Jealous Woman in Asian Literature and Theater

¶ … Jealous Woman in Asian Literature and Theater

Muromachi Noh Theater and Aoi no Ue

Steven T. Brown's Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh adopts a 'new historicist' approach to the study of Noh Theater. In contrast to the dominant tendencies of western scholars, Brown is not interested in "reducing Noh to its theatrical conventions nor abstracting its style and poetics from its performance materiality" (1). Rather he concentrates on Noh as an example of a "micropolitics of culture" (3), which, according to him, is a type of politics grounded in "power relations and effects associated with figurations of authority, gender, subjectivity, naming and patronage" (3).

Brown's primary intention in the Theatricalities of Power is to trace the historical process whereby Noh became institutionalized as the official art form of Japan during the Edo period (1603-1867). Although Brown narrates the history of this institutionalization by highlighting specific historical events and practices in medieval and early modern Japan, he is also anxious to disclose the dynamic relationship between history and performance. To this end, he is concerned to investigate the "history in Noh" as much as the "history of Noh" (1). This statement is crucial: it highlights the productive power of Noh theater, the way in which it was used to consolidate shogunal authority and create new identities and subject positions:

Rather than simply mirroring the socio-political contexts in which they were performed, I argue that these plays constituted an active, productive force in the theatre of the medieval cultural authority [in Japan].

(Brown 2)

Theatricalities of Power is composed of six chapters divided into three sections. Section one, 'Theatrical Technologies of Power, Self, and Signification in Medieval Japan', charts the historical development by which Noh theater shed its folk and ritualistic trappings and became the official, state-sponsored form of entertainment. According to Brown, the key moment in this process occurred in the late fourteenth century when the young shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), decided to patronize and financially support the Yuzaki troupe, led by Zeami's father Kannami. For Brown, patronage radically transformed the aesthetics and purpose of Noh because it caused practitioners to create a new, more sophisticated form of drama that would appeal to and reflect the desires and aspirations of the aristocracy and military elites. Thus, while there is Noh explicit political agenda in the theories of Noh's great dramaturge, Zeami, Brown concludes that his theatrical ideas are enmeshed, implicitly, in cultural politics and material practices:

Although Zeami never wrote in any of his treatises that the characters in Noh speak politically [ ... ] nevertheless, Zeami's aesthetics of alterity is historically marked by the political ambition to secure and maintain patronage from the ruling military aristocracy upon which it depended.

(Brown 31-2)

Brown accounts for the subsequent institutionalization of Noh in Japan by referring to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital, the exchange mechanism whereby cultural forms and artifacts perpetuate existing power relations via a process of mimetic transference from one social class to another:

In a strange turn of events, court aristocrats began to imitate the cultural interests and practices of military aristocrats such as Yoshimitsu, insofar as their continued survival depended to a large extent on the generosity of the military.

(Brown 33)

In the second section, 'The Powers of Performativity', Brown reads the spiritual rhetoric of the Noh play Aoi no Ue as an attempt to mask harsher socio-economic realities. In Brown's view, the haunting of Lady Aoi, the pregnant wife of the prince Genji, by Rokuj?, his secondary wife, is neither a dramatization of the dangers of karmic attachment, nor an archetypal embodiment of feminine jealousy. On the contrary, it is symptomatic of the transformation in female inheritance rights that dispossessed and disenfranchised women during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. According to Brown's micropolitical interpretation, Aoi spiritual possession is caused by Rokuj?'s anger and resentment at her economic dispossession. Given that the play effectively demonizes Rokuj?, Brown claims that Aoi no Ue is a performance that both confronts and excuses patriarchal guilt:

Without reducing the plot to demonize Rokuj? To a full-blown conspiracy, I would argue that the staging of jealousy in Aoi no Ue [ ... ] was also an exorcism of the contingencies associated with the reversal of female inheritance rights, which played an important role in the further consolidation of Ashikaga shogunal authority and its differentiation from imperial authority.

(Brown 87)

The third section of Theatricalities of Power, 'Performativities of Power', continues its exploration of the 'micropolitics' of Noh Theater by showing how plays such as Ominanmeshi and Tomoe use the tropes of female suicide and female-to-male cross-dressing to consolidate and reproduce male supremacy in Japan. In these chapters, performance is conceived as a way of structuring and producing the real: it creates new identities and knowledge. Noh theater's productive role is emphasized in the final chapter of the book, 'The Hegemon as Actor', when Brown describes how the shogun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, trained as a Noh performer and acted in self-commissioned plays that rhetorically displayed and cemented his prestige and authority:

The Taik? Noh plays written for Hideyoshi are [ ... ] unique in the history of world drama by virtue of the unprecedented role played by Hideyoshi in his own self-staging, thus blurring the boundaries between theatricality and politics to a degree unimaginable even on the Shakespearean stage.

(Brown 126-7)

A Connection

The triumph of Buddhist law and saving of Lady Aoi contrasts with The Tale of Genji; in the novel, Lady Aoi "dies giving birth to Genji's son" (Morris 31).

Heian / Kamakura Literature and The Tale of Genji