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Interview with Margaret Drabble, The Red Queen |
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| Margaret Drabble is the author of seventeen novels and the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She lives in London.
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Synopsis |
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Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package—a memoir by a Korean crown princess, written more than two hundred years ago. A highly appropriate gift for her impending trip to Seoul. But from whom?
The story she avidly reads as she flies to Seoul turns out to be one of great intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court, describes the Confucian practices of her time, and confesses the family dramas that left her husband dead by his own hand and her childless. Perhaps it is the loss of a child that resonates so deeply with Barbara…but she has little time to think of such things, she has just arrived in Korea.
She meets a certain Dr. Oo, also a guest at her downtown hotel, and to her surprise and delight he offers to guide her to some of the haunts of the Crown Princess. As she explores the gardens and fortresses, the inner sanctums and the royal courts, Barbara Halliwell begins to feel a strong affinity for everything related to the Princess and her mysterious life.
After a brief, intense, and ill-fated love affair, she returns to London. Is she ensnared by the events of the past week, of the past two hundred years, or will she pick up her life where she left it?
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Interview |
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Q: The Red Queen is inspired by The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea (University of California Press, 1996), and you've said that the discovery was "sheer chance." How did you run across the memoirs?
A: I was invited to speak at a literary conference in Seoul, South Korea, in 2000, and so before I went I visited the British Museum to look at the Korean antiquities and
to talk to one of the experts there. She happened to tell me about the memoirs, and I bought a copy through Amazon and was completely gripped by this extraordinary story. People recommend so many books
to me, as we all do to everybody, and often I pay no attention, but this recommendation had a very great impact on me and obsessed me for years of my life. I read everything I could find about the crown
princess and her period, including other versions of her memoirs, and found I could not get her story out of my head.
Q: The element that caught your attention was Lady Hyegyong's yearning for a red silk skirt—it reminded you of a red velvet party dress that you wore when you were a young girl. And throughout The Red Queen, you weave that component around other characters. What does that red silk skirt or dress symbolize to you?
A: The red silk skirt symbolizes the individual oddity of each and every human being. It makes the narrator a human being, not just a historical figure writing about major
events. It adds a touch of vivid realism to her story and gives it authenticity. Because the crown princess tells us about this odd childish yearning, maybe we can trust her as a narrator when she tells
us of other matters. So it symbolizes individuality, caprice, vanity, the danger of vanity…all these things. It stands for the universality of oddity, which communicates itself even across time
and space. .
Q: In the prologue, you make it clear that The Red Queen is not historical fiction, and although it's based on the memoirs of the crown princess, it's your interpretation of her story. With this in mind, how much is fact and how much is fiction?
A: I could, of course, go through line by line saying what I invented and what I drew directly from various versions of the memoirs, and from other historical documents, and any reader who is interested in pursuing this can also make these comparisons, as I give the sources at the end of the volume. The main outlines of her story, including her marriage to the crown prince, his mysterious illness, his quarrels with his father, and his violent death, are all fully recorded in official records. I believe the story of his death is as well known in Korea as the story of the beheading of Marie Antoinette is in France. I invented some but not all of the detail of the domestic scenes. But all the principal characters are historical.
Q: Why did you choose to fictionalize her story?
A: Partly because I am a novelist by trade. This is the answer Thomas Keneally gives as to why he wrote Schindler’s List as fiction not fact—I believe it was originally marketed as fiction (as Schindler’s Ark) in Europe, but as fact in the United States. But my reasons also included the need for a freedom to provide a modern interpretation. The crown princess told her own story, in her own words, in her own time, and I wanted to produce a commentary on it and its contemporary meaning, for which purpose I needed a fictional format. And by making her able to comment posthumously on her own life, I was able to explore the modern world too. One of the books I read while writing this novel was Mark Twain’s brilliant and extraordinary fantasy, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which explores similar questions of cultural relativism and cultural identity, and uses time travel to satirize the United States in the nineteenth century.
Q: The crown princess's life is marred with sadness and death and loneliness. She spent her days wishing time away by watching "the marker of the round bronze sundial, as it caught the slowly moving shadow of the sun" or listening to the "rain drops, as they fell on the broad leaves of the foxglove tree." She describes the girls swinging high above the wall so they could see the outside world. As a self-described feminist, what emotions did you tap in to in order to conjure these images for the reader?
A: Any reader of her memoirs or of my novel will be struck by the constraints that governed women’s lives in this period, not only in Korea but in most countries in the world. The crown princess lived a privileged but very circumscribed and regulated life. But she was articulate and intelligent, and knew what was happening around her, and was curious about the world outside the palace walls. The images of the sundial and the raindrops are drawn from personal observation, and from traditional Korean poetry of the period, which is very beautiful. By coincidence I have a large foxglove tree (I think its botanical name is Paulownia tomentosa) in my own English garden. It is a tree that makes many appearances in Korean literature, so I felt it was a strange link with the palace gardens of Seoul.
Q: You've filled your forty-year writing career with fiction, nonfiction, short stories, and plays: what's next for you?
A: Who knows? I have several ideas, and at the moment I am most taken with the possibility of writing a novel about a marine biologist. I like watching fish, and this would be a good excuse to visit all the great aquaria of the world. Fish are full of messages and meanings. But who knows if I will ever write this book?
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