From Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan) to an Autobiography (Chagi rok): Telling the Stories of Exemplary Women in 18th-Century Korea

This paper investigates an eighteenth-century Korean woman’s autobiography called Chagi rok (Writing of Self), focusing on its significance in understanding Korean women’s own discourses on exemplary women (yŏllyŏ), in contrast to the dominant versions lush with male elite perspectives, in the wake of women’s increased use of (auto)biographical writing as a weapon for shaping new discourses on exemplary women. It also probes what this new writing about a woman, written by the woman herself, tells us about women’s lives and community in eighteenth-century Korea, which enriches our discussions of early modern Korean women’s history and culture. I show how the Chagi rok illustrates women’s everyday struggles to navigate Confucian society and find resolutions to the problems, conflicts, and unruly feelings that arose from women’s different familial and societal duties, while simultaneously contesting and negotiating the dominant discourses of yŏllyŏ, which were reinforced by the distribution of various versions of the biographies of Chinese exemplary women (lienü).