Organizer and Chair: Tomiko Yoda, Duke University
Discussant: Norma M. Field, University of Chicago
Perhaps more than any other moment in Japanese history, Heian is perceived as a period in which gender difference figured prominently as the organizing force of culture. Familiar adjectives given to Heian literature—aesthetic, emotional, personal, etc.—are underwritten by the gendered (that is "feminine") principle purportedly operating in the genre. Furthermore, Heian culture as a whole is commonly presented as a world neatly divided between the feminine-private-native sphere against the masculine-public-Chinese sphere.
The panel attempts to question such naturalized alignments of gender, society and cultural production in Heian from a variety of angles. LaMarre locates productive hybridization rather than sterile opposition among gendered social spaces and practices at Heian court. Cavanaugh studies aesthetic sensibility in Genji monogatari—conventionally associated with the production of social harmony—as marking moral as well as aesthetic divide that turn on gender difference. Kawashima recasts the notion of "Heian women’s writing" as a complex historical construct developed by the critical tradition of the genre. And Yoda examines the ways in which female discursive agency is manipulated within a Heian text, its meaning constructed in relation to other social orders (such as literary genres).
The broader goal of the panel is to explore the contemporary relevance to the Heian literature. By questioning the interpretive frameworks which have been deemed self-evident and transhistorically valid by existing scholarship, the panel approaches the genre as a significant site in which gendered and national identities of modern Japan have been negotiated.
Thomas LaMarre, McGill University
This paper will first examine the construction of the feminine hand (onnade) and feminine poem (onnauta) at the early Heian court. Of particular importance are transformations that occur in the ninth century: (1) shifts in the visibility of court women with the advance of practices related to cloistering and concubinage; (2) the emergence of the regency system; (3) the formation of diurnal habits and spaces (related to hare and ke); and (4) the role of competitions (awase) in the distribution of rank and status. These factors help to explain how the positions of women within the court came to be mediated by feminine styles that once afforded women’s participation and limited their mobility. This analysis will serve to situate the functions and possibilities of gendered space at the Heian court.
The feminine style was differentiated from the masculine style (wotokode), and this pair overlapped with a distinction between Yamato and Han styles—now often called Japanese and Chinese styles. I turn to this overlap in order to look at the specific mode of interaction of these pairs. The aim is to challenge the imposition of what some feminist theorists call "a discourse on the mother tongue"—i.e., the overlap of feminine and Yamato styles is often taken as proof that women were linguistically isolated and thus they sustained the purity of Japanese speech and customs. To the contrary, the Heian court imagined the interaction of masculine/feminine together with Han/Yamato, and used it productively in order to establish sites of exchange and hybridization.
Carole Cavanaugh, Middlebury College
The paper argues that aesthetic language has meaning in Genji monogatari apart from its advocacy of miyabi or its role in the systematization of the beautiful. The prominence of emotional and aesthetic considerations in all matters in Genji proposes a function for negative aesthetic sentiment that goes beyond cultural instruction and artistic edification, to reach into areas of moral response. Shock and revulsion (expressed in words that ask for intersubjective agreement, such as asamashi or utomashi) are irreducible responses to offensiveness. These negative aesthetic responses articulate moral matters that within the narrative allow no compromise, particularly with regard to death and sexuality. Aestheticism in Genji monogatari is not only romantic or literary, it literally structures moral capacity.
When aesthetics and moral sentiment are linked, relations between men and women reveal themselves as ethical locations, not surprisingly for intersexual relations, but also for matters of life and death. Is the capacity for moral response then complicated by gender? The paper poses this question to address one more primary: how does aesthetic responsiveness structure the morally repellent in the Genji monogatari mentality?
Terry Kawashima, University of Minnesota
This paper investigates the issues of "female experience" and "authorship" in Heian literature by problematizing the works and figure of Ono no Komachi (active mid-ninth century), perhaps the best-known female poet from that period. Past scholarship has often attempted to establish biographical "truths" about her figure through readings of her poems; instead, I focus on narratives and poetry collections as motivated, strategic, and gendered sites of representation which propagate specific and seemingly naturalized images of the figure named Komachi.
I first examine selected prose works from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries which claimed to tell or were understood as stories about her life—those which portray Komachi as having enjoyed wealth and beauty in her youth, only to suffer severe decline in old age; I read these texts as attempts to domesticate her sexuality. I then turn to poetry collections which include poems attributed to Komachi, and show that changes in the selection of poems supposedly composed by her resemble those changes which take place in narrative depictions of her life-story.
Writers and compilers after Komachi’s lifetime constructed certain visions of "female experience" which fit their agendas, literary or religious, through the interweavings of Komachi’s figure and her oeuvre. "Female authorship," in this case, represents notions of who she was and what she had (or should have written), held by later generations. The case of Ono no Komachi thus suggests a reconsideration of "Heian women’s writing": her figure challenges the boundaries of all three terms.
Tomiko Yoda, Duke University
This paper examines the female narrator of Tosa nikki, one of the first Japanese literary texts that presents self-consciously gendered narrative discourse. It focuses on the manners in which the text both invokes and exploits the mono-literacy of women in the bi-literate Heian society. It is often believed that the text’s male author Ki no Tsurayuki wrote in a female voice in order to imitate aristocratic women’s practice of writing about their private lives in the native orthography and language—i.e., the text simply reflects the contemporary gendered literary and linguistic institutions. I question this view by pointing out the ways in which the text manipulates the boundaries that define gender, genres, writing and socio-linguistic communities, placing them in mutually constituting relations.
By deploying a narrator who supposedly cannot write Chinese poetry, the text places Japanese and Chinese poetry in separate spheres of writing. Locating Japanese poetry in such a new discursive space, the text claims the legitimacy of yamato uta as a literary discourse that equals kara uta. This context of Japanese poetry that the Tosa nikki implicates, however, has to be carefully distinguished from the unified field of Japanese language, orthography and literature that has been attributed to the Heian period. The dissonance between modern scholarship’s appropriation of the text as the embodiment of an emerging native language and literature, and the text’s own rhetoric of refashioning Japanese poetry helps us to rethink the function of gender in Heian literary history.