The plays of a crazed person are renowned enough to be one of the five categories in Noh plays. Noh play does not mean that a crazed person has a mental disorder clinically, but it means that he or she becomes insane because of a mental shock from a certain situation. Several cultures as well as Japan have the theaters that portray mad women. Ancient Greece and Elizabethan England presented the plays about mad women such as mother and crones (Bainbridge). Of all crazed person plays, it is popular that crazed women lose her mind by the grief and resentment of losing her child or loved one in Japan. Dojoji is about a crazed woman who was betrayed by loved one. The daughter of the lord who became a crazed woman later believed that she would get married to a priest who stayed her house every year, but the priest had no mind to marry her. Thus, she got upset and turned into a snake, and she killed him who hid in the bell in Dojoji temple. Even though long time passed, she felt resentment and changed to snake again. However, she disappeared for the pray of priests. I will analyze crazed woman’s madness in Dojoji: why she becomes insane and how the madness is expressed in Noh play.
To understand why she loses her mind, we need to know how people’s mind is formed. A woman dancer who is the main character of this play was a normal person, but she became angry and had an urge to get back at the priest who she loved after she knew that the priest got the runaround about marriage. And then, she changed to a horrible snake because she could not manage to hold back the rage. According to psychoanalytic theory, people’s minds are not created fixed states, but minds are formed depending on how minds develop as people grow (Fortier 85). In additio...
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.... A mad woman makes the audience feels her emotion acutely, and the dance of a mad woman is one of section that leads the audience to fascinate Noh play.
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Upon the dancer’s departure, “the dancer, who though older was still languid and full of grace, reached out and tapped me with two fingers on the cheek, turned, and walked away” (185). Krauss uses this odd gesture by the dancer helps reinforce the strange quirks of the dancer and the author’s thought of the gesture containing “something condescending in it, even meant to humiliate” (185). The use of the words, “languid and full of grace” continues to strengthen the narrator’s fascination in the dancers beauty but also how the narrator feels uncomfortable with her interactions with the dancer. After the narrator’s encounter with the dancer, she walks by a crowded park “until a cry rang out, pained and terrified, an agonizing child’s cry that tore into[her] as if it were an appeal to [her] alone” (186). The author’s use of the painful and terrifying cry reintroduces the theme of a screaming child from the first passage which reinforces the author’s incapability to manager her guilt. The use of the word “agonizing” in this context suggests the overwhelming amount of guilt the author contains but in form as a youthful shrilling scream. Towards the end of the short story, the agonizing
Ukiyo is a culture that strives to live a strictly pleasure-seeking routine. The largest flaw in this way of life, as Saikaku points out, is that its superficial nature forces people to live lives as meaningless and fluffy as its name, the “Floating World,” suggests. It is shallow in the physical sense, in that it focuses primarily on “beautiful” external appearances, and in the metaphorical sense, whereby individuals never really make deep-seated connections to anyone because of their addiction to finding these so-called pleasures. One particular character that Saikaku satirizes to embody this superficial nature of Ukiyo is the old, rotting woman found on the verandah in the episode of “A Monk’s Wife in a Worldly Temple.” He cleverly employs situational irony with this character to prove his point, as it is expected for the archetypal old woman to pass moral lessons to the younger generation. By the character’s own, sorrowful admission she claims that she “can’t forget about sex” and is going to “bite right into” (Saikaku 614) the protagonist; completely the opposite of what the audience expects her to say. This satire highlights the extent to which the Ukiyo lifestyle socially conditions individuals; the old woman is so far gone down that path that she no l...
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The experience of being locked in a room, against her desire drove her to complete and utter mad...
Other research has devoted to unveiling the origins and the development of their stereotyping and put them among the historical contextual frameworks (e.g., Kawai, 2003, 2005; Prasso, 2005). Research has shown that those stereotypes are not all without merits. The China doll/geisha girl stereotype, to some degree, presents us with a romanticized woman who embodies many feminine characteristics that are/ were valued and praised. The evolving stereotype of the Asian martial arts mistress features women power, which might have the potentials to free women from the gendered binary of proper femininity and masculinity. Nevertheless, the Western media cultural industry adopts several gender and race policing strategies so as to preserve patriarchy and White supremacy, obscuring the Asian women and diminishing the positive associations those images can possibly imply. The following section critically analyzes two cases, The Memoirs of a Geisha and Nikita, that I consider to typify the stereotypical depictions of Asian women as either the submissive, feminine geisha girl or as a powerful yet threatening martial arts lady. I also seek to examine
Pitt, Angela. "Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies." Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint from Shakespeare's Women. N.p.: n.p., 1981.
The first type of madness is that of “[an] seer’s inspiration coming from Apollo” (265b), for whom like “the prophetess at Delphi, no less, and the priestess at Dodona,” are able to guide the cities, like Sibyl, through divine prophecies “[onto] the right track in respect to the future” (244a-b). The second type of divine madness, [the] mystical initiation ascribed to Dionysus,” symbolizes wisdom and retribution, or justice. Plato further emphasizes wisdom and justice in his play Bacchae, in which he represents Dionysus as the personification of retribution, or justice, in, juxtapose to Pentheus, whom personifies traditions. Pentheus, due to his lack of wisdom, failed to not only see the divinity of Dionysus, and distinguish between what is reality and illusionary, but his death also symbolized the act of justice for underrepresented citizens, particularly for women that held no political power or representation in the state. The third classification of divine madness, “a poetic madness coming from the Muses,” depicts how madness can inspire the people it processes by educating them on “[the glorifications of the] myriad deeds of those in the past” (245a). Once processed with madness, Socrates emphasized how their works often eclipse the poetry of the sane, underlining how the poetry of the sane
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Japan is known for its unique gardening style, their diverse plants, their food, and their beautifully woven tapestries. Yet, most do not know about the history of their drama. Japanese Noh theatre is one of the most precise and prestigious art forms. It has been this way since the fourteenth century when Zeami first created Noh theatre. Zeami’s most famous plays, such as Kinuta, are still performed today. Japanese drama has not changed much since the fourteenth century because it has made a lasting effect on the culture. Noh theatre had a major influence on fourteenth century Japan and has affected modern day drama.
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