The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  Looking at these images through my envoy’s modern eyes brought back to me many memories of formal court life, and of the more intimate scene of my defloration. My father-in-law would not have liked the sight of the red blood on the pale sheets of the nuptial bed, although the shedding of this blood signified the conception of an heir.

  King Yŏngjo was fastidious and asthmatic, and at times he vacillated. But despite these weaknesses he had a strong will, and, unlike his son and his grandson, he lived to a venerable age. His was one of the longest reigns of any monarch in the history of the world.

  I digress. I was attempting to recapture that vanished world of ceremony, but I find in myself an understandable reluctance to recall the day of the consummation. Oh, I had been well instructed. I knew my fate. The matron of my bedchamber had herself explored my body in preparation. She said that it would ease the passage. She was a sadist and a liar. I think she was perverted. I do not think these explorations were customary, as she claimed they were. I think they gratified her in some manner. But I was at her mercy. I knew no better. I submitted. As children do.

  It would have been better to have left the task to Sado himself, for in those early days he was not without gentleness and ardour. I think, in those early days, he liked me.

  The illustrated manuscript in the British Museum, captured from its hiding place by Admiral Rozé, shows in intricate documentary detail the grandeur and the expense of the reverence which my grandson the king paid to me, the survivor, the matriarch. You can see the screens of crimson lacquer; you can see the pale green roof ornaments; you can see the billowing cream silk canopies; you can see the hangings of vast pink painted peonies; you can see the serried ranks of courtiers in robes of carmine and sage green and peacock blue. You can see the gifts displayed upon tables, and the women with their parasols and their fans, and their intricate and elegant hair ornaments standing proudly a foot high. You can see the officials prostrated low upon woven sedge mats. There are the candlesticks and the flags and the pennants and the candles and the incense stands. There is the great orchestra, and the musicians with all their instruments – the drums, the bronze bells, the stone chimes, the iron chimes, the pipes and the flutes and the triangles and the ivory clappers. And there is my throne, the elegant delicate silver throne, with its frame of red lacquered wood.

  (Red lacquer was once a royal prerogative, though by this time the merchant classes were beginning to appropriate it, despite the king’s objections. Change was coming, even to our allegedly frozen land.)

  The silver throne is empty. I am not depicted. I am not there. I have no name, and I am not there. It was forbidden to depict me. No queen could ever sit for a male painter. No men could dance before the queen, and the musicians who played in the inner court to the queen were blind – just as, in your day, I am told that only blind masseurs may obtain a licence to practise traditional massage in Korea. There were many absences, many prohibitions. Some linger after death.

  But although my portrait could not be included in this empty scene, although no image of me at that ceremony or at any other ceremony survives, although my very names have perished, I was there. In that year, in the kisa year, in 1809, at the age of seventy-five, I was there. I was there for the presentations and for the dancing and the music and the speeches and the relays of banquets. They were in my honour. I sat immobile and with perfect decorum, with royal decorum, upon that slight throne. I received homage. How heavily weighed those elaborate and beautiful ornaments upon my head – the jade, the ivory, the blossoming and trembling sprays of jewels, the ebony combs. And as I sat there, through the long day of hardly tolerable ritual boredom and banqueting, I cast my mind back to those early days at court, when I was a little child, when I had to practise court behaviour. I rarely made a false step. I schooled myself towards perfection. I rose early, and rehearsed for hours in solitude, for I was afraid. Sixty years later, I remembered my husband in his childhood and that bodily consummation, so many decades ago. I sat on the throne and thought of him, so terribly tormented, so long dead, and now lying at last in a new city in his splendid shrine in state.

  I visited that splendid shrine, on another, earlier state occasion, when I was a mere sixty years old. It was one of the few journeys I made in my imprisoned and privileged life. I will come to that. That, too, was well recorded, well documented. I will return to that. I will try to send my envoy to that scene.

  As I have said, Prince Sado and I were married for five years before the consummation took place. It was five years of study for him, and of a different kind of study for me. We were both precocious, and precociously placed. He had been more fully exposed to high expectations than I. I had been allowed a little space of carefree childhood, in my early infancy, but he had been allowed none. From the moment of his birth, he had been watched over. His every gesture was attended, first by wet nurses, then by nurses, then by tutors. He was attended by slaves and eunuchs and ladies-in-waiting and spies. Every sign and sound he made was interpreted as a sign of his princely genius. If he pointed at a written character and made a noise, it was greeted with cries of approbation. If he scribbled a baby’s scrawl with a marker thrust into his childish fist, it was hailed as a prophecy, or as a miracle of the calligraphic arts. He was acclaimed as the most handsome, the most intelligent, the most robust, the most gifted of infants. His father the king, King Yŏngjo, disastrously doted upon him, looking to him to redress all the wrongs of the family, to make payment for all the crimes that he had himself committed. Having neglected him in his earliest years, he overcompensated in his later childhood. This was bad judgement.

