Katherine PatersonのLyddieにみる曖昧なフェミニズム

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概要

• 論文の詳細を見る

• Katherine Patterson's historical Bildungsroman, Lyddie(1991), set in 1840s Vermont and Massachusetts, America, is one of her most powerful feminist novels for adolescents. Through the protagonist, Lyddie, as a focalizer, and various metaphors, the author narrates how the girl constructs her feminist subjectivity. However,a close reading of the novel, especially toward the end of it, reveals a certain ambiguity in the construction of the girl's subjectivity: her recognition that the fearful bear is not outside but in her"own narrow spirit." Roberta Trites attributes Patterson's ambivalent feminism mainly to the feminist ideological inconsistency,including Patterson's own, in 1990s America. To disprove Trites' argument, I examine the discrepancy between James Buckly's male-centered concept of Bildungsroman and Patterson's Bildungsroman. In Buckly's Bildungsroman, only male protagonists reach maturity and gain success, whereas female protagonists end up choosing, as Anis Pratt criticizes, between "secondary personhood, sacrificial victimization, madness, and death." This type of unhappy ending, however, is not the case with Lyddie. She reaches maturity, and has prospects of getting a college education as well as marriage. To construct the protagonist's feminist subjectivity, the author uses various metaphors: a threatening bear, a frog jumping for survival, and a slave struggling for freedom. Also, the protagonist's consciousness is raised through discourse in the female community of the spinning mill: her acquisition of literacy and decision to go to college. Furthermore, she fights with the overseer who sexually harasses female workers. Despite all of the above, Patterson ends the novel with ambivalent feminism, which, I argue, is mainly due to the inconsistency in the conception of female growth between the male-centered Bildungsroman and postmodern coming-of-age novel narrated by the feminist-minded author. In view of narratology, focalizer Lyddie's sense of female growth fails to accommodate itself to that of the third-person narrator.

• 神戸女学院大学の論文

著者

• 吉田 純子

  神戸女学院大学

• 吉田 純子

  神戸女学院大学文学部英文学科

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