Essay about gossamer years analysis

Submitted By mingxuan-tang
Words: 692
Pages: 3

According to the book The Gossamer Years, gender play a relative unbalanced role in the distribution of the wealth and power during the Heian period. Men owned the most of wealth and power and thus women could hardly have access to the wealth and power. From my perspective from the book, women only had a freedom of action.In the book The Gossamer Years, the author tried to deliver the emotion which could described as unhappy and disappointed to the marriage,even the society through the actions and observations including in the book. She compiled her memoirs which could be regarded the detailed description of life of a noblewoman. According to these detailed memoirs, she depicted the uneven standings between men and women and the sympathetic daily life for a noblewoman residing in the period of Heian Japan. Throughout the the book The gossamer Years, we can know that the men in the aristocracy hierarchy could have multiple lovers From the perspective of men at that period, the right to have multiple wives could be seen as the symbol of high status and dominant of the society. However, it is really pitied for the women there who could not get the complete love from their husband. According to the detailed description in the book, Fujiwara Kaneie sent sweet letters frequently to the author when they were falling in love with each other. Just as the note Kaneie left to the author in the beginning of the book, “I had hoped to spend at least today with you, but the indications are that this would not be convenient. Have you left me and become a hermit?”(page 35). We could see Kaneie took a lot effort including sending letters and frequently visiting to court the aurthor. However, they got far away from each other after Kaneie got married with his another wife. The relationship between them came to be worse and worse. Kaneie visited less frequently in the following days :“His visits became still more infrequent. I began to feel listless and absent-minded as I had never been before”.(page 40) . The relationship between them came to be worse and worse . “ Then he seemed to assure me of dependability;but the place he called home was not obviously here,and our relationship was far away from what I would have had it.”(page 51) Finally, she literally had nothing left except only one child and “he life is rich only in sorrow and loneliness”.(page 52) We could concluded that it’s a completely failure marriage for the author but it is destined to be failure at that period. Women could not get the same standing as men and men usually took few accounts of their