著者

高橋 愛

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.229-236, 2015-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

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Moby-Dick has been considered to be the most masculine of Herman Melville's novels. However, few studies have extensively considered the masculinity of those on board the Pequod despite the possibility that Melville had worked hard to express masculinities that deviated from the norms of American society in the nineteenth century. This paper discusses Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Seas, as a character onto whom Melville projected a facet of his multiple ideas of masculinity, by examining his body and his behaviors. First, Queequeg's race and ethnicity are ambiguous, though he is introduced as a Pacific Islander. His tattooed body characterizes him as non-white, but at the same time he transgresses the color line with his phrenologically excellent skull. His tattoos do not reveal any ethic characteristics, though it is said that he is based on a real Maori chief. Additionally, Queequeg's sexuality and gender are also ambiguous. He has a cordial friendship with Ishmale, a common sailor and the narrator of the novel. However, their friendship often seems too sensual to presume that they are just friends: Queequeg caresses his friend many times and his actions anticipate the homoerotic ecstasy that Ishmael experiences later. There also seems to be indications that Queequeg is transgender: for instance, his affectionate huging of Ishmael and his rescue of Tashtego, another harpooner. Given these points, Queequeg seems to be portrayed as an amorphous man who transgresses the boundaries of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. It is possible that his amorphous self is a projected image of what Melville regards as masculine.

著者

北村 紗衣

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, pp.149-167, 2011-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

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In J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, the barbarian girl, one of the main characters, suddenly begins to menstruate during the journey to the territory of her people, the barbarians. This scene of menstruation might seem irrelevant to the rest of the novel, which deals with the conflict between the Empire and the barbarians. Few critics have mentioned the menstruation in this novel, although Waiting for the Barbarians has been the subject of considerable commentary. However, if it is irrelevant to the novel's plot, why does Coetzee go out of his way to describe menstruation, even though literature seldom mentions it? In fact, some haunting images in Waiting for the Barbarians, such as children and blood, are closely linked to menstruation. This paper discusses how menstruation, a phenomenon that has many layers of meaning, works in this novel, focusing mainly on its physiological and symbolic meanings. On the physiological level of meaning, menstruation in Waiting for the Barbarians means that the barbarian girl is not pregnant; and it serves as a kind of foreshadowing of her clear break with the Magistrate, an officer of the Empire and the novel's narrator. After the Magistrate has sex with the barbarian girl, for a quick moment he dreams of making a family with her; but her menstruation shows that it is impossible for them to have children together. She leaves him and returns to her people just after menstruating. On the symbolic level of meaning, the barbarian girl's menstruation means that the "flow," which the Empire's control blocked, returns at the "margin," or the boundary, where the Empire's power intertwines with that of the barbarians. Under the Empire's control, blood is described as stagnant and clotted, and natural phenomena's flow is also disrupted. The flow, however, is visualized as menstruation when the barbarian girl reaches the boundary between the Empire and the barbarians' territory. Menstruation, the physiological phenomenon of blood leaking from a woman's body at its margin, symbolises boundary-crossing and overlaps with the act of geographic boundary-crossing, the barbarian girl's and the Magistrate's transition from the Empire to the barbarians' territory. Although both the Magistrate and the barbarian girl become boundary-crossers by being involved in geographic boundary-crossing and menstruation, the barbarian girl achieves greater fluidity than the Magistrate. This is because fluidity, a dangerous attribute, is traditionally ascribed to women in literature. In Waiting for the Barbarians, menstruation is used to symbolise the contrast between the Empire as a patriarchal, solid order and the margin where the Empire and the barbarians encounter each other, creating fluidity. It also symbolises the contrast between the woman who can achieve great fluidity, and the man who cannot escape from the Empire's solid order. Menstruation, which is fluid and cyclic, also symbolises the cycle of nature, especially reproduction, which the Empire hinders. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate thinks that the Empire does not respect nature's cycle and that it deprives its people and its land of fertility. As Julia Kristeva points out in "Women's Time," the time of history is linear and often is ascribed to men, but the time of nature is cyclic and often is ascribed to women. The Magistrate feels antipathy toward the time of history of the Empire, and he hopes that the barbarian girl, who achieves great fluidity through menstruation, will have children and regain nature's cycle.

