Anna Leonowens
|
|
Anna Leonowens (November, 1831 - 1915) is chiefly famous for being the British governess portrayed in the musical The King and I. The play, based on adaptations of her factually slipshod memoirs, provides a fictionalised look at her life in the royal court of Siam (present-day Thailand).
| Contents |
Early life
Although she claimed to have been born Anna Harriette Crawford in Caernarfon, Wales on November 5, 1834, recent investigations have discovered no record of her birth there. It is now thought that her Welsh blood was limited to one grandparent. Her own version of her story states that at the age of fifteen, she travelled to India to live with her mother, who had remarried after the death of Anna's father, Thomas Crawford, an army captain, in action. She reportedly spent the intervening years at boarding school and staying with relatives. It is now believed that she was born in India in November 1831, of an English father, Thomas Edwards, a cabinetmaker who died soon after her birth, and a partly East Indian mother, Mary Anne Glasscott, and that her maiden name was Ann Harriet Edwards. An observer who knew her described Leonowens as "a dumpty, middle-aged, half-caste schoolteacher." Her elder sister, Eliza, was the maternal grandmother of the film star Boris Karloff. In 1832, in Bombay, her mother became the wife of Patrick Donohoe, a corporal.
Marriage and widowhood
It was in India that she met and married in 1849, Thomas Leon Owens, a clerk. After the death of their first child they reportedly set out for England, eventually settling in London where they brought up two healthy children, Avis and Louis. The latter was, of course, to become famous as a character in the story of Anna's stay at the Siamese court. The story of the London sojourn seems spurious, given the evidence; it is more likely that the young Owenses, as they were, moved frequently throughout Asia.
Avis would go on to marry Thomas Fish, an American banker. Louis T. Leonowens became an officer in the Siamese royal cavalry. He married Caroline Knox, a daughter of Sir Thomas George Knox, the British consul-general in Bangkok (1824-1887) and his Siamese wife, Prang Somkok (-1888). Louis went on to found the trading company which bears his name to this day.
When her husband found work in Malaysia, Anna once again travelled to the colonies, this time with her children in tow. Their fortunes rapidly changed for the worse. Her husband, who had become an hotel keeper, died of apoplexy in Penang in 1859, at age 33, and she was left an impoverished widow. She had never before needed, or planned, to work outside the home. The only way she now had of supporting herself, however, was to become a teacher; and so she opened a school for the children of officers in Singapore. She also changed her surname to Leonowens, which was how her husband's surname was written on his death certificate.
Royal governess?
Though successful, the school could not support the family financially, and thus she came to the momentous decision to accept an offer made by the Siamese consul in Singapore and become governess to the children of the King of Siam, S.S.P.P. Maha Mongkut. Actually, she was hired as a teacher of English, not a governess.
It may be concluded that the opening scenes of the famous films based on the life of Anna Leonowens, in which the young "English" widow arrives in the strange eastern city of Bangkok amongst people whose way of life is a complete mystery to her, are highly misleading. Anna Leonowens knew the Far East well -- by the age of only twenty-seven, she had already lived in India, Australia and Singapore. Of course Siam was new to her, but there must have been as much about it that was familiar as there was of the unknown. This is not to say that there was nothing frightening about some of the experiences which she and her young son faced.
The reasons for her decision to send her daughter to school in Britain, while her son travelled with her to Bangkok, are not clear; though no doubt the position of women in the royal palace where she was going would not have been such as to allow her children to be treated equally. At around the time of her arrival, the King's eldest son, Chulalongkorn, was to be elevated to the position of Crown Prince, whilst his eldest daughter was enduring quite a different ceremony, that of the tonsure. It is no wonder that she made such a fuss about the delay in fulfilling the King's promise to provide her with a house of her own. With sixty-seven children and numerous wives, it was hardly likely that the King and his ministers would take much notice of a woman, albeit a European woman who was responsible for the education of the King's children. King Mongkut, however, was a learned and cultured man, who was breaking new ground for Siam simply by having the idea to educate his wives and children.
Her role in the royal court
It has been said that Anna Leonowens, in her memoirs of 1870, exaggerated the importance of her role in the King's court and suggested that she had a greater degree of influence than she could possibly have had in reality. However, it was the peculiarity of her situation that led to her story capturing the interest of a nation, and if many of the episodes featured in the films and plays about her stay in Siam do not reflect real life, this is no more than can be said about many other dramatisations of the lives of people even less worthy of note. It is debatable whether the true story of her time in Siam, which lasted only five years, would have become the subject of a film, a musical, and even a television series, if it had been told with literal truthfulness either by Anna herself or by those who re-told it later. In fact, it is largely based on some short stories she wrote. The secret of its success almost certainly lies in the very idea of a lone Western woman being accepted in an exotic Eastern royal court; and the fact that she was there to work, rather than as a lady of leisure, adds to the interest audiences have felt in Anna as a person.
Relations with King Mongkut
The King himself was a complex character. Educated and intelligent, he was nevertheless tightly controlled by his own upbringing and native traditions. He may have felt a certain degree of respect for the European woman -- indeed, must have done, otherwise he would not have entrusted the education of his children to her; but it would be wrong to imply, as do the various dramatisations of the story, that he treated her as an equal. The torture and execution of the girl, Tuptim, watered down for film viewers, illustrate only too clearly how foreign Siamese ideas of justice and religion were to those prevalent in Victorian Britain, let alone those in vogue in the 20th century. Anna's departure from Siam did not have, as popularly thought, anything to do with the King's death, and he did not plead with her to remain. However, she was in the process of negotiating to return to his court when he was taken ill and died.
That the King had some regard for Anna is indicated by the fact that she and her son were both mentioned in his will, though they never received the legacy.
Relations with King Chulalongkorn
The young King Chulalongkorn, elected according to Siamese tradition to succeed his father, made many reforms including the abolition of the practice of prostration before the royal person. Anna's teaching of him cannot be given complete credit for this, but it would be surprising if she had not had some influence on him. By this time she was already contributing articles based on her experiences to the "Atlantic Monthly", which were later expanded into two volumes of memoirs which earned her immediate notoriety, despite the stilted manner in which she wrote. She became personally acquainted with Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book whose anti-slavery message had not been lost on some of Anna's pupils in Siam. She visited America, Russia and other European countries, and eventually met King Chulalongkorn again when he visited London in 1897, thirty years after she had left Siam. He himself expressed his debt to her on that occasion.
Later years
In 1867, Anna went to live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she became involved in women's education, and was a suffragette and one of the founders of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. After 19 years, she moved to Montreal.
Anna Leonowens died on January 19, 1915 and was interred in the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, Quebec.
Truth or fiction?
Leonowens presented her own account as factual and for most of the 20th century it was accepted by most in the west as such, despite being strongly disputed in Thailand. The regular appearance of the story in various dramatic productions, plus Anna Leonowens' own ability to obscure the truth during her own lifetime meant that the fictional and true accounts of Anna Leonowens' life became very confused. It was, in the end, a chance discovery by a scientist which brought inconsistencies in her accounts and the historical record to more general attention. In the 1970s, Dr. W.S Bristowe, a regular visitor to the far east in search of spiders, was researching a biography of Leonowen's son, the successful businessman Louis T. Leonowens. After meticulous research Bristowe came to believe that significant parts of the famous tale were fictional. He published a book about it called Louis and the King of Siam in 1976. Bristowe's work is not universally accepted, and accounts of Leonowens' life still vary. The true story of Anna Leonowens' remarkable life may never wholly be clear.
Anna Leonowens in fiction and film
It was only after Margaret Landon's "novelisation" of the original Leonowens memoirs that the story of Anna and her stay in Siam became popular. It was quickly made into a film, Anna and the King of Siam, which took liberties with the plot; and the musical by Rodgers & Hammerstein followed not long afterwards, making even more drastic changes. Revived many times on stage, it has remained a favourite of the theatre-going public, and the actresses who have played the part have never given a hint of Anna's alleged Welsh origins -- let alone her actual mixed-race background.
External links
- The English Governess at the Siamese Court (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8678) Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok, by Anna Leonowens, from Project Gutenberg.
- "The Truth about Anna Leonowens" (http://www.thaistudents.com/kingandi/owens.html) by Thai Students.
- Louis T. Leonowens (Thailand) Ltd. (http://www.louist.co.th/), the company founded by Leonowen's son.
References
- Louis and the King of Siam, W.S. Bristowe, Chatto & Windus, 1976, ISBN 0701121645fr:Anna Leonowens