Delanceyplace.com 09/20/06-Japanese Aristocratic Women

In today's excerpt, the liberated women of
aristocracy in tenth-century Japan:



"It just happens that the women of Kyoto, in the
days when it was the residence of the Japanese
emperor and known as 'the capital of peace,' made a record of what they felt, illuminating human
emotion ... While men wrote learned texts on the
usual subjects of war, law and religion, in the
language ordinary people could not understand
(Chinese, the Japanese scholars' equivalent of the
Europeans' Latin), women started writing novels in
the everyday Japanese language, and in the process
invented Japanese literature. For about a hundred
years novels were written only by women ... The
world's first psychological novel is the Tale of
Genji, written between AD 1002 and 1022, by a widow in her twenties ...

"In this period, it was shameful for an aristocratic
woman to be dependent financially on her husband.
She did not move in to live with him on marriage;
each kept their own home. ... [t]hey had both the
ability and time to reflect on their relations with men, which were unusual in that there were virtually no restrictions on sexual intercourse. ... Men could have many wives (some went up to ten at a time) and even more concubines. ... Wives were encouraged to have all the lovers they could attract, and virgins were thought to be blemished, possessed by evil spirits.

"Nobody expected a partner, either short or long
term, to be faithful. A wife, indeed, believed that if
her husband had many mistresses, she was more
likely to have exciting and affectionate relations with him, provided she was the woman he preferred; that was a constant challenge. But this system became a nightmare because these wonderfully elegant people could not stand the uncertainty. Both men and women were morbidly jealous, even though jealousy was regarded as a breach of good manners. They all pined for security, though they were bored by it."

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of
Humanity, Vintage, 1998, pp. 281-284.

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Barclays
www.barclaycardus.com
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