Suspicious Deaths: Contested Female Suicides in the Late Chosŏn Period

Abstract This article examines cases involving suspicious deaths of women and allegations of female suicide in inquest records from the last decades of the Chosŏn period (1392–1910). Discourses on female suicide in the late Chosŏn traditionally revolved around the chastity ideology and several exemplary scenarios: suicide by widows to follow their husbands in death, by victims of sexual assault, and in response to accusations of sexual impropriety. While scholars have shown that the realities of female suicide during this period went well beyond the domain of chastity, they have usually examined these cases under the assumption that a voluntary act of suicide had taken place. Suicides in the late Chosŏn, however, were routinely subject to judicial scrutiny, and when they involved women, were especially fraught with the possibility of concealed foul play or coercion. This article interrogates how officials handled allegations of female suicide as well as questions of legal culpability in contentious cases. I show how suicide determinations relied on narratives of female grievance both within and beyond the chastity framework, and implicated multiple stakeholders—inquest officials, relatives of the deceased, and the accused along with their families—whose interests did not usually align and who told competing stories. Hence, these cases reveal the complex calculus involved in constructing narratives of female suicide in the late Chosŏn, and underscore the justice-oriented discourses, apart from the virtue discourses, that informed such narratives.