The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  My father-in-law the king was suspected of gaining the throne through fratricide. His brother, King Kyŏngjong, was a man weak of mind and body, and, after a brief rule, he died, and Yŏngjo succeeded. Foul play was suspected, and many rumours circulated. This was ten years before I was born, but the rumours did not die away – they multiplied. My slave Pongnyŏ, who cared for me as a baby, and who came to the palace with me when I was married, was full of gossip about these old scandals. She loved to frighten me with her tales. Some said the feeble-minded king had been bewitched, and had died through the black arts – by powdered bones, by incantations, and by mystic writings on eaves and lintels. Others said that his garments had been treated with the venom of snakes. One story held that a eunuch had poured a noxious ointment of henbane and mandrake into his ear, as he lay sleeping in the royal arbour. But the most popular version was the one in which Prince Yŏngjo had sent his brother a dish of poisoned mushrooms. The king tasted them, praised them, went into a spasm, and died within the hour. And so Yŏngjo gained the throne. That was the version that Pongnyŏ liked best, though she could never offer any first-hand evidence for it.

  I wonder what gossip she spread about me. She lived to a great age, and she had seen much and no doubt guessed at more.

  At times of strife or uncertainty, the poisoned mushrooms and the accusation of fratricide were sure to surface again. King Yŏngjo was always in fear of threats to the legitimacy of his rule. Our country has a long history of such scandals. We are not unique in this. I now know that all monarchies in all countries produce scandals of succession and murmurs of conspiracy and murder. Against this poisonous backdrop of gossip and innuendo and occasional outright denunciation, we attempted to survive, and to appear virtuous. Later accounts of our country describe this century, the eighteenth century, as a period of peace and prosperity, and it is true that King Yŏngjo initiated many reforms, but it was not peaceful to me and mine, as you shall hear.

  My husband and I were ten years old when we were married in 1744. We were children, and we had no say in that matter – or in any matter. We were fifteen when the marriage was consummated. This was in the first month of the year 1749.

  I cannot remember the marriage ceremony well, though I do recall that my mother looked magnificent, in her high wig and her rich and courtly robe with a lemon-yellow top beneath a violet overjacket. I cannot remember clearly what I wore. I was sick with fear that I might make a false step. I have to say that my father-in-law the king was kind and indulgent to me at this stage of my young life: on this point my subsequent testimony, however diplomatic and indeed obsequious in intent, has not lied. I do not know why, but he seemed to favour me and to wish me well, and he encouraged me when terror overcame me. I was often speechless, often faint. He spoke to me gently, and gave me his advice about etiquette and court behaviour. I wonder, now, if he did not, in fact, prefer women to men. He was very fond of some of his seven daughters, particularly of the princesses Hwap’yŏng (his third daughter) and Hwawan, who was three years younger than his only son, Sado. Perhaps from Sado’s birth onwards the king saw my husband as a rival, as a potential parricide. Necessary though that birth was, for the survival of the dynasty, maybe he resented it. All fathers find a rival in a son. Maybe that is why we talk so much of filial piety, in an effort to restrain our natural impulses towards parent-murder.

  King Yŏngjo was a strange man, a complex character. He was a powerful monarch, known as a reformer, but there was something vacillating and at times hysterical about him, something almost effeminate. I remember that he spoke to me about intimate details that shocked and surprised me. Never, he said to me when I was yet a child, a pre-pubertal child, never leave traces of red cosmetic on a white cloth. Keep your linen white. Men do not like to see the red smear, he told me. Do not let men see your artifice. It seemed a curious matter of concern for so great a monarch, and I was disturbed by his mentioning it. I still think it would have been more fitting for one of the three Queenly Majesties, my mother-in-law Lady SŏnhŬi, or the Dowager Queen Inwŏn, or even the king’s first wife, Queen Chŏngsŏng, to have spoken to me about these things. I do not know why he took it upon himself. His words shamed and embarrassed me.

