not a chapter review

[fidelioscabinet]

but perhaps not entirely irrelevant:

Considering the issues all of us are having over the way male-female relations are depicted in ToG (and other work from the same era), how much influence is the concept of yin and yang having on this issue for them? Or is this a question whose answer is so blindingly obvious I should go and read up on robes and

Comments

[fidelioscabinet]

Having grown up in the Southern US, let me assure you that the ideal behaviors people claim to admire and emulate often have little or nothing to do with the realities of how they behave behind the scenes. Traditionally, southern women are deferential to men--and yet we still have at least our share, if not more than the usual number of dragon-lady matriarchs, mama's boys, and Highly-managed Husbands (because none of them are hen-pecked, really, right?)

One of them interesting contrasts friends who've lived in Japan have mentioned is that the housewife really runs the house--the salaryman is "too busy" to worry about all the little details like the domestic budget, where the children go to school, and so on, and so on. An acquaintance who taught conversational English while living there said she never quite got over the shock of having one of her students, the wife of a well-to-do businessman, casually mention that when he didn't vote in a recent election the way she had advised him to (she researched all the candidates, because a good wife sorts these things out for her husband, who doesn't have time to pay attention to all the campaign stuff out there) she cut his allowance. She also fired the old geisha he'd used for fancy business entertaining for years when he was promoted, and she thought the geisha wasn't elegant enough to reflect his new status. But she was a properly-deferential wife, and was just looking out for him, and protecting his interests. One the one hand, he was waited on, and his every need considered, sometimes before he even got around to thinking about it. On the other hand, she ruled the roost in most matters.

It's a system I find difficult to get my mind around, and I'm old enough to remember relatives born in the late 19th century, who claimed to have some very old-fashioned worldviews, by our standards.

Of course, when it comes down to it, I suspect those passive Heian ladies were pretty aggressive sometimes--when it was just them--think about how Murasaki describes what Genji's mother went through. Of course, part of the reason she's not more assertive about fighting back against the women who torment her may be that her family's rank is much lower--so you not only have female deference to male, in her failure to tell the emperor she's had it, and is going home to Mama, but also lesser family rank deferring to greater when it comes to the Main Wife and the other ladies.

It is mind-boggling to a 21st century American feminist, though--I can feel my brain just kink up like a an over-twisted string trying to sort out why these people are doing what they're doing.