著者

Fuminori MATSUBARA

出版者

The English Literary Society of Japan

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, pp.277-287, 2018 (Released:2019-02-07)

著者

中島 崇法

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.8, pp.57-59, 2016-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

著者

竹腰 佳誉子

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.10, 2018

著者

塚田 雄一

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, pp.185-202, 2011-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

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This paper examines how the notion of homosexuality was formed in late nineteenth-century England, and how Oscar Wilde contributed to its formation, through an analysis of the discourse of Victorian sexology, the trials of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, while focusing particularly on the social and ideological background of the late Victorian period. In fin de siecle England, a growing fear of infectious diseases such as cholera and syphilis generated the idea that these diseases (and the people who carried them) needed to be purged in order to invigorate the British Empire, which was showing some indications of decline. Homosexuality, also known as "perverted sex," was listed among such diseases. The Victorian middle class believed that effeminate homosexuals were spreading corruption among "healthy" citizens and thereby debasing the masculine strength of the British Empire. The newly found science, Victorian sexology, provided a means to identify homosexuals in society by inventing new terms and theories to describe their sexuality, about which little was acutually known at that time. In this environment, Oscar Wilde was regarded as a poignant symbol of homosexuality, as he was significantly brought to trial and found guilty of gross indecency. The trials revealed how Wilde's sexuality threatened Victorian society. Wilde, with his homosexual activities, nullified two important boundaries that secured patriarchal society; not only did he threaten social distinctions by communicating with young men from the lower classes, but he also destroyed the barrier that safeguarded the Victorian household by committing a gross indecency while being the father of two sons. As such, the purge of Wilde the homosexual was significantly staged so as to maintain a "healthy" empire. Wilde's own writings echo the themes of his life. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, demonstrates the infectious nature of homosexuality. Through the representation of Dorian as a musical instrument that the wise elder Lord Henry plays, the homosexual state of being "infected by the elder" and ultimately "infecting the younger" (for Dorian himself also corrupts the youth in the second part of the novel) is examined throughout the novel. Moreover, the fact that this novel was citied in the trials as evidence of Wilde's crime (corrupting the "healthy" youth) and that it later served as a handbook for homosexuals suggests that The Picture of Dorian Gray itself was indeed an infectious, replicating presence in the same way as homosexuals were considered to be in Victorian society. Wilde thought a great deal of his aesthetic sense, and believed that he was leading the life of a decadent artist, free from the affairs of the middle-class society that he so despised. However, ironically enough, Wilde was in fact contributing to the British social purity movement by providing and reinforcing the representation of Victorian homosexuality in his trials and his novel in a way that mirrored how Victorian sexology attempted to theoretically characterise homosexuals in order to cure the disease of the empire.

著者

佐々木 徹

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, pp.227-234, 2018 (Released:2019-02-07)

著者

山口 治彦

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, pp.241-250, 2018 (Released:2019-02-07)

著者

石橋 敬太郎

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.6, pp.53-60, 2014

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In his play Bussy dAmbois (c. 1604), George Chapman created a hero who takes an unyielding stand against courtiers at Henry III's court and governs himself by the law of his own reason. More important in the play is that Guise and Monsieur appear as ministers of fate and providence. The French courtiers are controlled by stoic moral doctrine, the belief in the rationality of Nature. According to the stoics, God imparted a rational design to the degrees of Fate which govern Nature. In Chapman's play, the French courtiers believe that human nature is created within the divinely ordered scheme. For Bussy D'Ambois, however, human nature is constructed from the law of his own reason, not from the supernatural existences of fate and providence. Bussy challenges the providential view of human nature conceived by Guise and Monsieur. What is the nature of the element that made Chapman embody the hero's idea of human nature in a sharp contrast with that of the French courtiers? To examine this problem, I would like to focus on interrogation of the stoic view of human nature by intellectuals in the early Jacobean period. In the time when Bussy d'Ambois was composed, it was believed among the stoics that natural law emerges from the universe as "encoded" in creation with order, value and purpose. In virtue of his rational capacity, man synchronizes with this teleological design and discovers within it the main principles of his own moral law. The most famous exponent of such view was Richard Hooker, a divine of the Church of England in Elizabethan period. He combined with it a version of Christian providentialism. In the play, Bussy claims that rational man is a law unto himself, preserving a higher degree of virtue than law can legislate. He governs himself by the law of his own reason. There is a remarkable parallel between the portrait of Bussy and Sir Francis Bacon's portrait of human nature. In Bacon's view, the ontological basis of human beings was nature as the intrinsic principle-intellectual reason-within himself, not derived from God. Considering human nature as intellectual reason, he attempted to free people from the stoic traditional authorities, such as church and sacred kingship. In this sense, the hero's view of nature in the play serves as the precise inversion of Hooker's positive dependence of man upon God-man within nature created by God. To illustrate the conflict between the two human natures, it is important that Bussy's love for Tamyra is gained by obedience to reason. With his refusal of stoicism, the play's supernatural dimension works against fate and providence. In particular, Behemoth and his spirits are shown to be incompetent. But Guise sees the hero's interrogation of providentialism creating an arbitrary order that jeopardizes all "law", especially the idea of kingship itself. By the actions of Guise and Monsieur, finally, Bussy dies in a scene which begins with repudiations of teleology, providence and natural law to be found anywhere in stoicism of the early Jacobean period. An idea of fate and providence in human nature is still preserved at Henry III's court. However, the effect is too detached to praise Guise and Monsieur's providentialism. Actually, Bussy is transmogrified into a new star in the "firmament," an abiding reminder of his repudiations of stoic view, at the end of the play. Strongly aware of Bacon's human nature, therefore, Chapman illustrated the conflict between the two human natures seen in early Jacobean period. In doing so, the dramatist explored the significance of the hero striving to insulate himself from the stoic view of human nature by his self-fashioning in order to become a law unto himself.