  I now think, with the benefit of maturity and an afterlife, and in light of my readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropological and psychoanalytical literature, that he was speaking of men’s fear of menstrual blood. But did he know that? Did anyone, at that time, know that? I think not.

  How eagerly we women may watch for the smear of blood. And how, at times, we, too, may fear to see it.

  The king also warned me to be wary at court. He said I should pretend not to see some of the things that I saw. However strange I found them, I should ignore them. He did not say what these things were. It was a good and useful warning.

  But he was also generous to me, in many ways, and gave me some lavish and delightful gifts. How I loved the eight-panelled painted paper hwajo-do screen that was installed at his command in my apartment in the Detached Palace. This fleurs-et-oiseaux screen was of a subject and style considered traditional for the lady’s chamber, but it was of extraordinarily beautiful and delicate workmanship and muted subtlety of colouring, and I would gaze at it, entranced, for hours on end. It portrayed slightly stylized but familiar birds, in an idealized landscape of small rocks, slender flowering peach trees, pines, peonies, vines and ripe pomegranates; in the foreground and middle ground of two of the panels, plump spotted carp floated amongst ducks and herons. The soft tones were predominantly green and brown and rose and plum, against a natural ochre-brown background, though in my favourite panel a family of mandarin ducks, symbols of domestic happiness, took on a lighter blue-green as they swam amidst a bed of flowering lotus. It was a happy family – a mother bird, a father bird, and three ducklings, above whose heads fluttered two little blue birds of happiness.

  When we were little, the Crown Prince and I played games together. We played, like the children that we were. Prince Sado had toy soldiers and toy armies, and I had little toy horses to ride, as well as dolls and kites and shuttlecocks. Many gifts had been lavished upon him, perhaps unwisely, by the ladies-in-waiting of his late aunt, the widow of the late king, that king who was or was not killed by the poisoned mushrooms. The Crown Prince was much indulged – too much indulged – by the late king’s faction. The palace matron, Lady Han, in particular, had encouraged him in his love of military games: she was good with her hands, and she made him swords and scimitars and bows and arrows of wood and paper. She also invented an all-too-thrilling game in which young ladies-in-waiting would hide behind screens and doors, then leap out at him, brandishing their paper weapons and crying martial cries. Naturally, he was enchanted by this sport, and at the time, when he described it to me when I was a child, I saw no harm in it. It was only later that I began to see its dangers. His father and mother had been remote and cold towards him, and had much neglected him during his boyhood, rarely visiting the nursery quarters. The prince had needed some boyish comforts. This is how I saw it, when I was younger.

  Lady Han had been dismissed from her post two or three years before our betrothal because the king and Lady SŏnhŬi seemed at last to have become aware that her influence was unhealthy. But the damage was already done. The first seven years of life are the important ones, as I believe the Jesuits say.

  When the revered sage Mencius was a little boy, he played at funerals. His mother did not approve, and took steps to divert him from these morbid preoccupations. She was quite right not to approve, in my view. She was a more attentive mother to her son than the Lady SŏnhŬi was to my husband.

  Although our lives were largely separate, some hours of contact were permitted to my betrothed and me, and we, too, played military games and fought little campaigns on the schoolroom floor. I think these contacts were against the strict etiquette of the court, but nevertheless they took place. Many things took place that were not in the rule book. There were ma
ny blind eyes at court.

  These, too, were exciting and at times feverish games. The prince would rescue me from imaginary rival factions and carry me safely on his back, piggyback style, to his kingdom. I have to admit that I loved this game. I clasped him tightly round his waist with my legs. In ‘real life’, my family, the Hong family, was of the Noron faction of the Old Doctrine, which had long been in conflict with the Soron faction of the Young Doctrine, but in our game the crown prince and I made up other, more poetic names – I was of the Crimson Petal faction; my enemies were of the Black Bough. Occasionally the crown prince would take on the role of one of the enemy, and he would pretend to capture and then to torture me. He invented ingenious tortures of a pre-pubertal sexual nature, and I willingly complied. He would pretend to bind me fast, with silk sashes, and, while I was thus bound, he would caress me through my garments and insult me with mild abuse. Then he would make me kneel and lift my skirts, and caress me beneath my garments. Then he would pretend to behead me – our kingdom, alas, was only too familiar with beheadings.

