著者

酒井 敏

出版者

東京家政学院大学

雑誌

東京家政学院大学紀要 (ISSN:02866277)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.16, pp.85-94, 1976-10-31

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"Woman" has always been an important main theme of literature in any age and in any nation of the world, because of the fact that women have been regarded more or less as a beautiful, graceful and lovable being throughout many centuries, and also because literature as an art has been pursuing beauty all the time. That is why "woman" was and is one of the most essential objects of expression for art whose foremost aim is to seek beautiful things and express them in an actual, yet imaginative form so as to provide us with some aesthetetic delight. Now the present writer intends to take up some women appearing in several works of the Middle English literature, and to make an inquiry into their characters and personality with special reference to the ideal images of women in the Middle Ages. Here in this small tentative paper we shall deal with, for example, Wealhtheow in Beowulf, Guenevere in Malory's Morte d' Arthur as main characters, and in addition to them, we shall also look into two maidens with the same name of Elaine found in the Arthurian legend. They are respectively typical women living in the days of King Arthur, and at the same time they represent different aspects of the ideal type of the woman in those days. That is, each one of them is described in such a way that she becomes a symbol of the ideal which has been longed for by most people in the Middle Ages.