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The role of women in Japan 1750 1914
The role of women in Japan 1750 1914
The tale of genji analysis
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The Tale of Genji is believed to be have been mostly written by Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014 or 1075) in the year 1021 during the Heian Period (794-1184). It is considered to be one of the greatest works of fiction and it talks about the ideal roles of a man and woman during the Heian period. It also allows the modern audience to see the culture differences between what was considered the norm during the Heian Period and what is considered the norm during the 21th Century. The Tale of Genji tells the story of Prince Hikaru Genji, son of the current Emperor at the time and Lady Kiritsubo, and how he matures from a young boy that has multiple affairs with women to a wise Emperor that begins to take responsibility for the actions that he made when he was younger. It is a critique of early Japanese literature and shows how women are treated as “objects” that serve men and men are the more authoritative gender that can have multiple affairs with women and can change a woman into his ideal image of a woman.
According to Tō no Chūjō, Chief Left Equerry, Genji, and the Fujiwara Aide of Ceremonial in chapter two, there are three types of women. The highborn, the middle birth, and the low born. The highborn are born into royalty and are constantly cared for by the people that surround her. Unfortunately because girls that are born into royalty are constantly surrounded by their peers, a lot about those types of girls remain unknown and the girls that are born into royalty may not deserve their rank. The middle class are born from governors or men that are not high enough to be considered royalty but not low enough to be considered a commoner. Girls that are born in the middle class must distinguish themselves from other women that were born...
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...erfectionist and she did not seem to show any interest in Genji until her final moments of life before giving birth to their child and then dying at the end of chapter nine. It was not until Aoi’s death that Genji finally begin to appreciate Aoi and started to treat women as more than just objects of sex and power. When Genji finally became Emperor at the beginning of chapter seventeen, Genji is concerned about the future of his country and only focuses on taking care of the current wives that he has in life. In return his wives do their best to take care of him.
Works Cited
Heian Period (794-1184 AD). Timeline of Japanese History. Timeline of Japanese History. 2011.
Web. 27 February, 2011.
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. New York: Toronto, 2006. Print
“Summary of the Tale of Genji.” Taleofgenji.org. Taleofgenji.org. 2001. Web. 27 February,
2011.
However, this “ladder of success” was not as simple as it seemed. First of all, the class of both families will be a huge barrier. We are not even talking about freedom to love here, there is no such thing in late imperial China. Although we can’t say that love doesn’t exist even in such systems, such as Shen Fu and Chen Yun, but most marriages are not about love. Rather, it was about exchange of values. For example, when two families want to become business partners, the parents of the family will have their son and daughter married, so the two families will have closer bonding which made the business much easier. In this sense, we can see that the couple is simply a tool. In the same sense, the families which has not much “values” can only have marriages with the same class of families. Meaning for a women to climb up the ladder of success is not quite possible as the class of her family is a huge deciding factor for marriage in the
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Being a student interested in the field of biology, one knows that studying life in the past plays an important role in the history of organisms that lived on this earth. Similarly, being Japanese, studying the past of how Japanese were plays an important role in Japanese history. Despite all the general aspects of life that have changed from the Heian period, the one idea that has definitely not changed is the romantic relationships between a man and woman. Though the general concept is the same, from reading The Tale of Genji, it is what was considered the ideal woman and ideal man that were both surprising and thus worth discussing.
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