  These were forbidden games, and we would cease from them abruptly when interrupted. We were spied upon both overtly and covertly for most of our young lives. But he was the Crown Prince, and I was to be the queen, and we were married, so we were permitted some licence, and some private time together. My most intimate servant, Pongnyŏ, who had been with me since my birth, would occasionally turn a blind eye to our activities and let us frolic unseen. Pongnyŏ was only a slave, though she became my lady-in-waiting, and was many years later, after the tragedy, elevated to the rank of palace matron. In those early years of my marriage, those unconsummated years, she was my constant attendant. Another of my early attendants was Aji, the wet nurse who had breastfed me as a baby at my maternal home. She came with me also to the marriage pavilion. She, too, was discreet. Aji and Pongnyŏ tried to shelter me and the Crown Prince, and to prepare us for the ordeals ahead. Both lived to old age. Both outlived the Crown Prince.

  I was to be the Red Queen. In play, the Crown Prince used to call me his ‘little Red Queen’. He liked my red silk skirt. I liked the name he gave me. I was vain and I was theatrical, and I was fond of my status when I was a little girl.

  The Crown Prince played with my younger brothers, too – those two little brothers who were so similar in feature and so close in age that some mistook them for twins. They enjoyed visiting the palace, though they always had to be on guard. My husband, who was not much older than them, used to tease them and encourage them to overstep the invisible mark that proclaimed him as a prince and them as commoners. They were cautious about his overtures, and careful not to be tempted into overfamiliarity. They were right to be cautious. The field around the prince was red with danger.

  His name was Prince Sado. I will use this name because you will remember it, and because it is the name by which history and his people remember him, though in fact it was conferred upon him posthumously. During Prince Sado’s lifetime, he had many names, reflecting his somewhat capriciously changing status. Prince Changhon was the best known of these, but Sado is the name that has endured. Korean nomenclature in the royal and affined families was very complicated. The names of the princesses his sisters are confusing to the Western eye, for they all begin with the letter H, and are difficult to pronounce, but Sado’s posthumous name is easy to remember. It signifies mourning. A sad name, for one who is mourned.

  Prince Sado’s name, as I discovered long after his death and mine, also has a quite arbitrary connection with the name of the Marquis de Sade, and of the derivative noun, ‘sadism’. It is a meaningless and fortuitous connection, and as far as I know neither the Marquis de Sade nor Count Sacher-Masoch (who also was strangely obsessed with clothing) knew of the existence of the kingdom of Korea (or Corea, or Corée), let alone of the sufferings of my husband. Yet the connection provides a useful aide-mémoire.

  So, remember Prince Sado. And remember his innocence. He was a child when we played these games of beheadings. He had not yet earned his title. He had not yet become the Prince of Mournful Thoughts, the Prince of the Coffin.

  I have no name, and I have many names. I am a nameless woman. My true name is unknown to history. I am famous, but nameless. And I was never a queen in my lifetime, red or otherwise. I became a queen after my death. So much happens after death.

  Sado told me once that he had thought my genitals would look like the udder of a cow, with four teats and four nipples. He was relieved by their neat simplicity, when he stole these covert, excited glances at them. Of course, in those times, I had no breasts. I was flat, and smooth of skin.

