著者
北村 有紀子
出版者
拓殖大学
雑誌
拓殖大学論集. 人文・自然・人間科学研究 (ISSN:13446622)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.13, pp.45-57, 2005-03-20

This study aims to investigate how the Jewishness is portrayed in Anita Brookner's seventeenth novel, Visitors. The protagonist, Dorothea May, is "English," and her late husband, Henry, and his relatives are "Jewish." However, it is Dorothea who is mentally the outsider. Moreover, after a dream about a sunless vision of Heaven, which is reminiscent of a painting by L.S. Lowry, Dorothea starts to seek for another Heaven in the sun, i.e., the Israelite vision of the Old Testament. It is clear that Dorothea possesses both "Englishness" and "Jewishness." This contradictory situation of Dorothea's identity could be explained as characteristic of Brookner's diasporic British-Jewish writing.