During the Heian period, which lasted from 794 to 1185, literature is characterized as being in the forms of monogatari (tale) and nikki (diary). Many of the monogatari and nikki that were written were created by women, who wrote using kana syllabry. One of the most distinguished pieces of monogatari is Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji Monogatari or also known as The Tale of Genji. According to Nancy Hume, “most literary men of the Heian period avoided using the Japanese language or creating resembling fiction. This meant that the literature of the supreme period of Japanese civilization was left by default to the women, who were at liberty both to write in Japanese and to express themselves in the genre of fiction” (Hume 115).
The Tale of Genji is about an almost perfect man in the court and has many affairs with not only women, but with men as well. While reading The Tale of Genji, the reader may wonder how the noble men in the court could have so many affairs and visit many women throughout the city without worrying about political matters. At the time The Tale of Genji had been written, the nobles of the Heian court did not “need to occupy themselves with warfare or administration or economic planning,” and instead, “devoted themselves entirely to the cult of beauty” (Hume 117). Through Genji’s interactions with his friends and his lovers, the reader is able to picture the ideal woman and the ideal man of the imperial court during the Heian period as portrayed by Murasaki Shikibu.
As Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, she describes her image of the ideal woman through her characters. The tale actually begins by stating an important aspect that a woman needed during the Heian period. At the beginning, Genji’s mot...
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...Murasaki Shikibu seems to criticize the daily and social lives of those in the court because they in fact have flaws themselves and that those of royalty commit the same sins as commoners do. Based on The Tale of Genji, it seems that people can only hope to achieve perfection by trying to live according to the social standard of what are the ideal man and the ideal woman.
Works Cited
Hume, Nancy. Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader. New York: State University of New
York Press, 1995. Print.
Morris, Ivan. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan. New York: Kodansha America, Inc., 1994. Print
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Royall Tyler. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. Print.
Shirane, Haruo. The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of ‘The Tale of Genji’. California: Standford University Press, 1987. Print.
Ironically, Murasaki was able to write The Tale of the Genji in a patriarchal environment, which was typically dominated by male poets and historical writers. The background of this 11th century Japanese “novel” defines the unusual circumstances of a male-dominant literary culture, which allowed Murasaki to tell this story as a female author. In her own diary, Murasaki Shikibu writes about the power of patriarchal authority in the royal court, when she learns that the emperor was reading Tale of Genji. This aspect of 11th century Japanese society defines the assumption of ignorance and submissiveness that Murasaki had to endure as a female
Based on Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji” the ideal man and the ideal woman of the Heian Court can easily be discerned as not truly existing, with the main character, Genji, being the nearly satirical example of what was the ideal man, and descriptions of the many women in the story as prescription of the ideal woman with the young Murasaki playing a similar role to that of Genji in the story.
The author of the Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, was a woman and it is interesting that the hero Prince Genji is a male and takes on many wives and lovers during his lifetime. Murasaki had special insights into how men and women related to each other during the Heian period and these insights led to a captivating story in terms of how men and women measured up to the ideals that Heian society expected of them.
Although The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, is set in late tenth-century Japan, the plights of the characters are universal. In Chapter 12, Genji leaves his wife, who is named after the author, and goes into exile. Desperately in love with Genji, Muraskai is similar to Euripides' Medea in the play of the same name. She suffers because her husband, Jason, abandons her for a princess. Shikibu and Euripides seem to have shared the same worldviews about women's emotional dependence on their mates.
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Vintage Classics. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1985.
Secrets of the Samurai: A survey of the Martial Arts of Feudal Japan by Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook
Masuda, Sayo. Autobiography of a Geisha. Trans. G. G. Rowley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
...Yamamoto’s ‘The Legend of Miss Sasagawara’.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 39. 2 (2009). Student Resources in Context. Web. 3 Nov. 2013.
Gaskin, Carol. and Hawkins, Vince. The Ways of the Samurai. New York: Byron Preiss Visual
Though not the focus of epic poetry, the female characters of this ancient genre play a central role, as they have a great influence on the male heroes they encounter. In a genre which idealizes manliness and heroism—that is, acts of courage, strength, and cunning— women are set in opposition to these ideals and therefore less respected. At the same time, women who attempt to take on more “masculine” roles are vilified. Here, antagonist is defined as anyone in opposition to the hero’s goals. Female agency—their free will and ability to wield power—is directly related to their role in epic poetry; that is, the more agency a female character has, the more antagonistic of a role she plays. This agency is often enacted through sexuality or supernatural
Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, set in the Heian Period, gives a good idea of what the model Heian man and Heian woman should look like. Genji himself is like a physical embodiment of male perfection, while a large portion of the Broom Tree chapter outlines the ideal of a woman—that it is men who decide what constitutes a perfect woman, and the fact that even they cannot come to decide which traits are the best, and whether anyone can realistically possess all of those traits shows that the function of women in the eyes of men of that period was largely to cater to their husbands and households. Broken down, there are similarities and differences between the standard for Heian men and women, and the Tale of Genji provides excellent examples of characters who fit into their respective gender roles.
...hich we say today how strange they are, but as all people tend to do when we see anything substantially different from our perceived norms we automatically assume it to be strange or wrong in thinking. To many The Tale of Genji is a book to be criticized for its archaic ideals of how badly women were treated in this era and their wrong ideals of marriage. I see this as a wonderful opportunity to study a culture who is different in ways than our own. The Tale of Genji is a book I find to be a wonderful History book. Even though the tale itself is fiction, truths of that society can still be gleaned from within these pages. I for one applaud Murasaki Shikibu for giving us a taste of her time and consider her book to be a novel to be praised.
• Mishima, Yukio. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965.
Louis, Thomas and Thomas Ito. Samurai: The Code of Warrior. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2008.
Women were often subjects of intense focus in ancient literary works. In Sarah Pomeroy’s introduction of her text Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she writes, “Women pervade nearly every genre of classical literature, yet often the bias of the author distorts the information” (x). It is evident in literature that the social roles of women were more restricted than the roles of men. And since the majority of early literature was written by men, misogyny tends to taint much of it. The female characters are usually given negative traits of deception, temptation, selfishness, and seduction. Women were controlled, contained, and exploited. In early literature, women are seen as objects of possession, forces deadly to men, cunning, passive, shameful, and often less honorable than men. Literature reflects the societal beliefs and attitudes of an era and the consistency of these beliefs and attitudes toward women and the roles women play has endured through the centuries in literature. Women begin at a disadvantage according to these societal definitions. In a world run by competing men, women were viewed as property—prizes of contests, booty of battle and the more power men had over these possessions the more prestigious the man. When reading ancient literature one finds that women are often not only prizes, but they were responsible for luring or seducing men into damnation by using their feminine traits.