An American Concubine in Old Korea

Frontiers, 2004 by Choi, Hyaeweol

Missionary Discourse on Gender, Race, and Modernity

Recent feminist scholarship in Korea has rekindled interest in "the gender of modernity"1 as part of the effort to rewrite women's history from women's point of view, and in so doing, to restore women as historical agents rather than as merely the object of representation by men.2 Korean feminist scholars give particular attention to the representation of New Woman (sinyosong or sinyoja) in colonial Korea (1910-1945) as an example of how the hypermasculine discourse of modernity put forward by male intellectuals relegated New Women to the status of deviant and selfish individuals, tragic heroines, or privileged beneficiaries of modern education.3 Repositioning the New Woman as a political and sexual group rather than as scattered individuals, feminist scholars argue that the New Woman signified modernity by challenging Confucian patriarchal gender relations and by emphasizing women's own subjectivities.4 They also call attention to how the colonial condition,5 in which national independence was the priority, intersected significantly with the formation of modern female subjectivities. As the feminist journal Yosongkwa Sahyoe (Women and Society) rightly puts it in its special issue in 2000, the phenomenon of New Woman should be understood within the intersection of modernity, colonialism, patriarchy, and Korean nationalism.

However, in this new critical examination of the gender of modernity, there is a continuing assumption that American Protestant missionaries contributed positively to the formation of modern womanhood. An important question related to this assumption is what kind of modern womanhood they delivered.6 Without specifying the complex nature of modernity, previous studies often cite two factors to prove the positive impact of Christianity on modern womanhood in Korea. One is the Christian notion of equality for women and men under God, implying infinite possibilities for women in the era of modernity.7 However, that literal understanding of the notion did not conform to the actual practice of church organizations, in which women assumed only marginal positions. Moreover, there is ample evidence that Western women, including Americans, readily accepted a subordinate role as "helpmates" in the foreign mission field.8 The other factor has to do with missionaries' contribution to institutional and socioeconomic reforms. In particular, the establishment of mission schools for girls is often used as a prime example of how Christianity helped Korean women develop a desire for liberation from patriarchal Confucian norms. After all, many self-proclaimed New Women of Korea in the 19205 studied at Christian mission schools. It is well known, however, that one cannot readily assume that the simple presence of schools is in itself a sign of modernity. Schooling can also be a powerful mechanism for reinforcing traditional gender ideology and repressing the desire for freedom. Thus, the crux of the problems embedded in the assumptions mentioned above is that both philosophical premises and institutional changes are regarded as the sign of modernity, while there is a peculiar absence of interest in exploring how missionaries themselves understood and represented modernity as a lived experience in the early twentieth century and what ramifications their perception of modernity could have on the nature of modern womanhood in Korea.

One of the ways to examine the complex and fluid nature of modernity is to distinguish "modernization," which centers on socioeconomic and institutional reforms, from "modernity," an overarching term that includes not only the constellation of socioeconomic phenomena9 but also "cultural articulations of modernizations as self-conscious experiences and discourses, judgments, and feelings about these experiences."10 For a fuller understanding of the nature of the modernity delivered by Christianity and its impact on Korean modern womanhood, it is crucial to examine the interplay between what missionaries did institutionally and how their particular notion of modernity was discursively produced as a way to construct particular knowledge about modern womanhood.

In this article, I explore the complex nature of gendered modernity with special focus on the discursive construction of modern womanhood by missionaries. Adopting Foucault's notion of discourse that constructs particular social and cultural knowledge with the will to truth and power," I specifically examine an unpublished novel, The Concubine,12 written by Ellasue Canter Wagner (1881-1957), a veteran missionary of the U.S. Southern Methodist Church who served in Korea from 1904 to 1940.13 I chose this novel for analysis because, unlike other novels by missionaries stationed in Korea, it explicitly and primarily deals with "modern girls." Moreover, while the novel shares some of the traditional themes of other missionary literatures-that is, saving souls and Christian womanhood-it also offers an intriguing tableau for uncovering the tensions between tradition and modernity, between religiosity and secularity, between the East and the West, and between races, which demands a "symptomatic reading, an analysis of what was said but also left unsaid." 14 In order to capture the complexity of the novel beyond the Christianprescribed moral message, I relate Wagner's discourse on modern womanhood to the prevailing narratives of New Woman in the West and in Korea in the first half of the twentieth century. I also relate my analysis to Wagner's own subject positions as a white Western missionary woman in Korea. As Tani Barlow argues, "the term subject position calls attention to the power of discourse to situate the meanings of woman multiply and always in relation to one another."15 Highly educated and deeply involved in evangelical and educational work with Koreans, Wagner was at the crossroads of rapidly changing gender relations and racial dynamics. Considering Wagner's own subject positions and the particular historical context of the 19205 and 19305,1 argue that Wagner's novel is highly suggestive of what constitutes true "modern" womanhood in missionary discourse and how the missionary vision for modern womanhood was in tension with the phenomenon of the secular New Woman and the feminist movement.16 In a significant way, the novel illustrates both the anxiety and ambivalence felt by missionaries in the face of growing challenges to the "cult of true womanhood," in which religious piety and domesticity were the core of a woman's virtue.17 By choosing to focus on the concubine system as a plot device, Wagner affords herself the chance to critique the "pagan" and "premodern" nature of Korean traditions, but, more important, she challenges secular modernity. In so doing, Wagner presents her own vision for ideal modern womanhood, which privileges Christian spirituality as the core value of true modernity. Reading what is said and what is left unsaid in Wagner's novel, one might argue that missionary women, who have been imagined by Koreans as main players in constructing "modern" womanhood in Korea,18 tended to have uneasy relations with so-called modernity and used their narratives as an antidote to the "perils of modernity."19