The frightened young bride, with eyelids still sealed, was then borne to her parents-in-law’s home on a chair ornamented with red, covered with leopard skin, and accompanied by a group of lantern bearers. When she arrives, she bows four times to her parents-in-laws and then is taken back to her own parents’ home where her makeup is removed and her eyes unsealed. Her husband arrives later and stays the night — returning the following morning to his own home. This was repeated over the next couple of days. It is on the third day that she goes to her parents-in-law’s home to stay for good — “absorbed as one of his [the groom’s] mother’s inferiors.”
Silence was considered to be an admirable trait of a wife and the wedding day was no exception. It was expected for her to be absolutely silent and to not even make a gesture other than the ritual bowing. To do otherwise would result in embarrassment and shame to her family. Her husband, instead of helping her maintain her silence, would taunt her and try to trick her into speaking. “It may be a week or several months before the husband knows the sound of his own wife’s voice, and even after that for a length of time she only opens her mouth for necessary speech.” While this may have been so at the beginning of the marriage it did not last long — there are a number of stories of Korean wives giving their all-too-deserving husbands frequent tongue lashings.
As stated earlier, most of these marriages were arranged and had little to do with love, but if a man was rich enough he often had a concubine — a woman he chose and often loved much more than his wife. The concubine may have had the husband’s attention but it was the wife who ruled the house.
Note
Not all of these marriage brokers were on the up and up. In the early 1900s, a marriage broker arranged a wedding between a young girl from a well-to-do family and a young handsome man. Apparently some of the girl’s relatives went to visit the prospective groom at his house to verify the broker’s claims and were very impressed. The young man was obviously affluent, well-dressed, and lived in a wonderful house. An elaborate wedding was held and then the young groom took his wife to his true home — “a wretched house where his father and mother and a large family lived huddled together like rabbits in a hole. The deception was a most cruel one, for the girl had been accustomed to a life of comparative luxury.”