| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 日本語文學系碩士班 === 99 === Women were still confined to traditional social norms while the Meiji Era (1868-1912) started its modernization and industrialization, and rose to world power status. Higuchi Ichiyo, considered as the first major woman writer of Japan's Meiji period, examines and argues gender issue, social class and feudalism from the perspectives of humanism, especially women's roles. Her literary focuses on women’s self-awakening and liberation, exploring women’s autonomy and the way of how women live in the society. Compared with her own early works, her writing mechanism and thinking become more delicate and sophisticated with time passing by, and she, at the end, deeply realizes the ill-fated destiny of being a woman in the self-exploration process of I-am-a-woman.
This research aims to examine how women oppose the paternalism and gender discrimination by looking at the novels of Higuchi Ichiyo’s later years in which women have no choice but to be housewives to meet social expectations. From the standpoint of female, this research also tends to review how women express and identify themselves, and how they find their own way to live physically and consciously at that time. At last, the study investigates other woman writers of the same period to re-define and re-position Higuchi Ichiyo in the Japan Meiji Era’s literature.
The methodology employed in the study is to analyze women’s self-awareness and behaviors by using two types of “fantasy” concept: (1) family fantasy, also called co-fantasy, formed by family relationships and (2) romance fantasy created by love relationships. Two kinds of women are analyzed in this study. One is the ladies and housewives in the household, and the other is the prostitutes outside the socially-expected family life. In addition, contemporary criticism, literary theory, authorship theory, and author’s journals are reviewed to analyze Higuchi Ichiyo’s writing mechanism and thinking.
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