著者

山内 政樹

出版者

関西学院大学

雑誌

英米文学 (ISSN:04246853)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.50, no.1, pp.57-69, 2005-12-15

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By the time George Eliot died, women writers constituted a set of frightening rivals in the literary marketplace. Henry Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is an educated character which comes out with the continuing interest in the psychological disturbance caused by a conflict between reason and emotion. Henry Knight the reviewer criticizes the novel written by Elfride Swancourt the woman writer. His criticism puts him in the position superior to woman writer. He lives within the frame of traditional phallogocentrism. The world he lives in is quite different from the real one. Knight projects his image upon the woman with whom he is in love, and then will attribute to her qualities quite different from those she really has. It is untried lips that Knight has desired. As he excessively sticks to his ideal woman, he feels uneasy about physical contact with real woman. Touching with woman's body, he becomes very nervous. This extreme restraint is not the expression of his wholly gentle and tender nature. Besides the predominant tenderness, there exists contrary but unconscious stream of hostility. The hostility is cried out through an excessive increase of tenderness which is expressed as anxiety. When he does not become superior to Elfride Swancourt as to sexual experiences, his tenderness changes into hostility and anxiety. He cannot accept the fact sexuality inheres in the psyche, or soul. Women writers gain more power in the literary marketplace, and women tend to become superior to men about sexual experiences, apart from their ideal angel. These two facts are linked with each other. Ascetic men and the recent writers are under the threat of the appearance of new women.