元気と病気 : The Adventures of Tom Sawyerにおける少年像の文化的形成

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In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the heroic and courageous actions of juvenile characters necessarily entail the experience of illness. After witnessing Injun Joe's murder of Dr. Robinson in a graveyard at midnight, Tom Sawyer suffers from intense "melancholy"; chasing after Joe's gangs to the path on the Cardiff Hill and getting wind of their ferocious robbery plan, Huck hurries back to town for help and collapses "with fever"; after straying far into the depths of McDougal's cave, from which Tom and Becky Thatcher escape with bravery and tact, they become "bedridden" and grow "more and more tired and worn," as if they were afflicted by "a wasting illness." These narratological reciprocations between adventure and illness structure the world's most famous boy's story of all time. This narratological structure reflects the cultural ethos in late nineteenth-century America, which T. J. Jackson Lears designates as a "therapeutic worldview." Within the "therapeutic," "sentimentalized" morals culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rigid standards of patriarchal authority that pronounced official "proscription" over society were gradually replaced by more liberal, moderate evaluations and practices, which emphasized maternal, female sensibility and its "prescription." Especially concerning health and illness, along with various practices in alternative medicine, a diversity of theories and discourses began to flourish and circulate in the American "therapeutic" cultural context, providing unstable but critical meanings to mundane human experiences. As the absolute judgment of patriarchal reason was becoming neutralized, multiple hypotheses and conceptions of illness emerged not only to cause medical controversies, but also to absorb public attention. Within this "therapeutic" cultural framework, Tom Sawyer, an icon of modern, adorable, "Good Bad" boy, paradoxically, must simultaneously be both vigorous enough to go off on an adventure and vulnerable enough to lie sick in bed. As Aunt Polly often says, in St. Petersberg, boys are virtually expected to be so much vigorous as to be seen as "mischieevous." If they are too vigorous, however, especially when their adventure is too brave and deviatory, they are to feel desperate "fatigue" and to be laid up with illness. Be that as it may, in order to avoid falling victim to illness, boys should not be forced to stay indoors and study the Bible; for that sort of sedentary activity will in turn lead the children to the "over-use" of nerve energy and make them lapse into a mental disease known as "neurasthenia," a term made widely popular by George M. Beard in late nineteenth-century America. This double-bind condition with regard to illness in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which greatly contributes to the structural reciprocation between vigor and illness in the plot, is to a considerable degree prescribed by the contemporary discourses and cultural transformation in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the development of the genre of boy's story in America can be considered as a product of the "sentimentalized" nineteenth-century culture, by which the superintendent authority of a male mentor, mainly represented as a father figure, was gradually eradicated. Thus boy-heroes became so liberated as to enjoy autonomy and pleasure on their own terms to the extent that they could fully pour their vigor into romantic actions as if they were "outlaws" exempted from social norms and constraints. Nevertheless those boy-outlaws should be re-constrained within the boundary of community and be adapted for social ideals. On such occasion in the boy's stories, the cultural device employed to recapture them is illness and maternal remedy for it, as is the case in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Aunt Polly and the Widow Douglas attend the sickbeds of Tom and Huck. Tom Sawyer was culturally demanded that he should periodically succumb to illness in order not to be too wild and violent. Yet at the same time, boy-heroes were also requested to have so much vigor and physical strength that they were to even become "savage." Considering that their stories circulated in the cultural context in which "neurasthenia," a mental illness defined as lack of "energy," was such a broad concern among the male intellectuals as to provoke ubiquitous "anxious masculinity," the boys must be emancipated from the modern "overcivilization" and mental pressure by which contemporary American male subjects suffered the depletion of nerve energy. Male anxiety, a collective fear of energetic exhaustion, was thus projected onto the admiring inscription of "primitive" vibrancy of juvenile characters, to the extent that they were often represented as "Indians." By focusing specifically on the topics of vigor and illness to reconfigure the historical and cultural context in the middle to late nineteenth century in America, I try to examine how the modern boy's icon of Tom Sawyer is formed under the great influences of the "therapeutic" concerns and commands at that time.
2012-03-31

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齊藤弘平
青山学院大学(院)

元気と病気 : The Adventures of Tom Sawyerにおける少年像の文化的形成

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