著者

三島 亜紀子

出版者

神戸女学院大学

雑誌

女性学評論 (ISSN:09136630)

巻号頁・発行日

no.15, pp.97-116, 2001-03

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Before committing suicide, Virginia Woolf wrote her memoir, "A Sketch of the Past,"in which she said that she was sexually abused by brothers-in-law in her childhood. Her experience as a sexually abused child has been discussed in Virginia Woolf studies. Most biographers think the experience had a great influence on her life and her works. For example, Dr.Emiko Kamiya, a well known psychiatrist, tried to explain Woolf's "insanity" and treated her as a patient of psychosis. This way of thinking can be considered as an outcome of development of Virginia Woolf studies in a sense when we read Quentin Bell's biography. Although Bell, Woolf's nephew, described her incestuous experience in it, he didn't mention the relationship between her "nervous breakdown"and the experience. Kamiya, whose understanding is different from Bell's, handled medical discourses for analyzing Woolf. Afterward, many theories based on diverse disciplines have been applied to interpreting Woolf's "madness,"and the "science of child abuse"has been adopted as well. Luise DeSalvo, one of the representative biographers of Woolf, depends on this new science. DeSalvo insists that Woolf was not a "lunatic"or a patient but a sexually abused child and "survivor." However, Virginia Woolf studies in Japan were limited in this respect because the "science of child abuse" has never been popular in Japan until guite recently. This paper illustrates various interpretations of Woolf's experience as a sexually abused girl and investigates the efficacy of these interpretations that are based on theories not of sexual abuse but of other disciplines.