Women in China

The reading that I did for this post honestly made me really sad. In the America right now, I feel like women and men are fairly equal. There are definitely still places where men are treated inferior to women but for the most part, women are treated pretty good in America and other places around the world. It's so hard to imagine living in China during a time like the Han Dynasty. At this time they strongly believed in the Confucian principles such as men being superior to women and they also believed in respecting their elders. Because of their age and experience they were supposedly much wiser then younger people. They would arrange who their daughters would marry. In Lui Xijun's poem "Lament" she writes about how truly miserable she was in her situation. She was married off by her family to the King of the Wusun for political reasons. They sent her to a far away, remote place to go meet, marry, and start a life with him. He turned out to be an old, decrepit man. She hated her life and where she lived and what she had to eat to survive. All that she wanted was to be able to go home and have her old life back. In the end she said that she wished that she was a yellow snow-goose so she could fly home.

A woman named Ban Zhao wrote a "Lesson to Woman" in the late first century. She starts off by introducing herself as an "unworthy writer . . . unsophisticated, unenlightened, and by nature unintelligent." I couldn't believe that she was describing herself with such harsh terms. She went on to talk about how a woman's main purpose in life was to work and serve her husband. They had strict unspoken rules about being humble and yielding to and respecting others. They had to be virtuous and be careful of everything they said, or wore, or how they acted. The men were educated but the women didn't get the opportunity to receive an education. She did discuss, however, that men couldn't just disrespect their wife. They were a team--described as yin and yang. If a husband is unworthy then they didn't have the right to control their wife.

Another account of what it was like to be a woman during the Han Dynasty is shown in Fu Xuan's poem "To Be a Woman". This is weird to me because it is actually written by a man. The first line was really powerful to me, it says: "It is bitter to be a woman, the cheapest thing on earth." I don't think women at this time were abused or beaten as much as just made to feel like nothing; they feel cheap. Its makes me really glad that women are treated so much better and equal nowadays.

Antigone

In the play Antigone, by Sophocles, Antigone shows some heroic characteristics. Antigone is very strong in her beliefs of divine laws and is very loyal to the gods. When her brother dies, she makes it her life purpose to bury her brother. Creon, Antigone's uncle, is the ruler at the time and decrees that no one can mourn the death of Polynices and he cannot be buried. This was a terrible thing to command and Antigone just wanted to make things right for her brother so she did everything she could do to have him buried.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus went on a journey to obtain immortality. Antigone and Odysseus are similar in a lot of ways, they are both considered heroes in Greek culture because they were brave and they followed what they believed. They both fought for what they thought was right even though they faced hard things--even death. Many people were against them and didn't support them but they continued to do what they believed and both of them ended up dying because of it.

The main differences between Antigone and the Odyssey are Antigone is a play and the Odyssey is an epic and Odysseus went on a journey and had a lot of stops and trials along the way while didn't go on a journey; she just had a bunch of trials. And they both die but Antigone kills herself and Odysseus is killed. Also, Antigone takes place in Thebes and Odysseus is in the Agean sea most of the time.

Even though Antigone is considered a hero in Greek culture, I personally don't think she was that heroic. She did what she knew to be right but she didn't really do it for the right reasons. She did it more for selfish and prideful reasons rather than for the real good reasons that she should have. She tries to gain admiration and fame with the people and get praise from the gods. I still think she's heroic but she just is less of a hero then people think.