著者

別府 恵子 Keiko BEPPU

雑誌

女性学評論 = Women's studies forum

巻号頁・発行日

vol.10, pp.65-78, 1996-03

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The first ambience the infant experiences, in any culture, is the mother's body to which later configurations of space are necessarily related. Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land(1975) has unveiled a subtly programmed image system in American life and letters; the metaphorical experience of the "land-as-woman"persists along with the archetypal polarity of masculine and feminine, which results in the exploitation of the "land-as- woman" in patriarchal culture. Historically, as Kolodny's book testifies, the "land-as-woman"(land is woman) has been the object of man's desire of all kinds: geopolitical strategies, sexual gratifications, and artistic creations. In such socio-cultural construct woman has been deprived of her natural right as the subject of her own body. Woman's body has been codified, even more so than man's, within the patriarchal culture as something desirable, dispensable, and disposable. This somewhat freewheeling essay on "foot fetishism" examines the abuse of woman's body as observed in two defferent cultures: in the fairy tale "Cinderella,"and in two early short stories by the Japanese novelist, Tanizaki Junichiro:"The Tattoo"(1910) and "Fumiko's Foot"(1919). Anne Sexton's poem entitled "Cinderella"in Transformations(1971) is an ingenious rewriting of the fairy tale, narrated by "a middle-aged witch,"as the speaker of the poem calls herself. In this ironic rendering of a "pretty woman's"success story, the prince charming is transformed into a shoe salesman, who goes on the road, as it were, to find the shapely female foot that should fit the gold shoe. In capitalist culture the prince's effort is trivialized as that of a salesman who must promote the company's campaign to sell a certain kind of shoes. Tanizaki's "The Tattoo"dramatizes the tattooer's passionate adoration of beauty represented in "a feminine foot of absolute perfection."The ironic twist at the end is the tatooer's complete surrender to that beauty the artist creates; the creator himself has no contorol of his own creation. The art student in "Fumiko's Foot" makes a confession,to "the writer,"of a crazed old man's foot fetishism he likewise secretly shares. The fetish obsession with woman's bare foot, which leads to creation of beauty in Tanizaki's stories here examined, is no less than a perverted sexual gratification for woman. At the same time, in the light of Tanizaki's essay "In Praise of Shadows"(1933), the fetish interest in female beauty expressed by the characters in his stories is better appreciated as the artistobservers' manifesto of an aesthetics. Just the same, the foot fetishism here considered-both the craze for the gold shoe and the adoration of a shapely female foot-is nothing but the abuse of woman's body and of man's as well. Eros in its ideal form is possible only when man and woman regain his/her wholeness, in control of his/her own body.

著者

別府 恵子 Keiko BEPPU

雑誌

女性学評論 = Women's studies forum

巻号頁・発行日

vol.25, pp.1-23, 2011-03

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The two periods, which stand out in the literary history of the United States,are the "American Renaissance" of mid-nineteenth century,and the 1920s which began with the May Day riots in 1919, and died a spectacular death in October 1929. " The jazz age" is the name given to this special decade, " an age of miracles, an age of art , an age of excess, and an age of satire." After the end of the First World War, the United States suddenly found itself on its way to a world's superpower, to quote F.Scott Fitzgerald," it danced into the limelight" on the international political stage. The age gave women their suffrage, and liberated women dramatized themselves as flappers. They had got rid of the Victorian mores of genteel tradition, smoked and drank in public,enjyoying free sex. Their lifestyle and fashion became the cultural symbol of the decade, when " a whole race[went] hedonistic, deciding on pleasure." The same 1920s produced a rich variety of artists, novelists, and poets: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, W.C.Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Also, a group of gifted women poets- Amy Lowell, Mina Roy, Dorothy Parker, Elinor Wylie, and Edna St.Vincent Millay- gave the 1920s its distinct color and " a lovely light." However, later on they have either been critically ignored or simply forgotten in the literary history of the United States. This essay is a vindication of Edna St.Vincent Millay(1892-1950), the first woman poet who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver(1923), through an examination of her representative poems in their historical context then and now. She is the "savage beauty, " who dedicated her life to the creation of beauty, leaving significant poetical works including some 200 sonnets written on the ecstasy and the anguish of love.