The Shaping Of Ideal Female Feature In Tang Dynasty

The image feature of women in the eyes of people in the Tang Dynasty were relatively open,but the few records of women in the ancient books can only prove that this kind of openness belongs to the minority,and most of the middle and lower class women were in the hidden corner of the society.The discovery of a large number of epitaph provides us with rich materials to explore the female images in the Tang Dynasty,which is able to explore the ideal female images and female concepts in people’s minds through the text written by Tang people.Many female epitaph in the Tang Dynasty have the information of their authors,and the relationship between them will inevitably affect the view on women.According to the epitaph,writers can be divided into three: those who write by Imperial edicts,those who write by inviting,and those who write by relatives.In this paper,I will explore the ideal female image in Tang people’s mind by different writers of female epitaph.The female epitaph wrote by Imperial edicts mainly belonged to princesses,concubines and other noble women.Thier image features were closely related to the emperor.Overall,as a kind of gradually stereotypes in troublesome to write the epitaph of official writing,but little about the life of chi master detail,has the characteristic of "vague gorgeous".Female epitaph wrote by inviting was more common in the Tang Dynasty.It was mainly composed by officials and literati who were good at literature and asked by the families of the volunteers to write epitaph.Those who are not familiar with the volunteers themselves are called good writers,whose female images are more stereotyped.However,the female epitaph written by those who knew the volunteers mostly started from the trifles of life,which showed the freshness of the volunteers’ images.Female epitaph wrote by relatives present images of women playing different roles in family life throughout their lives.They switched from one family role to another,but almost all of them were closely related to their marriage,reflecting women’s attachment to men at that time.Finally,through the common words in the female epitaph,it can be seen that the ideal female feature in Tang Dynasty is a virtuous woman with family as the center.Buddhism belief seems to be a constraint means for widowed women to maintain their chastity,so it can be seen that the concept of chastity is an important part of the concept of women in the Tang Dynasty,and also adapted to the orthodox view of women in the Confucian society.