forestofglory

I've been meaning for months to write up Knight Flower, the Joseon-era kdrama about a RESPECTABLE WIDOW BY DAY, VIGILANTE BY NIGHT who spends her days dutifully kneeling by her husband's portrait and serving her mother-in-law and her nights running around town in a black mask dispensing justice by the sword.

I enjoyed this drama very much, but it's kind of an odd beast -- it's genuinely interested in the awful constraints on Joseon's women's worlds and widow's worlds in particular and wants to explore that seriously, and it also wants have our heroine be extremely cool and fight off five guys in an alley every episode and toss off a one-liner about it, and it also wants our [middle-aged! widow!] heroine to be a charming sitcom naif who gets comically overcome by the sight of a man's midriff and is shocked! shocked! to learn about some of the various injustices going on in Joseon despite the fact that she's been wandering the streets dispensing vigilante justice for ten years. (They attempt to square some of this circle by virtue of the fact that our heroine's arranged husband was killed! by bandits! on his very wedding day! and so she has spent ten years dutifully mourning a man she never actually met, let alone slept with.)

And because Lee Hanee is a talented actress, she can almost more or less pull all of that off and make RESPECTABLE WIDOW SECRET VIGILANTE JO YEO-HWA a coherent character -- helped in large part by the various interesting women around her, including:

- Yeo-hwa's hard-nosed and cynical teenaged maid, whom Yeo-hwa rescued off the streets as a teenager, and who has spent her years since then in the single-minded pursuit of enough money for An Independent Place, which she is going to move into JUST as soon as her chaotic mistress to whom she is unfortunately absolutely loyal is Out Of This Fucking House and No Longer Doing This Stupid Vigilante Shit
- Yeo-hwa's mother-in-law, who holds Yeo-hwa harshly to the extremely narrow line of conduct allowed for widows [go nowhere; speak to no one; serve your husband's family; accept that it's an embarrassment for you to be alive when your husband is dead] and sees her largely as a walking reputational vector for the family -- but hey, at least she would never pressure Yeo-hwa to commit honorable suicide, like some other mother-in-laws-of-widows of their acquaintance, so that's something! In any other drama this character would be a cruel stereotype but in this drama she's played by Kim Mi-kyung with sympathy and complexity; she's the immediate bane of Yeo-hwa's life, and nonetheless she and Yeo-hwa have spent a decade bound together as family with a kind of affection, and Yeo-hwa understands perfectly well that her mother-in-law is also trapped by the only rules she knows
- Yeo-hwa's business partner and accomplice, a merchant whom Yeo-hwa also rescued on the streets and who has also spent the time since then like You Could Just Leave This Fucking House, I will prepare a fake identity for you, it won't be hard
- the main female villain, ( who is somewhat of a spoiler though this all starts to come out pretty early on )

Obviously Jo Yeo-hwa also has a love interest. He's an honorable baby cop who wants to fight corruption and also has a backstory tied up in the ten-years-ago political plot. He's completely fine. His older brother, an upright schemer who's been helping the virtuous king lay long-term plots to take back control from his evil ministers,* has an very cute B-plot bookstore romance with the cynical maid that I frankly found much more compelling in the glimpses of it that we got. More compelling yet ( is spoilers again! )

*there's nothing kdramas love more than a virtuous king who's trying to take back control from his evil ministers

I have often read single-person biographies where the biographer is very obviously in love with their subject; I have also occasionally read have also read Couple Biographies where the biographer is really invested in the romance between their subjects plural. Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife is a really great, thoughtful, thorough exploration of a particular moment in the history of American slavery around the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the defiant abolitionist movement. It is also very definitively a love story that Woo believes in with her whole heart and is ready to champion all the way to the end, which I honestly think is quite charming even when I myself looking at the evidence was sometimes like "well, I too would like to believe that all through their many years together William and Ellen Craft were indeed fully and romantically on the same page and had each other's backs about everything, but I think it's possible there are other interpretations of some of these events and that in many cases we simply can't know for sure --"

The Big Headline about Ellen and William Craft, the story that made them famous and that the first part of this book recounts in detail, is their daring escape North from slavery in 1848: Ellen disguised herself as an extremely sickly white gentleman who needed her loyal slave with her at all times, and in this guise they managed to navigate 19th-century public transit all the way from Georgia to Philadelphia. They themselves wrote a book about this, which I do plan to read, because it sounds extremely cool and romantic and indeed everyone they met as they made their way from Philadelphia to Massachusetts was like "that's extremely cool and romantic!" and promptly pulled them onto the abolitionist lecture circuit to general wild applause. Ellen, in particular, had major abolitionist propaganda value for forcing empathy out of white people. She was often billed as the White Slave (a label that she did not enjoy.)

Being an escaped slave on the abolitionist lecture circuit was obviously pretty dangerous in 1848 but not as dangerous as it was about to become. In 1848, the Fugitive Slave Laws up north were pretty toothless and unenforceable. In 1850, in an attempt to staple the rapidly-fracturing country back together, significantly stronger laws were passed that essentially forced abolitionist states to cooperate with returning escaped slaves to their masters. Ellen and William Craft, who had so publicly escaped in a way that was very cool and also very embarrassing for the slave states through which they passed, inevitably became one of the first major test cases as to whether Massachusetts would indeed fulfill its Obligations to the South.

Woo writes a compelling narrative, but more importantly she does a really wonderful job balancing that narrative with the complexity of the broader context; from the opening chapter, where she ties the Craft's escape in 1848 with the 1848 revolutionary movement in Europe, I already knew I was in good hands. She does occasionally I think overuse the Ominous Foreshadowing Chapter Ending, but as nonfiction author sins go that's a minor one. She says that at one point in the text that as part of telling their full story she wants to complicate the idea of a happy ending, but it's very clear that in her heart she wants the Crafts to have been very in love and very married all throughout their long and interesting lives, and who can blame her for that?