著者

小関 三平

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

vol.9, pp.89-122, 1995-03

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Jogakusei(the girls' school student)was one of the symbols of enlightenment and modernization in the Meiji Era. Naturally, many novelists described the various types of jogakusei and jogakusei-agari(the girls' school graduate). Analyzing these types, I attempt to illuminate the social situations surrounding them and their happiness or unhappiness. Part I focuses on the development of female education and the dominant influences upon it, two of which are of primary importance: first, the minken-undo, or movement emerged; second,an ideal of personal independence and equality taught by the Protestant missionaries who founded many Christian girls' schools. Jogakusei, therefore, was a new phenomenon symbolizing westernization and progress. Part II deals with the birth of the Jogakusei Novel at the end of the 1880s; this period was also the beginning of the modernization of novel writing characterized by realistic descriptions of the everyday life and psychology of the middle class. Readers can find there the conflicts between parents and their daughters and those among parents themselves. The period also saw the beginning of a nationalistic reaction against westernization in every sphere of social life. Its biggest symptoms were the publication of a textbook on female ethics by the Empress's initiative in 1887, and the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890. It was in this transitional stage, filled with serious ambivalence, that the Japanese public read the first female novelists born at the beginning of the Meiji Era and recently graduated from Tokyo Jogakko. Their works will be dealt with in a future article.