The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng (Hanjungnok)

Lady Hyegyŏng married the Crown Prince of Korea in 1744, when she was nine years old.

She watched Prince Sado lose his mind, dropping his clothes at random and slaying servants without cause.

She heard the king plot to kill his inconvenient heir as slowly and strangely as possible while his grandson begged for his life.

And as a widow she became the eye of a political maelstrom that destroyed her family — the family she had brought to power by dint of being crown princess.

The Hanjungnok, or “Records in Silence,” is the memoir of a Korean princess known as Lady Hyegyŏng (1735-1815 CE). It remains a classic in contemporary Korea and one of the few pre-modern memoirs by an East Asian woman of life beyond the domestic sphere, according to translator JaHyun Kim Haboush.

The daughter of a well-connected scholar, Lady Hyegyŏng claims to have written her memoirs to put rumors to rest about her husband’s death.

In doing so, she dances a strange politico-cultural dance. She shies from accusing the royal family of fault, either the king who killed his son or the son who was, by her account, a homicidal maniac. And so she describes a precocious Crown Prince who was separated from his busy parents and led astray by devious servants. Too intimidated to show his intelligence, he was despised by his father as a dull child. Frustration and dissipation led in turn to madness.

The plot is Shakespearean in its vision of mad princes, scheming queens, and heirs on the rise. The structure of the memoir further complicates matters: it’s in five parts written at different times for different audiences, and depending on the order of the translation, one reads veiled references to “the incident” long before Lady Hyegyŏng lays it out scene by scene.

The Hanjungnok is as much a defense of different parties in the incident as it is a memoir. Lady Hyegyŏng finds herself defending her own failure to follow her husband in death in favor of raising their son, who would become king.

For the most part, she remains an outsider who denies her right as a woman to discuss politics. This is why a translation with a solid introduction and good footnotes is invaluable for understanding the context of the work, such as why the manner of Prince Sado’s death had to be bloodless. The Haboush translation (University of California Press, 1996) offers some intriguing insights into the mores of the Choson period, questions of genre and 18th-century views on madness and criminality.

See also:

• Post by Chris Miller about Hanjungnok on the blog Weekend Reading
• The Red Queen (2004) by Margaret Drabble, a novel about a British scholar who discovers a personal connection to Lady Hyegyŏng