アメリカ女性ゴシック小説における狂気 : 「家庭の天使」による呪縛

Madness is one of the conventional motifs in Gothic literature. This literary genre first appeared in 18^-century British society, where reason and rationality were appreciated. Against this social trend, Gothic literature tried to disclose irrational emotions or desires repressed into the inner part of the human psyche. One of the symbolic expressions for these feelings veiled in darkness was madness. Of particular interest in Gothic literature is the phenomenon of female madness. As Helen Small argues, "the forms of insanity are usually clearly gendered in early Gothic fiction." In the case of male protagonists, they are "driven to insanity by vaulting ambition and uncontrollable lust." (153) On the contrary, females tend to lose their wits as the result of being victimized by male villains. Feminist critics maintain, however, that since the Victorian era, female writers have adopted heroines afflicted with madness in order to articulate their angry protest against the idea of "the Angel in the House" created in the male-oriented society. Taking such examples as "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, I would like to discuss how heroines\u27 madness symbolizes resistance to their situations in American society in the period from the late 19^ century to the mid-20^ century

Joyce Carol Oatesの"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" : Connieのゴシック的「他者」Arnold

Joyce Carol Oates\u27s(1938-) "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is one of the outstanding modern Gothic stories. It first appeared in Epoch in 1966 and was later included in Oates\u27s anthology of short stories, The Wheel of Love (1970). Walter Sullivan calls this story "an interlude of terror," as it does not directly depict such horrible scenes as rape and murder typical in the-18th-century classical Gothic novels. However, it makes the readers believe that a 15-year-old protagonist Connie is surely going to be the victim of the diabolical Arnold Friend, who is not her friend at all but an incarnation of the Devil. G.J. Weinberger argues that Arnold is Connie\u27s "other self" representing not only her "mythic, irrational side ... but also a cluster of insights into the violence and sexuality of adulthood" and emphasizes that this is the story of Connie\u27s initiation. Weinberger\u27s analysis is insightful and persuasive, but there still remain some unsolved questions as to why the entire story is dominated by an atmosphere of vanity and Connie\u27s death-wish. This paper, therefore, demonstrates that Arnold Friend is Connie\u27s Gothic "Other Self," which represents her irrational and destructive impulses to overthrow the conventional ideas and vanity of everyday life which are shared by people in America in the 1960s

ヘンリー・ジェイムズの「友だちの友だち」 : 語り手の"ファンタジー"

Henry James\u27s "The Friends of the Friends" first appeared in 1896 under the title of "The Way It Came", two years before the publication of The Turn of the Screw, perhaps the most provocative ghost story written by James. Since Edmund Wilson argued that the ghost in The Turn of the Screw was simply a production of the narrator\u27s mind, many critics have also focused on the mind of the narrator in "The Friends of the Friends." They conclude that the narrator is jealous of her friend who shares the psychical experience with her fiance, which makes the narrator imagine the ghost of her friend. To read this story simply as a product of the narrator\u27s jealousy, leaves some inconsistency remaining. The ambiguity of the ghost and the narrator\u27s enigmatic behavior lead the reader to another interpretation. This paper demonstrates the alternative reading that the narrator, obsessed with her hypothesis, creates her "fantasy" in the sense used in psychoanalysis, meaning \u27the imaginings to which we are all addicted, but which some disturbed persons take in greater or lesser degree as "fact."\u27 At the end of the story we realize that we have been caught in the narrator\u27s imaginative world and that "The Friends of the Friends" is James\u27s "amusette" to catch those readers who are "not easily caught.

マーガレット・エドソンの『ウィット』 : ゴシック的「狂気の科学者」のモチーフ

Margaret Edson\u27s first play Wit (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, features Vivian Bearing, a professor specializing in John Donne\u27s metaphysical poetry. She is hospitalized dying of advanced ovarian cancer. Her doctors Kelekian and Jason have Vivian undergo an experimental treatment with strong side effects. The treatment is very aggressive and lasts for no less than eight weeks. For the doctors, Vivian is no longer a human being but "material" for their medical research, or in Dr. Moreau\u27s term a "problem" for their intellectual desires. Focusing on the unsympathetic attitudes of Kelekian and Jason toward their patient Vivian, this play can be classified within the Gothic genre and containing the "Mad Scientist" motif. What allows this play from falling into a simple dichotomy between the assailants and the victim, however, is the fact that Vivian herself shares the character of "Mad Scientist." This paper analyzes how Vivian can be characterized as a mad scientist along with her doctors