중국 역사속의 “팜므파탈” 여성형상 고찰

Abstract

‘Femme Fatal’ means an image of enchantress that was explosively popular in the literature and art of aestheticism and symbolism at the end of the century. The people of that era used to see it as a woman of fate who had a fatal charming enough to cause a man falling in love with her to death. In Chinese history, the ancient countries, Xia, Yin and Zhou, faded out always with "liquor and girl", which was one of reasons of their fall. Many of people warn you about girls and liquor. They keep saying that you must keep away from girls. However, it is your instinct as a man to be attracted to a beautiful girl. However, the ancient Confucianism scholars considered the women's political participation being helped by men as an injustice, so that they strictly limited the education for women. Such contradictory thoughts formed double aspects of a girl: a wise wife and cute concubine or entertainer to make a birth of negativeness and positiveness of Confucianism based society. 'Enchantress' was called an extreme temptation sometimes or an object of blame on the other hand among people. Such tendency did not only make it impossible for both man and woman to see the true figure of a woman but also distorted a woman as a human. In China, an extremely beautiful girl is called 'a woman of extraordinary beauty', which means a girl beautiful enough to cause a nation's downfall'. Such girls usually made kings' thoughts dull, so that the kings could not govern their countries in right ways, and furthermore, led the kings to wild life, and then finally caused the kings to loose their countries. This is also a very negative image of beautiful girls. Such beautiful girls were, however, rather poor figures who became political and social victims due to their born beauty. In this study, I try to arrange the 'femme fatal' images reflected in the figures of the girls who have been called the beauties in Chinese history and then discuss the truth and falsehood of such images. I reveal that such ‘femme fatal' images have been faked by men in fact. Such images of ‘femme fatal’ hide truth and falsehood. Beauty itself has been only one power that women can have because there could not have been properties or free will in women who had been subordinated under men for several thousands years. Men did not accept even such power of women and rather faked the images of such beautiful women into wicked women. Such beautiful women were, however, only the victims of their eras in the patriarchal societies that had kept subordinating women.