著者

河合 利江

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, pp.359-364, 2011-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

著者

岩田 美喜

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, pp.99-112, 2011

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Oliver Goldsmith's The Good Natur'd Man (1768) has mainly been interpreted as an abortive piece of laughing comedy and often contrasted with False Delicacy (1768), a sentimental comedy by Hugh Kelly. Modern scholars point out that, though critics contemporary with Goldsmith upbraided the former as "low and vulgar" and praised the latter as "refined and sentimental," the two plays actually share the same ambivalent views about sentimentalism. Nevertheless, The Good Natur'd Man greatly differs from False Delicacy in that Goldsmith's play tries to highlight the commercialism latent in sentimental comedy rather than to conceal it. As Sir William Thornhill in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) does, Honeywood in The Good Natur'd Man suffers from "a sickly sensibility" and his excessive benevolence makes his fortune decay. Thus, Honeywood's distress is always connected with his economic discomfort, especially in Act 3, where he is placed under house arrest for his debts and has to meet his beloved, Miss Richland, who comes to rescue him, in this humiliating situation. Though he tries to disguise a bailiff and his follower as respectable gentlemen, they misinterpret the couple's conversation about the London literary taste as the literal "taste," i.e., food prices in London, making Honeywood feel even more humiliated. In the final scene, Honeywood, remonstrated by his uncle and Miss Richland, vows that he would henceforth bestow charity only for those who deserve it and the play ends in expectation of the marriage between Honeywood and Miss Richland. Even in this conventional ending, the surname of the heroine, whose first name is unknown throughout the play, reminds the audience that his mental happiness is concurrent with his financial success. The Good Natur'd Man exposes the commercialist drive, which is existent but usually concealed in the virtue-in-distress strategy of sentimental comedy. However, at the same time, the fantasy ending of the comedy does admit the utilitarian exercise of sensibility, which seems the last thing the author of The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770) would do. Richard Cumberland, in his memoirs, recollects with compassion that Goldsmith even in his final years laboured to write scribbles according to the demand of publishers, resignedly commenting that "Paternoster-Row is not Parnassus." The phrase may also be true of the divided attitude towards the economy of sensibility in The Good Natur'd Man.

著者

唐戸 信嘉

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.6, pp.125-132, 2014

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When Thomas Hardy published Jude the Obscure, it was bitterly criticized by reviewers chiefly for its unconventional discourses on "marriage," "family," and "sexual instinct." Although it is, as critics have agreed unanimously, obvious that an antagonistic attitude to Victorian domestic ideology provoked the reader's antipathy, a more accurate analysis of the socio-cultural context in which Jude was written and read would be needed to clarify what the radicalism of "the marriage question" in the text was. This paper first gives a brief outline of the institution of marriage which was strongly conditioned by social evolutionary theory. This theory identified the patriarchal and monogamous family as one of the most important achievements of evolutionary advance. While evolutionist anthropologists formulated the late Victorian norm of marriage, the 1890s marked a turning point in the interpretation of marriage as a result of the publication of Edyard Westermarck's The History of Human Marriage; it rejected the evolutionist theory of primitive matrimonial anarchy and cast a doubt upon the patriarchal tradition inimical to the idea of sexual equality. Accepting a new historical point of view through which the contemporary institution of marriage loses its historical legitimacy, Jude redefines marriage as a private act whose duration depends only on the couple's will, and also revolts against the evolutionist ideology which, looking on a family as the social unit, coerces people into compulsory monogamy. In the process of analysing matrimonial conventions, the text discloses their exclusive structure and detects that they arise from the desire to monopolize wealth. While symbolizing the historical shift of the idea of "marriage" in the 1890s, Jude's attack on the hypocrisy of the middle-class ideology was, we can conclude, premature (only four years after the publication of Westermarck's book) and drew heavy criticism from many readers.

