Costume dramas take liberties, and The Scandal is no exception. Here’s a look at what the show gets right about the world it’s set in, and where it’s clearly playing with history for the story.
Could Lady Cho actually not remarry?
The show leans hard on the idea that a widow’s life was essentially over the moment her husband died. That’s grounded in something real, but the mechanism is a little different from how it’s often portrayed.
Widow remarriage wasn’t outright illegal for most of the dynasty. What actually happened is that under King Seongjong, it became law that the descendants of a remarried widow were blocked from holding government office. Since a family’s entire status ran through its sons’ careers, that penalty was often enough to end the conversation before it started, functionally the same as a ban, even without one on the books.
Where the “virtuous widow” idea came from
The state actively rewarded widows who didn’t remarry from the very start of the dynasty, and what counted as “virtuous” got more extreme over time, eventually including women who harmed or killed themselves to prove their devotion. This started with the yangban class and spread to commoners as the dynasty went on. And there’s a genuinely dark angle here: as the noble class grew faster than the number of available government posts, some families pushed their widows toward extreme displays of chastity specifically because it could earn the family a reward, even a minor appointment.
One of the more human accounts of what this actually looked like comes from the writer Park Ji-won, in an essay about a widow from Hamyang. It includes a story about a different woman entirely, a mother who raised two sons alone and got through the lonely nights by rolling a worn coin in her hand until the writing on it disappeared. It’s a small, quiet detail that says more about the cost of “virtue” than most of the official record does.
Was a cousin romance actually taboo?
The show suggests Cho Won and Lady Cho share the same clan, which, if true, makes this more than just scandalous. Joseon enforced a total ban on marriage between anyone with the same surname and clan origin, no matter how distantly related they actually were, far stricter than Korea’s modern law. So if they are the same clan, their relationship wouldn’t just draw gossip, it would be flatly illegal to ever formalize. Worth double-checking against the show if you want to state this more firmly later, but even framed as “the show implies,” it’s a solid piece of context.
What the show gets right
Lady Cho raising silkworms and making her own silk isn’t just a character quirk, it’s historically accurate. Sericulture was a legitimate, valued domestic economic activity, including among elite women. The show’s spin is framing it as art and personal expression rather than household production, which is a fair creative choice, but the craft itself is real.