatherings, and intimate conversations. Of course, these accounts are not factual; rather, they are imaginative renderings of domestic life. But the massive span of lineage novels allows these texts to delve into the minutest gestures of domestic intimacy; although private emotions in these texts are placed on the horizon of kinship obligation, they are recognized as objectively conditioned and inalienable. Lineage novels’ manuscripts, too, capture the sentimental fabric of kinship. Carefully transmitted through generations, these manuscripts are mementoes of deceased women’s brushwork, treasured by descendants for their lasting affective value.

Third, the lineage novel captures the aestheticization of vernacular Korean writing and the emergence of early modern vernacular Korean

fictional prose, 21 fueled by the narrative desire of kinship. After the promulgation of vernacular Korean script in the mid– fifteenth century, its use remained mostly functional until the late seventeenth century, when elite women appropriated vernacular Korean culture as the domain of their learning and creativity. The lineage novel marks the emergence of elite vernacular Korean literary tradition, which predates the popularization of vernacular Korean fictional prose among broader audiences in the eighteenth century. The emergence of early modern Korean fictional prose was fueled by the intense narrative desire produced by the Korean kinship system, which directed creative energy toward the elaboration of its main premises. The structural mirroring of the norms and aesthetics of kinship allowed lineage novels to grow like trees as they traced the ever- expanding generations of the central lineage. These kinship origins of early modern Korean fictional prose, in turn, offer a suggestive angle upon the global history of the novel.

The Novel in the Early Modern World

The emergence of the lineage novel in the late seventeenth century was coeval not only with the formulation of the Chosŏn patrilineal kinship system but also with the so- called rise of the novel— a global proliferation of fictional prose. No longer understood as the mirror image of European literary modernity, the global story of fictional realism receives a unique elaboration in a recent study by Ning Ma. In The Age of Silver, adopting an approach of “anthropocenic realism,” Ma links the development of fictional realism in England, Spain, China, and Japan to the global flows of silver from Spanish colonies in South America to the Pacific trade network from the 1500s to the 1800s. Her approach disenchants and historicizes the central analytical terms developed by scholars of European fiction and uncovers a broader aesthetic movement from epic to biographical narrative facilitated within a network of horizontal monetary connections that disaggregated the junctures between state, society, and the person in different corners of the world.

The novel’s “feminization” and “interiorization,” Ma contends, register the unmooring of traditional hierarchies by the dynamic of money flows.22 The prominence of female audiences, protagonists, and manuscript makers in the history of the lineage novel’s development as well as its focus

“Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea is a methodologically brilliant introduction to Korean lineage novels and the domestic worlds in which they were produced and consumed. Written as women were becoming ever more constrained by patriarchal kinship ideals, lineage novels are a rich archive of the often unruly emotional responses to the affective restructuring of the domestic realm.” maram epstein, author of Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late-Imperial Chinese Fiction

“Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea sets an admirable standard for emerging studies of premodern Korean literature with its in-depth historical analysis, theoretical sophistication, and measured, clear writing style.”

sunyoung park , author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945

“This book offers a captivating story about the rise and fall of the lineage novel, walking us through the ways in which the kinship feelings and practices of elite families cast not only the form and content of this genre but also its production and circulation. Compelling testimony of how our deep understanding of history can help us appreciate the aesthetics of bygone days and why literature still matters.” yoon sun yang , author of From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea

“In this sweeping account of the political, social, and cultural life of seventeenth- to early twentieth-century Korea, Ksenia Chizhova provocatively asks, How did Koreans do kinship? Her fascinating answers offer glimpses into the unruly emotions of everyday life and the oft-tumultuous relations between genders and generations. This is early modern Korea as never before seen and literary history at its best.” andre schmid , author of Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919

“Eloquent, detailed, and original, this book’s account of the lineage trope, vernacular writing, gender, and readership sheds new light on the early modern novel in East Asian literary history.” ning ma , author of The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West ksenia chizhova is assistant professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University.

premodern east asia: new horizons

Cover image: Kim Hongdo Illustrations of Hong I-sang’s Life, one of the eight panels from silk folding screen, courtesy of the National Museum of Korea

Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

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