Chapter 23 Section 23: Female Figures

When Jun Huai returns to the sun, it is when the concubine is heartbroken. In Shakespeare's "When You Liked It," Rosalind says to her cousin Senia: "Oh, cousin, cousin, my little cousin, you know my love best How deep! But I cannot express: my love is as inexhaustible as the Gulf of Portugal." In China, a woman - a wife's love for her husband, and a man - the husband's love for his wife, It can be said that it is as unfathomable and indescribable as Rosalind's love for her cousin.It is as endless as the Gulf of Portugal. However, I'm going to talk about those differences between them.As I said, there are differences between the Chinese concept of perfect femininity and the ancient Hebrews' ideal femininity. In "Song of Solomon", the Hebrew lover expresses his love for his wife in this way: "How beautiful you are, oh my love, you are as beautiful as Telza, as beautiful as Jerusalem, as a ripping tree." Terrible as the army!" Even today, anyone who has seen a beautiful dark-eyed Jewish woman will admit that this picture of the ideal woman that the ancient Hebrew lovers ascribed to their race was true and vivid.However, with regard to the conceptual image of Chinese women, here I would like to point out that there is absolutely no frightening factor in it, either physically or spiritually.Even the beautiful Chinese "Helen" in Chinese history, who "one look at the city, and then look at the country", is scary only because of her irresistible inner charm.In my previous article entitled "The Spirit of the Chinese," I talked about an English word "gentle" (gentle), and used it to summarize the entire impression of the Chinese human type on others.If this generalization is true for real Chinese people, it is even more accurate for real Chinese women.In fact, this "gentleness" of the real Chinese has become, in Chinese women, a divine strange tenderness.The tenderness, humility, and submissiveness of a Chinese woman are just like what the woman said to her husband on New Year's Eve in Middle Milton:

God is your law, and you are my law; besides, I know nothing, and this is a woman's happiest knowledge and glory. Indeed, in the Chinese ideal of womanhood, you will not find in the ideal image of womanhood of any other people a quality of softness and tenderness which you cannot find in any other nation--no civilization, whether Hebrew, Greek, or Roman, does not have this feature.This perfect, divine, extraordinary tenderness is to be found only in one civilization, Christianity, when it reached its acme, the Renaissance. If you have read the beautiful story of Greselda in Boccaccio, you will have a glimpse of the true Christian ideal of woman in it.Then you will understand what this perfect submissiveness, this divine, purely disinterested tenderness, signifies in the Chinese ideal of womanhood. (z-70)

In short, in this divine and extraordinary tenderness, the true Christian image of the ideal woman is largely the same as the Chinese idea of ​​womanhood, but there is also a slight difference between them.If you compare carefully the Virgin Mary in Christianity, she is not the same as the Chinese Guanyin Bodhisattva, but just the same as the image of the banshee portrayed by outstanding Chinese artists, you can see this difference-the Christian ideal image of women is the same as the Chinese Differences between images in people's conceptions of women.The Virgin Mary is very gentle, and the perfect Chinese women are also gentle; the Virgin Mary is elegant, leisurely, and wonderfully light, and the ideal Chinese women are also soft, elegant, and wonderful.However, the Chinese ideal woman excels in that she is also light-hearted and courteous.For this charming grace expressed by the word "polite," you'd have to go back to ancient Greece, --(z-53)

Oh, I would go to the fields of the Speychdroc and the foot of Tecita, where the Spartan girls dance the Dionysian dance! In fact, you will have to go to the fields of Desaly and where the Specchdrok flows, to the foothills of Tecita, where the Spartan girls sing and dance. Needless to say, since the Song Dynasty in China, these Song Dynasty scholars who can be called ascetics of Confucianism have narrowed Confucianism, making it narrow and rigid. Under this way of thinking, the spirit of Confucianism and Chinese civilization The spirit has been vulgarized. --Since then, Chinese women have lost a lot of elegance and charm--the meaning expressed by the word "polite".Therefore, if you want to see the elegance and femininity expressed by "Li Li" in the true Chinese ideal of womanhood, you will have to go to Japan, where, even to this day, the pure Chineseness of the Tang Dynasty is preserved. civilization.It is this grace and femininity of the sacred and extraordinary tenderness of the Chinese ideal female image, which is signified by the word yuli, which endows the Japanese woman with the character of "nobility"--even with the poorest Japanese women of today. not excluded.

Concerning this characteristic of charm and grace expressed by the word "polite," allow me to quote here a few words from Matthew Arnold.Arnold contrasts the ideal woman of the rigid Protestant in England with that of the delicate and delicate Catholic of France, and Eugenie de Goonin, the beloved sister of the French poet Maurice de Goonin. , and an Englishwoman who wrote a poem entitled "Miss Emma Tasham," and then he said: The Frenchwoman is a Catholic from Languedoc, and the Englishwoman is a Protestant from Margot , Margot, in all its tedious discourse, in all its ugliness and inappropriateness--and, I might add, in all its beneficence.Between these two shapes and forms of life, on the one hand, there is the "nadalet" of Gurline at Christmas in Languedoc, her Easter service in the mud, her daily readings throughout her life as a saint; , the bare, empty, narrow English liturgy of Miss Tasham's Protestantism, her ecclesiastical organization in partnership with the church in Margot Halley Square; The chant of the passionate verse: