Three times filmed (under one name or another) and a Broadway hit, TheKing and I was a tall tale with great appeal to post-World War II America.Based on a purportedly true account, The King and I is the story of a properEnglish governess, Anna Leonowens, employed by the King of Siam (as Thailand wasknown). In her account, she worked patiently working amidst Third Worldbarbarism to help end slavery and monarchial absolutism, as well as mold theimagination of the king’s son along the lines of Western democracy. The sagaappealed to Americans’ sense of cultural superiority and missionary endeavor.Thais were greatly insulted.
In Masked: The Life of Anna Leonowens, School Mistress at the Court ofSiam (published by University of Wisconsin Press), historian Alfred Habeggerexplores her story and finds it wanting in facts. He is not the firstresearcher down that trail, but investigates Leonowens’ memoirs (the basis forthe movies and the musical) with greater fairness and fuller access tohistorical sources. He finds that the governess was employed in Siam but in amuch lesser role than claimed. After her Bangkok sojourn, Leonowens came to theU.S. and stumbled into politically liberal circles. Her audience was easilytitillated by her stories of the royal harem and exotic Asia, but despitespeaking to veterans of the abolitionist movement, she was forced to carefullymaintain a false Anglo-Saxon front and deny her mixed race origins in India.
Leonowens was a hit. She wrote popular accounts of her progressiveinfluence on Siamese society that bore little relation to reality, yetreflected the general drift of Siam as well as the optimistic aspirations ofAmericans dreaming of a better world molded in their own self-image.
The 1956 film starring Yul Brynner as the virile, strutting King of Siamremains the best-known telling of the tale. As Habegger relates, the movie wasbanned in Thailand as “an act of colonization—an invasion that seizes not landor material products but a people’s sense of their past.”
