Discourses of desire and female resistance in the Tale of Genji.

Abstract

This dissertation delineates the presence, in <italic>Genji monogatari, </italic> of a critical subtext that is juxtaposed against three hegemonic, socio-ideological discourses of desire that inform the whole work. The first of these is the aesthetic discourse of idealized love embodied in the <italic> Kokinshu,</italic> the second the public discourse of imperial-bureaucratic marriage politics, and the third is the discourse of erotic adventure, or <italic> irogonomi.</italic> Employing Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism as my basic conceptual framework, I argue that author Murasaki Shikibu engages in a dialogical critique of love and desire as romanticized by the patriarchal milieu of the Heian aristocracy. This submerged critique, manifest in the interior responses of the female characters to their sociopolitical positioning, constitutes a silent resistance to the ideological premises found in these hegemonic discourses of poetic love, marriage politics, and erotic conquest. In Chapter I, I investigate the applicability of Bakhtin to <italic> Genji monogatari</italic> and determine the extent to which Murasaki Shikibu allows her protagonists to articulate and develop discourses in response to, and in conflict with, her own representation of the reigning socio-ideologies of Heian court society. In Chapter II, I present the case that Murasaki Shikibu's narrative method communicates a resistance to the dominant ideologies of her time through fragmented layering and juxtaposition of narratorial discourse, dialogue between characters, and the inclusion of female interior monologues. In Chapter III, I analyze the lyrical discourse of desire constituted by the five scrolls on the theme of Love in the first imperial anthology, <italic> Kokinshu.</italic> I then examine <italic>Genji</italic>'s apparent privileging and easily overlooked critique of <italic>Kokinshu's </italic> conception of idealized love. In Chapter IV, I highlight <italic> Genji monogatari's</italic> discourses of marriage politics and erotic adventure. Comparing the text's gendered portrayals of desire, I discuss how the significance of Genji's marriage politics eventually came to be recognized and discussed in <italic>Genji</italic> scholarship, in particular in Orikuchi Shinobu's work on <italic>irogonomi.</italic> Resistance to the centralizing forces of the reigning ideologies is configured in the tale as a recurrent tension generated by the silent but eloquent juxtaposition of courtly ideologies against female protagonists', as well as the narrators', ambivalent responses to them. However submerged beneath the always already inscribed languages of the patriarchy, this tension can be read as Murasaki Shikibu's critique of Heian gender relations, and of the ways in which female desires were circumscribed and silenced in her society and in her time. In sum, this dissertation seeks to recuperate a buried discourse of female resistance that has remained obscured through centuries of voluminous exegeses on a female-authored text that is also considered the premier masterpiece of the classical Japanese canon.