Visions of the Third Princess. Gendering spaces in The Tale of Genji illustrations

摘要

While literary scholarship takes the feminine nature of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji for granted, in the visual field the unveiling of interior female spaces through the peculiar technique of the "blown-off roof" can hardly be attributed to a genuinely "feminine perspective". Already in 12th century picture scrolls the distinction between tropes designating male and female erotic communication generated varying patterns of secretly spying at the other sex, based on the "blown-off roof device as well as the normative bird's-eye-view on the exterior of buildings. The paper focuses on 17th century representations of Genji's consort, the Third Princess, that in discriminating between female and male patterns of voyeurism betray an increasing awareness of the ambivalence implied in gendered ways of "seeing the other sex". In conclusion, the author reconsiders the paradigmatic role of gender in Japanese art history. She argues that from the Edo period onward speculations on the feminine aesthetics of Heian fiction obscured the male appropriation of Genji monogatari.