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The Social Significance of the Discourse on Corporeal Punishment of Elite Women in Joseon

  • The Review of Korean History
  • 2017, (128), pp.237-270
  • Publisher : The Historical Society Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

Kyoung Park 1

1연세대학교 법학연구원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the social significance of the discourse on the corporeal punishment of elite women during the Joseon dynasty. The Great Ming Code (『大明律』) that served as Joseon’s criminal law stipulated that, for female criminals, fines be collected in place of sentences of penal servitude or exile (a practice called suseok (收贖)). Yet in reality, beatings with a heavy stick were administered to women. But in the case of elite women, the substitution of beatings with either the light or heavy stick for fines or other punishments remained customary. Eventually however, some began to argue that women who killed female servants out of jealousy should be punished corporeally, and in 1691 (Sukjong 17), one such woman was punished corporeally at the capital bell tower and exiled by royal proclamation. The case of a woman’s privately torturing and killing a female servant who had been involved in an extramarital affair with her husband was a matter of an owner killing a servant. As such, it tended to be punished lightly relative to other homicides—were an investigating official to apply relevant laws, the sentence would fall within the ‘60 strokes of beating with the heavy stick and 1 year of exile’ category. But once this matter came before the king, whether follow custom in substituting the sentence’s beatings for fines or other punishments, or whether to break with custom and proceed with the beatings became the subject of debate. The officials opposed to the beatings rooted their argument in the logic that both the privilege of the elite and the chastity of women needed to be protected. On the other hand, those officials favoring the application of beatings in the limited case of a woman’s jealousy-induced murder of a female servant countered that this act was one of derogating the husband and violating the constant bonds (綱常). The argument against proceeding with the beatings was one based upon status order and female chastity—elements considered critical to the maintenance of Joseon’s social order. In this light, it was because the argument for enforcing the beatings eschewed a focus on the cruelty of the torture and murder involved in the act in favor of advancing a vision of husband-wife relations rooted in Confucian ideology that it proved so persuasive. Ultimately, that the royal proclamation to punish corporeally the woman who had killed a female servant out of jealousy was handed down and became part of Joseon law reflects the process by which Joseon’s ruling elite used penal administration to treat as serious crimes actions that opposed the patriarchal family order they had constructed, and in so doing demanded—by force—women’s accommodation.

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