著者

別府 恵子

出版者

神戸女学院大学

雑誌

女性学評論 = Women's studies forum (ISSN:09136630)

巻号頁・発行日

no.10, pp.65-78, 1996-03

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The first ambience the infant experiences, in any culture, is the mother's body to which later configurations of space are necessarily related. Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land(1975) has unveiled a subtly programmed image system in American life and letters; the metaphorical experience of the "land-as-woman"persists along with the archetypal polarity of masculine and feminine, which results in the exploitation of the "land-as- woman" in patriarchal culture. Historically, as Kolodny's book testifies, the "land-as-woman"(land is woman) has been the object of man's desire of all kinds: geopolitical strategies, sexual gratifications, and artistic creations. In such socio-cultural construct woman has been deprived of her natural right as the subject of her own body. Woman's body has been codified, even more so than man's, within the patriarchal culture as something desirable, dispensable, and disposable. This somewhat freewheeling essay on "foot fetishism" examines the abuse of woman's body as observed in two defferent cultures: in the fairy tale "Cinderella,"and in two early short stories by the Japanese novelist, Tanizaki Junichiro:"The Tattoo"(1910) and "Fumiko's Foot"(1919). Anne Sexton's poem entitled "Cinderella"in Transformations(1971) is an ingenious rewriting of the fairy tale, narrated by "a middle-aged witch,"as the speaker of the poem calls herself. In this ironic rendering of a "pretty woman's"success story, the prince charming is transformed into a shoe salesman, who goes on the road, as it were, to find the shapely female foot that should fit the gold shoe. In capitalist culture the prince's effort is trivialized as that of a salesman who must promote the company's campaign to sell a certain kind of shoes. Tanizaki's "The Tattoo"dramatizes the tattooer's passionate adoration of beauty represented in "a feminine foot of absolute perfection."The ironic twist at the end is the tatooer's complete surrender to that beauty the artist creates; the creator himself has no contorol of his own creation. The art student in "Fumiko's Foot" makes a confession,to "the writer,"of a crazed old man's foot fetishism he likewise secretly shares. The fetish obsession with woman's bare foot, which leads to creation of beauty in Tanizaki's stories here examined, is no less than a perverted sexual gratification for woman. At the same time, in the light of Tanizaki's essay "In Praise of Shadows"(1933), the fetish interest in female beauty expressed by the characters in his stories is better appreciated as the artistobservers' manifesto of an aesthetics. Just the same, the foot fetishism here considered-both the craze for the gold shoe and the adoration of a shapely female foot-is nothing but the abuse of woman's body and of man's as well. Eros in its ideal form is possible only when man and woman regain his/her wholeness, in control of his/her own body.