  Children find the human body confusing. Even ‘liberated’ and well-informed children in the twenty-first century find the human body confusing. Even children reared naked in villages of baked earth find the human body confusing, and are shocked by the drama of the events, both natural and unnatural, that inevitably overtake it. Small wonder, then, that the Crown Prince and I, so swathed and so enveloped in such rich symbolic fabrics, should have had false images of what is hidden away. The laws governing physical contact between the sexes were, in a Confucian culture, very strict and very complex. Contact between the sexes, except within marriage and amongst close kin, was in theory forbidden, though of course contacts took place. Rules are one thing, practice another. But in theory at least women took one path, men another, and those paths should never cross. There were many elegant and time-consuming debates at our court on small, not to say ridiculous, points of principle – for instance, was a man permitted to soil himself and pollute his kinswoman by holding out his hand to save his sister-in-law from drowning? This popular moral conundrum was not dissimilar from the predicament of the heroine of Bernardin de St Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie, one of the sensational successes published in Europe during my lifetime, though of course we in Korea knew nothing of this small volume. In this curious work, the virtuous heroine Virginie refuses to undress to save herself from shipwreck, and thus drowns within sight of shore and of her lover. Clothing has much to answer for.

  The colour red was the royal colour of Korea. (Yellow, we were told, was the colour of the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven, and we were subservient to him.) King Yŏngjo, my father-in-law, a man not without vanity, considered that the king alone had the exclusive right to wear it, but by his reign the wearing of red robes had spread through the court. He attempted to forbid it, just as he attempted to forbid the wearing of costly and richly patterned Chinese silk, and high, elaborately braided wigs of false hair, but he failed. He was a man of strange contradictions, veering from vanity to frugality, from abstinence to drunkenness, from histrionic display to extreme self-denial and retreat. Maybe this is what monarchy inevitably does to the human spirit. But I prefer to think that he had a unique and peculiar character, which resulted in the unique and peculiar fate of his son. I do believe that character affects history. That is no longer a fashionable view, but those who have lived close to power, even if themselves powerless, as I was, tend to hold it. And we were a small country, where one man’s whims could affect many.

  Confucius said that a man should not wear scarlet at home. I do not know why he said that – maybe as a passing joke, who knows? – but that, too, became written on tablets of stone.

  I think men are afraid of blood, although they are attracted to it. I think King Yŏngjo, as I have said, was afraid of menstrual blood, though he did not know it. I remember that as a child I was particularly anxious, not about menstruation, but about excretion. Even when I grew older it seemed to me strange that the organs of excrement and the organs of procreation should be placed so close to one another. When I was little, I must confess that I had thought them identical – it was small relief to me to learn that they were so narrowly divided. It is not so, I know now, with all species. May I be permitted to say that I find the human body not elegantly designed? We pay a high price for our higher intelligence. Our nearest relations, the apes, are not lovely either. They pa
rody our defects, and we know that, though we are reluctant to admit it. I prefer fish, or birds, or flowers.

  Like many children, I thought that women gave birth through the navel. This was no stranger a notion to me than my little husband’s view that my genitals should resemble the udder of a cow. As for the penis – I thought it unsightly, asymmetrical. I did not like the way it flopped to one side or to the other. At least a woman’s body could be cut into two neat halves. Sliced, like an apple.

  You might be able to appreciate my childish ignorance better if you were to look at the illuminated manuscripts illustrating the court ceremonies of the period. Many of these survive, though I am informed that not all have yet been traced. No doubt some have perished, but I believe more will be recovered in time. Our country was much plundered, much invaded. I have sent my envoy to re-examine the manuscript commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the consummation of my marriage to Crown Prince Sado: this grand and lavish celebration took place in the kisa year of 1809, when I was seventy-five years old, and my husband was long dead and buried (and indeed exhumed and reburied). With hands gloved in white cotton, my ghostly representative turned the pages of this valuable and handsome volume, beneath the sharp eyes of its custodians. You do not have to go all the way to Korea to see this manuscript, for, like the Elgin Marbles, it has come to rest in the British Museum in London, via a curious route involving a French admiral and a French bakery.

  (I have discovered that it was purchased from the French by the British in 1891. I wonder if it will ever be restored to its native land? Perhaps I could make a nuisance of myself by persuading my envoy to agitate for its return? What right had the French then or the British now to this Korean artefact? Personally, I think that such narrowly nationalistic attitudes towards such rightly treasured artefacts are misguided, but it would be easy to play devil’s advocate and make an inconveniently plausible case for the manuscript’s return.)