It's been a crazy week: lots of work, lots of distractions (third presidential debate), and various meetings thrown in for good measure. I've thus gotten behind in blogging. But before the week gained momentum and stole my time and attention I had a chance, on Monday evening, to go to a movie with my wife and daughter. We saw "The Duchess." It wasn't all that good, though cinemagraphically pretty. But it brought to mind certain historical manifestations of Confucianism.
The story follows the life of Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire in the latter decades of the 18th century. She is obviously privileged, born into aristocracy and elevated further up the social hierarchy through marriage. Her life of wealth and comfort are disrupted, however, by the harsh realities of British society of that time. The Duke to whom she is married turns out to be a jerk, taking what amounts to a second wife or concubine, treating Georgiana as merely a son-producing machine. When Georgiana tries to fight back and gain some measure of autonomy and self-respect within the family, she is crushed. She has no rights. When she starts her own affair with another man, her husband threatens her with utter ruin, invoking the ultimate punishment: never letting her have contact with her children again. He holds all the cards legally and socially and economically. She must accept being forced into a social role of his choosing. At one critical moment, when she turns to her mother for advice, the elder woman simply says, "there is not alternative."
So, it should be obvious by now how this story brought to my mind images of Confucian practice in China. Whatever the classic texts themselves might have suggested, Confucian thought was institutionalized, based on a fusion with Legalism (PDF!), in Imperial China in a manner that served hierarchy and power and patriarchy. The subordination of women was fundamental. Indeed, the early twentieth century rejection of Confucianism by many Chinese intellectuals opened the door then for an assertion of women's rights and a rejection of patriarcy (even if that promise would still take decades to realize).
In short, Georgiana Spencer's story is something high born 18th century Chinese women could completely understand.
This leads to another point. If women were so clearly dominated in 18th century Britain, if their experience shares some obvious similarities with their Chinese sisters, I think we then need to reconsider the distinction we tend to draw between "East" and "West." These overly simplistic generalizations are usually meant to stand for a difference in regard to the position of the individual versus some notion of a collective. The "West" is supposedly more individualistic, while the "East" is said to subordinate the individual to the family or society or some such collective. To the extent that this distinction is ever really useful, the Spencer story would seem to suggest that, in very fundamental ways the "West" was not really "Western" in the late 18th century. Perhaps the "West" did not really become the "West" until it was in more direct interaction with the "East," which possibly was never as "Eastern" as our generalizations imply.
So, here's a question: When did the West Westernize? At what point did it become empirically the "West" of our stereotype?
I'm thinking it was about 1970....
not even close. The west became the west we think of in the 15th century following the Spanish reconquista, which was basically the Spaniards kicking the Moors out of Spain
Posted by: David Stack | December 09, 2008 at 10:56 PM