Forms of Knowledge and Mimicry in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I
By Elizabeth
​
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I is undoubtedly one of the most well-known and best celebrated musicals in American culture. Set in Siam in the 1860s, the musical tells the story of a real moment in Siamese history, when King Mongkut commissioned an Anglo-Indian woman named Anna Leonowens to serve as the governess to his harem. Faced with the threat of economic exploitation and colonization, at a time when every other country in Southeast Asia was occupied or colonized by a European power, Mongkut commissioned Leonowens to provide the wives and children of his harem with a secular Western education (Morgan 95). Following her tenure in Bangkok, Leonowens moved to the United States, where she published two travel memoirs about her service entitled The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1873). These memoirs inspired Margaret Landon, an American missionary wife in Thailand, to write her famous novel Anna and the King of Siam in 1944. The novel was adapted to become a film in 1946, and the story’s success influenced Rodgers and Hammerstein to produce The King and I as we know it today for the Broadway stage in 1951.
​
By virtue of its reproductive history, The King and I is embedded with attitudes shaped by the contexts of Orientalism and both British and American imperialism. Consequently, the story makes significant departures from actual historical events. Additionally, because of its multiple retellings by Westerners, the story grossly misrepresents the people and culture of historic Thailand. When the musical was originally staged, the majority of the actors cast to play the King’s harem were white or Hispanic; Yul Brynner, who played King Mongkut, was a Russian immigrant to the United States (Fordin 292). Anna Leonowens’ story has been banned in Thailand since her memoirs were first published, and the The King and I musical is viewed to this day as an “insult to the monarchy” (Buruma, Klein). While the Thai people were originally offended by the fact that Anna Leonowens was given much of the credit for modernizing Thailand, while King Mongkut’s role was overlooked, the memoirs’ subsequent adaptations and misrepresentations of the Siamese people have added insult to injury (Klein). After Queen Sirikit attended a performance of the musical in 1985, it is reported that she thought it was amusing, as “’We all know that the court would never act like that’” (qtd. in Klein).
Given The King and I’s deeply political history, recent revivals of the musical have met controversy from critics who argue that the musical perpetuates an exoticized and Orientalized perspective of King Mongkut and his harem, making a spectacle of Siamese culture for the entertainment of a Western audience. When viewed within Said and Cohn’s framework of postcolonial analysis, the Orientalist ideologies perpetuated by the musical become undeniable, and appear to be embedded in the history of the musical’s story. Yet although the musical derives from Orientalist forms of knowledge about Siam, it brings to the forefront legitimate anxieties and concerns created by these forms of knowledge and the hegemony of Western culture, and its lasting relevance derives from the fact that it represents a real and crucial moment in Siamese history. As the characters mimic and appropriate the British forms of knowledge introduced to them by Anna, a thread of resistance emerges that calls into question the inherently Orientalist perspective of the musical. In this essay, I argue that The King and I remains relevant in 2018 not because of its perpetuation of Orientalist and Imperialist ideologies; rather, The King and I remains relevant because of the legitimate anxieties and concerns it forces the viewer to confront surrounding the hegemony of colonialist forms of knowledge.
​