Study Of The Female Epitaphs In The Yuan Dynasty

This paper aims to study the female survival condition in the Yuan dynasty, the literary style and the stylistic feature of female epitaphs.The introduction part serves as an overview of the paper's significance, the framework and the innovation.The first chapter means to study the external Ming Fu, involves the granting system, their knowledge, their religious belief and the duty of helping their husbands and teaching their children. So we can draw a conclusion that the external Ming Fu is a wise adviser as a wife, a successful educator as a mother, a competent manager as a housewife. They can realize the value of their life through putting these duties into their own pursuit.The second chapter focuses on the hermits' wives, including the state of being an official and hidden live in seclusion in Chinese history, the marital choice, the complex psychology of the hermits' wives. Finally, we can come to a conclusion that they married hermits mainly because of their parents'worship on the Confucianism, and the good economic conditions. In addition, some hermits were willing to be uxorilocal son-in-law, which is also an important factor. Of course, lots of women had a common goal with hermits; they always support their seclusion, while in the hope of their sons to becoming officials.Chapter three's study is about the common women, which means that they are not external Ming Fu or hermits'wives. We can't figure out their confirm identity from the epitaphs. So we should regard this kind of women as common women. I intend to describe three topics in this part:their idea of chastity, the widow's life, their virtuous and filial piety.The fourth chapter is the case study of the epitaph, namely the research for the epitaphs written by Yuji. First of all, I count the contents of the female epitaph written by Yuji, so we can study these epitaph's content and writing characteristics. Compared with the epitaphs written by other literati, we can make it clear that Yuji's work is distinctly narrateable, good at depicting the character. His writing style is easy. But they always show some noble style when describing the upper class women. In one word, his work is changeful; this changeful style reflects his proficient skills. He can do as he pleases when writing, so he was deserving of called the Wen Zong of the Yuan dynasty. However,1works are lack of passion because of his noble style.The fifth part is an odd theory. It mainly discusses the female epitaphs'stylis features and literary style. We can reach a decision that the epitaphs of Yuan dynas always show women's virtue through a kind of fantasy style, boast women's doing means of beautifying false or true, and avoid the subject of death by indirectness.The appendix part chooses fifty epitaphs related to the women groups described the main text to give a comments. But in principle, they don't coincide with the epitap mentioned in the body text. The purpose is to show the female life in a broader angle.Each part of this paper is not dependent, but Complement and explain for each oth I strive to make their combination maximally display the female life, and the stylist feature.