  King Yŏngjo had waited long for his son’s birth, and he was forty-two when this male heir was born. He had lost his first son some seven years earlier, an event which had shaken the royal succession and caused rebellion, ferment, tortures, executions. Sado was destined to rescue the state from these divisions. He was to reconcile those deadly factions, the Noron and the Soron, and to bring in an era of Heavenly Peace. There was much rejoicing, too much rejoicing. Too much was expected of this baby. He was expected to right the wrongs of his dynasty. He was expected to clear his father’s name.

  The fratricidal crime of the poisoned mushrooms was never far from King Yŏngjo’s mind, although it had never been proved and was always denied. And in my view, I may now say openly, now that we are all dead, this crime had never been committed. My father-in-law King Yŏngjo had many faults, but I do not believe that he killed his brother. He lived to commit a crime far worse than that of fratricide, but I do not think he was responsible for the poisoned mushrooms.

  Prince Sado was praised and adored as a baby, and surrounded by sycophantic palace ladies who tended to his every whim, picking up his toys, fastening his trousers for him, tying his laces, washing his face for him, and waiting on him hand and foot. There was no discipline in those early years. (He always hated washing his own face.) But as he grew older, as I have said, too much was demanded of him. As he grew out of the charmed estate of infancy and into boyhood, faults were constantly found in him. Those talents that he had were overlooked. I remember the days when he used to enjoy painting, which was considered an appropriate royal occupation. (I believe it remains an acceptable occupation, in the surviving royal houses of the West.) Prince Sado had a true talent for painting and calligraphy, which our son and grandson inherited, but I believe that none of Prince Sado’s works survives. He had a gift. Although he painted military scenes with castles and forts and armies, he also liked to paint mountains and waterfalls. He was an admirer of the new ‘true view’ school of landscape painting, though there were few true views that he was able to see with his own eyes, so circumscribed were his movements in his early years. It is no wonder that he wished, as he grew older, for the freedom of travel.

  The claustrophobia of the court cannot be described. It was a closed world within a closed world. Sado wanted to see with his own eyes the Peony Peak, the Green Lotus Hermitage, the Magpie Br
idge, the Cold Jade Pavilion, the Hot Crystal Springs, the Diamond Mountains. The very names of the places enchanted him. He painted them from his imagination, as he painted bamboo and chrysanthemums from life. Later, he destroyed most of these works himself. He was a great destroyer. All that we remember of him now is his destructive madness, and the manner of his death.

  The curriculum of a student prince was punishing. Sado’s father, King Yŏngjo, had been through many years of what I would now call indoctrination: he had been obliged to spend many hours and many weeks and many months studying the works of Confucius and Mencius, and the histories of the Chinese and Korean dynasties, and who knows how many other canonical and fossilized texts. He had to learn by rote and to repeat the texts word for word, and was chided for any errors. Tutors watched over him, and coached him, and examined him, and official reports were written of every success and every failure. His son Prince Sado was drilled in the same hard school. Fathers like to force their own suffering upon their sons. Although quick of intelligence, Prince Sado found his studies a great strain. When he became flustered, when he stumbled in his recitations, his father would wheeze and rant at him. Sado developed a stammer at this time, and, when he stammered, his father would yell at him, ‘Spit it out, boy. Spit it out!’ This was not helpful.

  His father’s name gave him particular difficulty. He always stammered when he had to use his father’s name. Fortunately, there were many acceptable circumlocutions he could employ. But I noticed that he could not pronounce his father’s name.

  As I have said, our society was obsessed by examinations. As my father’s life bore witness, we idolized scholarship, even the dead hand of dead scholarship. Sado, as heir to the throne, was not compelled to ascend the scholarly ladder to achieve position, but study was nevertheless demanded of him, and his failures were harshly criticized. Sado was afraid of his father. As he grew older, he would delay the daily moment at which he had to confront his father. He would refuse to dress. He would hesitate over his choice of clothes, like a woman. His fear of clothing became a mania. This became well known. His violence towards his attire passed beyond joke and gossip, and into the realm of terror.

  I longed for red, and for many long years, as a widow, I wore white. Had I been born in modern times, were I living now, I might choose to explore the question of nakedness and dress. Of the body, and of clothing. I have now read and reread the globally disseminated Hebrew version of the sinfulness of nakedness – the story of how Adam and Eve saw that they were naked, and were ashamed – and I have compared it with other myths in other cultures. I consider that this matter has not been satisfactorily addressed. Yes, I sometimes think that, if I were to have another life on earth, I might choose to devote a few decades of it to the question of clothing and the perversions of clothing. My longing for a red silk skirt, Sado’s fear of the jade beads. The golden dragon robe, the black vest, the butcher’s hated bamboo hat with leather strings. How could these longings and fears have dug in so deep, with their white roots? How could they have caused so many deaths, of such innocent, lowly, harmless people? What are garments but the outer clothing of the spirit? And yet men have killed for them, and been cruelly abased by them.

