- 著者
-
鈴木 万里
- 出版者
- JAPAN SOCIETY FOR GENDER STUDIES
- 雑誌
- 日本ジェンダー研究 (ISSN:18841619)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.2007, no.10, pp.17-26, 2007-09-22 (Released:2010-08-04)
- 参考文献数
- 21
The image of women in English literature changed dramatically in mid 18th century England. Christian tradition had long regarded women as ‘Eve's daughters’, which meant that women were invariably evil and harmful. By the end of the 18th century, however, women described in novels generally became good, modest, innocent, and vulnerable. The new trend in this image of the woman was initiated by Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), often described as ‘the first novel’ in English literature. Its morality and didacticism established the respectability of the form. Its popularity transcended the boundaries of class, gender, and educational differences. It had such a great an impact on society that it brought about a shift in the dominant expectations for female characters in subsequent novels throughout the century; young, beautiful, good, chaste, submissive, and vulnerable. It also represented gender positions and politics in modern indUstrialized patriarchal society; men provided with wealth, being superior, and women deprived and dependent, being inferior. It highly appraised woman's chastity of the kind which enabled a servant girl to become a lady, opening the way for heroines to engage in hypergamy. Consequently, the novel inspired considerable controversy over femininity and inter-class marriage. Two major novelists separately expressed an antagonistic view in the form of fiction. One is Henry Fielding, who published An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741); the other is Eliza Haywood, who wrote Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected (1741). Both of them criticized Pamela and her ‘virtue’, although they focused on comparatively different aspects of the novel. The former held a conservative point of view, in which Pamela was thought of as a potential threat to the stability of society. The latter held a feminist point of view; her heroine tries to undermine the male-dominant society in which the relationship between man and woman is based on exchange. It delineates the material realities of women's lives as well as their difficulties in pursuing financial security. The dispute caused by Pamela tells us that a new ideology of femininity was being constructed in the middle of the century. This article will shed light on this process as well as its social background and the changing values it epitomised.