Reading response - Essay Example

Reading response One can see that power politics provide less importance to the problems faced by the common people, especially the marginalization faced by womenfolk. The collection of poem named as Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute by the Chinese poet named Liu Shang is an attempt to extract reality from history and to elevate femininity beyond limitations. Thesis statement: The poet attempts to prove that how historical power politics within ancient Chinese context marginalized womenfolk and how they withstood the same with courage.

Purpose First of all, the author unveils the grass-root level reasons behind the atrocities faced by women during Han Dynasty. To be specific, the female protagonist (Cai Yan) belongs to the upper-class society. But her esteemed social status was not helpful to keep away from the clutches of power politics. The narrator in the poem by Liu Shang states that, “Smoke and dust darkened the countryside, overrun by barbarians; They knocked aside my widow’s vows, and my chastity was lost” (Chang, Saussy, and Kwong 23).

To be specific, she was abducted, raped, and forced to lead her life with her abductors. So, the author purposefully selected the life of Cai Yan to portray the social life during the reign of Han Dynasty. Setting The author selected Chinese history as the setting of his literary work because history does not reveal everything. To be specific, historical writing focuses upon power politics and ignores the problems faced by the mass. So, the author purposefully chose an epoch from Chinese history to unleash literary creativity.

This is important because the poem provides ample importance to the main problems faced by the female protagonist within her public and private domains. Personal opinion The poem can be considered as the combination of history, feminist ideology, and imagination. For instance, the female protagonist’s words reveal the historical background of the problems faced by her in her society. Similarly, the author incorporates feminist ideology within the poems because the same is in the form of first person perspective by the female protagonist.

On the other side, the poem is symbolic of imaginative capacity because it unveils a woman’s emotionality. Summing, the poet depends the female protagonist to unmask the link between power politics and marginalization. To be specific, the poet makes use of feminist perspective to unmask the limitations of traditional poetry. In short, the poem is most appealing to me because it touched my heart by portraying how the female protagonist managed to survive in a society under male domination.

Works CitedChang, Kang-i Sun, Haun Saussy, and Charles Yim-tze Kwong,eds. Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism. California: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print.