ABSTRACT
In 1994, in her article entitled “Gracia Hosokawa Tama,” Elizabeth Gössmann challenged one of the misrepresentations of Tama Gracia as an ideal wife, ready to sacrifice herself for her husband.1 Gössmann was inspired by Miura Ayako’s historical romance, Hosokawa Garashiya fujin, of 1975.2 In this wellresearched fiction, Miura criticized both the Japanese feudal family system and European missionary values which bound women of sixteenth-century Japan to this misrepresentation, depicting Tama Gracia as a strong, learned, intelligent, and liberated woman. Gössmann responded to Miura’s view and said, “it is not impossible to discover Gracia as an independent woman, in spite of all the exterior limitations and prohibitions from which she had to suffer.”3 She saw in Tama Gracia “an attitude of female autonomy.”4 Finding the key of Tama Gracia’s liberation in the Christian gospel, she continued: “[Even] if Christianity in that time preached the subordination of women to men,” the fundamental message of the gospel informed women of the possibility of attaining equality of the two sexes in “personality, responsibility and reliability.”5 Gössmann concluded her essay by saying that upon the foundation which Miura laid, “we only have to ‘emancipate’ her from the prejudices of male chauvinism to find out that her life did not merely consist of self-sacrifice and suffering, even if she had to suffer hard.”6 Gössmann called forth “modern Japanese women writers of history as well as fiction” to “reshape this important figure of Japanese history.”7
