Anger in the Late Chosŏn Era through <i>The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng</i>

Abstract This article examines the emotional regime of the late Chosŏn palace through how anger is portrayed in The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng. Written by Lady Hyegyŏng (1735–1815), the wife of the ill-fated Crown Prince Sado and the mother of King Chŏngjo, the Memoirs recollect deeply traumatic events, ones that left deep scars and lingering grudges in the royal family and beyond. Drawing on William Reddy’s concept of “emotional regimes,” this article identifies five normative rules governing anger expression in the late Chosŏn palace: restraint, empathy, protocol, circumstance, and obligation, all of which can be traced through the semantic and contextual analysis of anger-related vocabulary in the Memoirs and contextualized within Confucian ideas of emotional regulation and their moral implications. Together, these rules show anger expression to be a socially encoded and politically consequential act, often stratified along lines of hierarchy and gender. Whereas male royals, especially King Yŏngjo, frequently displayed anger as righteous indignation or an expression of royal authority, his subordinates—whether the women in the palace or even his own crown prince—were compelled to internalize their emotions or express them obliquely, suffering the psychological toll of their suppression.