Speaking Feminine Virtue

Most speakers and learners of Japanese accept ‘women’s language’ as a naturally-occurring phenomenon, rooted in the speech practices or inherent femininity of its users. However, investigation into the origins of this supposedly-innate language variety contradicts the gradual, organic formation of women’s speech that one might expect. Rather, we see a careful discursive construction of women’s language throughout Japan’s history. This thesis examines the literary texts of the Nara and Heian periods, diaries, letters, and official records of women serving in the imperial court of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, and women’s conduct manuals in the Edo period to analyze the origins of ‘women’s language,’ the ways in which vernaculars of some women were appropriated and applied to all women, and the ideological currents that reinforced these norms in cultural practice. My analysis found that pre-modern metalinguistic discourses provided a foundation of legitimacy for future discourses surrounding ‘women’s language.’ I examined how changes in women’s social and political standing during the medieval period led to the genesis of court women’s speech, finding that this speech style was diffused through early prototypes of conduct manuals tailored for women. As conduct manuals aimed at women gained prominence in the Edo period, the norms associated with virtuous ‘women’s language’ became inseparable from economic class and social status, and through appropriation of court women’s language conduct manuals were implicit in the erasure of women’s linguistic innovation. In spite of these rigid norms, the numerous examples of women’s subversive and non-standard language use suggest that there were ways for women to bend the rules and that there was, ultimately, more to women’s language than conduct manual discourses would lead us to believe.Bachelor of Art