  When I was mortal, I stole most of my learning from books translated into the vernacular. I learned han’gŭl early and easily, encouraged by my learned aunt. Han’gŭl was the ingenious and scientific phonetic alphabet so brilliantly devised six centuries ago, during the Golden Age of King Sejong. We did not call it by the name of ‘han’gŭl’, a name which was not given to it until the twentieth century, but we could all read it. It is much more accessible than classical Chinese, though that, too, I studied with some success. King Sejong did not, of course, create this script single-handed, but he was, I believe, personally responsible for appointing the committee of scholars who devised it, and to him goes the honour of the vision of a more widely accessible written language, which would not exclude the common people. (Careless accounts in tourist guides to our country credit King Sejong himself with the invention of the alphabet, just as, I note, North Korea now attributes the twentieth-century invention of massed dance notation to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, the son of the Eternal President, Kim Il Sung. I think King Sejong was a cleverer man and a better monarch than the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, but of course, I am a southerner, and I permit myself to retain some of my prejudices in death.)

  When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands upon. I stole learning from my clever young aunt, who was willing to teach me. I stole from Prince Sado, who in those early years was willing to talk to me about history and about literature and about the Confucian texts. I was an eager and a secret scholar. I stole and stored the scraps I thought I might need. Learning was not forbidden to women, but nor was it freely offered to them. I think, now, that my exemption from the masculine curriculum and the state examination system was a blessing in disguise: unlike my husband, I was able to sharpen my wits without fear of failure. But at times, when I was young, I envied those who had more access to learning. The luckiest women, in this respect, were the kisaeng, those courtesans of the demi-monde who were expected to be literate and well informed in the arts. In its treatment of women, our society and our civilization resembled most that the world has known. These days, women sift through the sands of past time for cultures when women were learned and held power, but they have not yet discovered much. They look back to the stone ages for lost matriarchies, but little has yet been revealed. There were powerful queens and empresses, even in our own land, long ago in the Silla period, and there are Korean fairy stories about powerful and adored princesses, as there are in every culture. But, for the most part, women’s power was exercised through men. As mine was, for I lived in repressive times. I take no little credit for the survival of my son and my grandson. I fought for their lives. They owed their lives to me in double trust, by my blood and by my wit.

  But, I repeat, I failed my husband Prince Sado. I could not help him. Nor could I help my third and perhaps my most loved brother, Nagim, who died in exile. So many died in exile. It was a common fate. Nor could I save my uncle Hong Inhan, who was executed, I fear through my fault. I saved my son and lost my uncle. These were hard times, hard choices.

  Although I am dead and immortal, I cannot read the undiscovered past. I have to wait for some mortal human agency to dig it up for me. It is slow, and at times I grow impatient. These mortal human agents were, through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, called archaeologists and anthropologists and historians. They are joined now, in the exploration of the past, by geneticists and evolutionary biologists. Were I to have a second or a third time on earth again, perhaps I would choose to be reborn as an evolutionary biologist. But I am a ghost, and I am not free. I can speculate, but I cannot rend the veil that obscures the past. I have my envoy, and she has her envoys, but all these emissaries have their temporal and corporeal and local limitations. As a ghost, I am denied easy access even to some of the discoveries that have been made about my life and times. My life was full of prohibitions, and not all of them have passed with my death. Ghosts, too, have their restrictions.

  Our system, the Confucian system, was a dead system. It was centuries dead long before I was born. It did not move forward, in the eighteenth century, towards the universalism of the Enlightenment, though, despite its rigid hierarchies, it had some universalist tenets and tendencies of its own. But the systems of belief that have succeeded it are also dead. All religions, all faiths are dead, though some still make a false show of survival. It is simply that Confucianism endured for more centuries than most.

  I do not blame Confucius for the destruction of my husband. I could, I suppose, do so, if I wished to be ingenious, and to apportion blame far from where it must rest. But Confucius did not lay down the code and the manner in which the father must kill the son and the son the father. Nor did Aeschylus, who was a contemporary of Confucius, invent this code. Nor did their near-successor Sopho
cles. They neither prescribed nor proscribed. They simply described what was, and what had been, in the bloody history of our ugly species. There is no moral to the story of Oedipus.

  We in the palace, of course, knew nothing of the ancient Greeks, and I still have much to learn about them. But, largely isolated though we were and chose to be, we were not entirely ignorant, even in those mortal days, of the arts and sciences and superstitions of the West. A hundred years before my birth, our Crown Prince Sohyŏn had spent some years in China, and he and his envoys returned with books and stories and artefacts and paintings that showed us something of life in Europe. He brought a terrestrial globe, showing us for the first time the Western view of the shape of the world. We saw the Western global view, though I cannot say that we liked it. I am told that none of these objects has survived the many anti-Western purges that followed, but I remember seeing with my own eyes an oil painting of the crucifixion of Christ, brought by the Jesuits to Yenching, and thence to our court in Seoul. And I remember that I wondered at the barbarity of the West, which devised such bizarre tortures, and I was puzzled that a culture which committed such atrocities should wish to export and advertise them. I also saw books of engravings, which were full of scenes of tortures and decapitations and castrations and other so-called martyrdoms. I did not care for these foreign images, as a child or as a woman. But it may be that the art that reached us was inferior art, second-rate art, export art. Cheap missionary art, for undiscerning foreigners.