著者

宮澤 優樹

出版者

日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究. 支部統合号 = Studies in English literature. 日本英文学会 編 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.10, pp.17-25, 2018-01

著者

竹内 康浩 松浦 和宏 小塩 大輔 石川 まりあ

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.7-16, 2015-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

著者

丹治 愛

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.9, pp.99-106, 2017

著者

神崎 高明

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.8, pp.199-202, 2016-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

著者

宮原 一成

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.9, pp.265-274, 2017

著者

Masaomi Kobayashi

出版者

The English Literary Society of Japan

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.299-307, 2015-01-20 (Released:2017-06-16)

著者

山口 和彦

出版者

一般財団法人日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究. 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.8, pp.67-76, 2016-01-20

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Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West has been highly evaluated as a counter-history of the borderland, or as an epic novel. A number of critics, however, have pointed out its lack of ethical substance due to its abundant descriptions of violence, blood, and death. This essay examines the thematics of violence, and reinterprets BM as a work of fiction that explores the whereabouts and possibility of ethics in the postmodern and in the posthuman. The kid's characterization as a mother-killer is associated with the violence of American historiography, reflecting the rhetoric of America's expansion as biological development. It, in turn, defies the conventions of the Western-Bildungsroman genre: the building of American character through frontier experiences. Thus, BM foregrounds ontological problems of human existence and free will in the apocalyptic borderland. The desert in BM functions as a topos in which the judge practices his hyper-rational, hyper-nihilistic violence, which relativizes every system of values to the single purpose of life: "war," that is, "the truest form of divination." The kid, the judge's biggest rival, rejects being a subject of the "war," and, as a result, is cannibalized by the judge himself (not as a sacrifice for the common good or belief). His death, however, is presented as the unrepresentable, which demonstrates that this death itself is not usurped by the judge, who attempts to be the suzerain of the earth. The biggest dilemma the story presents is the kid's rejection of opportunities to kill the judge by exercising his own violent nature. This, paradoxically, leads to the possibility of a counter-ethics that continues to reject the judge's philosophy of violence. The counter-ethics (in the posthuman), in this sense, might be represented as one always already in a germinal stage, as shown in the epilogue.

著者

塚田 雄一

出版者

一般財団法人日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究. 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, pp.185-202, 2011-01-20

---

This paper examines how the notion of homosexuality was formed in late nineteenth-century England, and how Oscar Wilde contributed to its formation, through an analysis of the discourse of Victorian sexology, the trials of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, while focusing particularly on the social and ideological background of the late Victorian period. In fin de siecle England, a growing fear of infectious diseases such as cholera and syphilis generated the idea that these diseases (and the people who carried them) needed to be purged in order to invigorate the British Empire, which was showing some indications of decline. Homosexuality, also known as "perverted sex," was listed among such diseases. The Victorian middle class believed that effeminate homosexuals were spreading corruption among "healthy" citizens and thereby debasing the masculine strength of the British Empire. The newly found science, Victorian sexology, provided a means to identify homosexuals in society by inventing new terms and theories to describe their sexuality, about which little was acutually known at that time. In this environment, Oscar Wilde was regarded as a poignant symbol of homosexuality, as he was significantly brought to trial and found guilty of gross indecency. The trials revealed how Wilde's sexuality threatened Victorian society. Wilde, with his homosexual activities, nullified two important boundaries that secured patriarchal society; not only did he threaten social distinctions by communicating with young men from the lower classes, but he also destroyed the barrier that safeguarded the Victorian household by committing a gross indecency while being the father of two sons. As such, the purge of Wilde the homosexual was significantly staged so as to maintain a "healthy" empire. Wilde's own writings echo the themes of his life. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, demonstrates the infectious nature of homosexuality. Through the representation of Dorian as a musical instrument that the wise elder Lord Henry plays, the homosexual state of being "infected by the elder" and ultimately "infecting the younger" (for Dorian himself also corrupts the youth in the second part of the novel) is examined throughout the novel. Moreover, the fact that this novel was citied in the trials as evidence of Wilde's crime (corrupting the "healthy" youth) and that it later served as a handbook for homosexuals suggests that The Picture of Dorian Gray itself was indeed an infectious, replicating presence in the same way as homosexuals were considered to be in Victorian society. Wilde thought a great deal of his aesthetic sense, and believed that he was leading the life of a decadent artist, free from the affairs of the middle-class society that he so despised. However, ironically enough, Wilde was in fact contributing to the British social purity movement by providing and reinforcing the representation of Victorian homosexuality in his trials and his novel in a way that mirrored how Victorian sexology attempted to theoretically characterise homosexuals in order to cure the disease of the empire.