I am still rereading the Tale of Genji, and books about the culture of that period of Japan.

So quick: What does Genji, Lolita, and the film Pricilla have in common? Finding a young girl and grooming her to fit your idea of the ideal wife.

I could probably add WoodyAllen's seduction of his wife's adopted daughter, foot binding in China (this was done because men found small feet sexually arousing), and the way Confucian rules, Islamic rules, and even Christian rules limited women''s desire for self fulfillment...

Reading Lolita in Tehran is about the way that powerful men groom women into what they want women to be. In her book she finds a parallel between the pedophile writer of Lolita and the Mullah's crackdown on women in education and dress after the revolution.

The irony? In medical school, the book Lolita was used by our psychiatrist teacher to point out how very young women wanted sex:  but Nafisi points out that the book is actually written by the pedophile and is his point of view (to justify his sexual abuse of her). 

So add Freudian sexual theory into how men project their ideas onto women, and although his stress on trying to stop sexual repression was good, the end result was not liberation of women but teaching women it is better to be promiscuous than repressed as wives, meaning more responsibility free sex for men.

A lot of the patients seen by Freud were repressed (not just sexually of course: that's what he got wrong. These upper class ladies were put into a box telling them they had to be submissive wives, not independent workers and equal to their husbands).

One result of repressing desire (sexual and other personal areas) or by severe life stress (as in refugees) is conversion reaction: aka Hysteria.

We rarely see this in the USA, but I did see it in tribal Africa. And one only has to read Victorian novels where you read about those crazy ladies in the attic who were hysterics trying to cope with a society where they essentially were limited in what they could do. This was the theme of Jane Eyre, where Jane was trying to cope with her limited choices and of course the crazy wife in the attic who went crazy after a forced marriage...and this was one reason that it was both popular and controversial.

Back to Genji: how did women cope in this novel? Polygamy was fine for Genji and other men, but the women were miserable, as the female author of this book makes clear. Indeed, a lot of these women literally went crazy: in that society this hysteria was defined as Spirit Possession, and Genji's wives suffered from various versions of it.

Doris Bargen 's book on  Spirit Possession in the novel is titled: A Woman's weapon.

Goodreads review notes that by becoming possessed, women assert control over their own lives.

From this male-centered perspective, female jealousy provides a convenient explanation for the emergence of mono no ke within the polygynous marital system of the Heian aristocracy. Yet this conventional view fails to take into account the work's female authorship and its largely female audience. Relying upon anthropological as well as literary evidence, Doris G. Bargen foregrounds the motives of the possessed character and located mono no ke within the politics of Heian society, interpreting spirit possession as a female strategy adopted to counter male strategies of empowerment. Possessions become "performances" by women attempting to redress the balance of power; they subtly subvert the structure of domination and significantly alter the construction of gender.

My main disagreement with her excellent book is that this is written as if the spirit possession/hysteria was a deliberate choice, whereas I see it in the same way that passive aggression works in real life: the woman cannot chose, but her subconscious desires pop up and voila, conversion reaction occurs that helps her to cope (in this case, spirit possession but in real life, often hypochondria or exaggeration of real illnesses).

All of this is something to remember when you read stuff about the wonderfulness of polyandry or why we need to destroy marriage as a patriarchal institution.

Yes, under Confucian laws (in Genji), Islamic laws, or the now almost defunct laws of Christian fundamentalism in western Europe, women were put into a box and had choices limited. But men were also limited: they were pressured to take care of the women they seduced and the children they begot in such societies.

But if you want to raise children safely, being in a safe box with a man to protect you might be better than trying to cope with a full time job and raising children without any husband or extended family to help you.

Finally I should note that in Genji, another way women coped when threatened by unwanted attention or marriages  was to cut their hair and become a Buddhist nun.

 This probably worked in medieval Europe, both for women who didn't want a husband or for women who wanted to be nurses or teachers or scholars. However, contrary to the plot of the frustrated wife in She Came to Me, modern convents in the west won't let you come in to flee your marriage or the world.

so what is the answer?

I don't have a single answer. Life is complicated, but the modern idea to just destroy these rules ignore the innate biological facts that we were born sexual beings, and the religious idea that we were born in a time and place and with a body that includes sex and other desires, and it is how we cope with all of life that is important in the long run.

Which is why Murasaki's novel remains important to study to introduce a non Western voice into the loud rhetoric of the modern man hating feminists.