Another way or angle of analyzing, thinking about categorizing portraits or pictures, images of beautiful women in the 19th century, is to see what sort of situations they're drawn into. What actions they're performing. How they're interacting with other people or their environment. Or how they blend into or stand apart from the environment itself. There is a very interesting series of beauty images, bijin-ga, in the ukiyo-e or floating world genre of illustrated art from the 18th century, early 19th century. There's one series, which I want to introduce at the beginning of our lesson today. One very good example of different women caught in different situations, instances of life, as an image. Is the series published in 1802 titled, An Important Lesson, A Parents' Pair of Spectacles. And the artist is very well known abroad and here, in Japan, as well, as an ukiyo-e painter and illustrator, Kitagawa Utamaro. Let's take a look at this young woman here. We know that she's a young woman because she hasn't shaved off her eyebrows yet. Women who once married in this age would shave off their eyebrows and you can tell right away whether they're single or married. Anyway, she's lying down on her pillow reading a book. We don't know, from any of the words here or captions, what class, in other words, what station in society she's from. But we could infer from the simple hair decorations, her comb and the hairpins that she has, which are simple wood. And also by the kimono that she's wearing, the outer kimono, which is a yellow, checkered silk cloth, cloth that was woven in Hachijo Island to the south of Tokyo. This was often used by middle-class or upper-class merchants, young women in Edo at the time. So we can imagine that this young woman is the daughter of a merchant family, she works perhaps at a tea shop, perhaps at a brothel, or some other institution or shop somewhere in Edo that deals with customers where she's face-to-face with people that she deals with every day. The way that she's dressed and the fact that she's lying down with her hairpins and then reading a book implies that she's taken a little bit of time out of her busy day. She's perhaps still working, she's taken a short break, gone upstairs perhaps to lie down on her tatami mat. And she's spending her time by reading a book. The book that she's reading is an illustrated edition of a historical wartime chronicle, which was very popular among young men and young women right at the turn of the 19th century. She's reading it and its fascinating, it was very, very easy to read. Women, by the way, as well as young men of her age had very, very high literacy especially in the large cities at this time in Japan. We don't have literacy statistics as exist in France or Britain at this time. We do know from circumstantial documents and evidence that young women of her age, if they're merchants or even if they're farmers, were expected to be able to read simple texts, just in order to carry on life as citizens in their communities. Anyway, she is reading this text which was not the most easy or simple text to read, it's historical. It goes into depth about the wars of medieval Japan and so forth. So she's obviously trying to learn something, the way that people, adults in society many, many centuries ago conducted themselves: their morals, their ethics, and so forth. The title, which I mentioned earlier, Important Lessons: A Parent's Pair of Spectacles is written, literally, here within this pair of spectacles which have been put on their side. Sort of here at the top of the print. And also we have the title within the print itself. And also this particular episode it calls her a very, very sort of bright girl. Perhaps too bright for her own good. It's a title, it's a word that refers to sort of very bright, intelligent people who sometimes are a little bit too intelligent for themselves and for the people around them. It's not particularly critical, but it's sort of making fun at the fact that she's spending her valuable free time reading a book. What I'd like you to pay attention to is the fact that these lines here that go along her hair here, that are sort shaped along the edge of her hairdo here, are all words. There is a short prose passage here about what this young woman is like, what she does, the things that she likes, her character. Basically is giving a characterization of the fictional life of young woman who is portrayed in the portrait itself. Again, we might ask whether this ukiyo-e polychrome woodblock print from 1802 is a work of art, which could be studied in art history class. Or, having read this passage here, whether it's a closer to a work of literature, or it's closer to what should be categorized, thought together and analyzed with written text of the same age by different writers and authors and so forth. That's always a question that follows along, that keeps us company as we go through cultural artifacts in Japan in the 19th century. One of the things I really want us all to think about during this module but also throughout the whole course here, is how we would categorize, where we would place the different objects, the different images, the different texts that we're looking at. Whether they belong in the categories that we would, at first glance, assume they do, or whether there are different valances, different values within historical culture which prompt us to rethink these categories themselves.
