「最後のカウボーイ」ー「マディソン郡の橋」にみる「男らしさ」の神話

概要

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The past few years have seen the publication of interesting gender studies on cultural concepts of masculinity such as David D.Gilmore's Manhood in the Making(1990)or Osamu Hashimoto's Lektionen fur einen schonen Mann(1994), to name only a few of such attempts. These books alert the reader to the gap between the myth and the reality of manhood, reassessing the idea of the virile man who has reigned the world for thousands of years. Like femininity, they so claim, masculinity is no more than a cultural construct. The handsome man(=the ruler) is as elusive and ethereal as the portrait of Robert Kincaid, the last cowboy in Robert James Waller's novel. In the interview he had last fall with Ms Takagi for the Marcopolo, the author of The bridges of Madison County(1992) explained the "origin of the fictive picture"as the vision of a shy last-of-a-dying male animal;the book has turned out to be the best selling novel of a romantic love story pure and simple. Waller's novel, however, is not so much a romantic tale as a story of Robert Kincaid the last cowboy, who feels out of harmony with the world and his time,"given over to increasing amounts of organization," where people have given up "free range."Such vision of a peculiar kind of male animal finds its prototype in the American hero created by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leather-stocking Tales(1823-41), a loner in the wilderness, self-sufficient and free like the wind. He is a "peregrine,"a perennial traveler who is always on the road, doomed to live a life of solitude. This image of American hero has been identified with that of the cowboy introduced in the popular pulp fiction of the 1870's. The foolhardiness(courage), toughness, and the rootlessness of a cowboy's life have in turn created the romantic picture of a nomadic life synonymous with masculinity in American culture/literature. In Robert Kincaid the author has given an endearing portrait of the popular notion of the American male, who is , however, becoming obsolete, a dying species. Simultaneously, the novel exposes the evil inherent in the myth of the virile man, because the aggressiveness he represents keeps people apart from each other and from the problems we need to be working on. The Bridges of Madison County is a requiem for "the last of the cowboy", Robert Kincaid.
神戸女学院大学の論文

著者

別府恵子
神戸女学院大学

「最後のカウボーイ」ー「マディソン郡の橋」にみる「男らしさ」の神話

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「最後のカウボーイ」ー 「マディソン郡の橋」にみる「男らしさ」の神話

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概要

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関連論文

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「最後のカウボーイ」ー「マディソン郡の橋」にみる「男らしさ」の神話