Fleissner, Jennifer L.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
●Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wall Paper" (1892), The Home (1903), Herland (1915)
●Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
●Mary Wilkins Freeman
●Frank Norris Vandover and the Brute (1894, published posthumously in 1917), Mc Teague (1899), The Octopus (1901)
●Sarah Orne Jewett Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
●Henry James The Bostonians (1886)
●Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie (1899)
●Edith Wharton The House of Mirth (1905)
●Kate Chopin The Awakening (1899)
●Gertrude Stein Three Lives (1909)
[Summary]
旧来hypermasculineなジャンルでありリアリズムの不幸な亜種として捉えられてきた自然主義を女の視点から再考察する。そこでは家庭というhyperfeminizedな領域に閉じ込められた女達のcompulsion（見果てぬ「完成」「完全体」への前進なき前進）が鍵となる。このcumpulsionという概念は、旧来自然主義に賦与されていたdeterminism対human agency（ないしはself-determination）という二項対立を脱臼する。というのもcompulsionはそれ自体determinism的なものに突き動かされている（完成がもちろん悲劇的に失敗するほかない見果てぬ夢だから）反面、それに向かって前進を続けようとする行為のなかにある種の個人の主体性が発見され得るからである。自然主義における人間の（男の）「敗北か勝利か」というプロットは、同時代の女性作家作品あるいは自然主義作品内の女性キャラクターを視野にいれることによって複雑化する。彼女達の軌跡は弛まぬ、非直線的な、そして反復的な動きによって跡づけられる。…というのが雑駁なまとめなのだが、個人的な印象としてはFleissnerが自然主義作品の男性登場人物に旧来の批評史が与えてきた「敗北の美学」のようなものに苛立ち、それを「自然主義はジェンダーロールの反転を可能にして、男達にsentimental novelにおけるヒロインのような感傷性を獲得させた」と喝破する様子がなんともすがすがしかった。男達の「敗北か勝利か」というヒロイックなプロットから女の強迫神経症的な日々の動作を中心とした、いわばanti climacticなプロットとも呼べないプロットに焦点を当てて、小説ってそういうもんでしょ、と論じるFleissnerの姿を見ていると、アメリカの女性研究家の中でもこういう敗北主義に一言もの申したいひとがいるんだなぁ、という風に素朴にうれしかった。その意味でDreiserを感傷文学の枠組みで論じた第四章、"Sentimentality and 'Drift' in Dreiser and Wharton"はとても興味深かったし、それからSteinの前進の見えない漸近運動的文体と「出産なき永遠の妊娠」願望（ある種の母性への抵抗）を論じた最終章もよかった。
［Introduction: The "Feminization" of American Naturalism］
☆世紀転換期における母性—Theodore RooseveltとHenry Adamsによる母性の自然化と、その自然の近代に対する「勝利／敗北」というプロット●Henry Adams "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (1900)は母性と再生産を「絶えることのない動き」として評価（"Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing" qtd in 2, "He even briefly considers a fantasy of a new law 'obliging every woman, married or not, to bear one baby--at the expense for the Treasury--before she was thirty years old, under penalty of solitary confinement for life'" 4）。Rooseveltもまた、男性性と女性性のジェンダーロールの強化を声高に叫び、子を生すことを女の国家に対する義務とした（"In 1905, even as Roosevelt exhorted the country's young men to serve their newly expanding country in time of war, he made an equal case for the duty of all young female Americans to bear children for the nation--in large part because such reproductive patriotism could no longer be taken for granted." 3）。もちろんその背景には出生率の低下と女性の労働市場への参入がある→自然（ここでは母性と同義）の「敗北」か「勝利」かという歴史プロット (the resulting historical narrative did appear as simply the hyperbolic plot of nature's wholesale loss or its restoration, as conceived by [Adams] or by Roosevelt. 5)
●女の身体、母性という「自然」が近代化に勝つか負けるかというのが、自然主義と世紀転換期アメリカの共通の問題
●[there was a tendency] "to embody all modernity's evil in the "monthly-magazine-made American female," eschewing her maternal role (7)
●The implication . . . is that feminism itself forms a key component of the historical "plot of decline" (8).
☆世紀転換期の"remasculinization of culture" (13)は実はfeminizationあるいはsentimentalizationと機を逸にしている
●American modernity may be "feminized," but it cannot be said to be so simply in the sense of feminization as gentility and constraint. Rather, once we recognize that women experiensed new freedoms through these same modern phenomena, it becomes possible to argue that the deepest repositories of sentimental, therapeutic, indeed nostalgic culture in the 1890s may have belonged to the era's manly men. . . . [T]o the extent we identify a sentimental nostalgia at work in the 1890s, it shouyld be identified not with domestic New England writing, but with remasculinization itself. （そのとき多くの女達は変化へ向かっていたのだから。）
●多くのNaturalistの小説というのは実はthe female buildungsromans (18) であって、"[male] agency's total evacuation" によって印づけられる"fiction of .... male impotence" (19)である、と。たとえばSister CarrieやMc Teagueなどはその典型で、女が家庭や再生産という役割に興味をなくしたらどうなるか、という物語である。それによって "turning the mal ehero into a version of the victimized "fallen woman" familiar from seduction fiction (21).
●Naturalism has indeed occasionally been subsumed under this rubric, with women acting as part of the array of pitiless natural forces threatening the men (21)これはとても面白い。
●For the male subject, more traditionally thought capable of transcending his embodiment through rationality, this shift can appear as simply a frightening diminution of personal agency. For the woman, however, long accustomed to the way her embodiment trumps any claims made for her rational capacities, the revelation of all persons as mutually composed of both dimensions allows her unprecedented entree into a nonfamilial sphere no longer predicated on leaving "nature" wholly behind (22).
☆旧来の自然主義批評とそれに対するFleissnerの立ち位置
●[N]aturalism is seen as either fatalistic or nostalgic in the face of modern life. If fatalistic, it depicts modern individuals bereft of agency or vitality, dwarfed by a cityscape of soulless mechanical dynamos, spiraling steadily downward in "plots of decline"; to the extent that "nature" survives here, it does so in the distorted form of traits linked to decadence or atavism. If nostalgic, the reverse is true: naturalism goes along with a renewal of what Roosevelt called "the strenuous life," returnbing masculine power and adventure to a vitiated modernity by rediscovering the freedoms and struggles associated with a still wide-open, untarnished natural landscape (6-7)
●The determinism that is so often considered central to naturalist writing actually goes along with both of these options [hyperbolic "plots of decline" or "plots of triumph"]; the naturalist subject is either the absolute victim of merciless external forces, or we find that those force's very mercilessness provides an opportunity for the truly manly subject to assert his own equally outsized power (9).
●それに対してFleissnerのポイントは: naturalism's most characteristic plot, as in the case of the modern young woman, is marked by neither the steep ark of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion--back and forth, around and around, on and on--that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place (9).
☆上記のような"repetitive movement"をcumpulsionとして捉えた時、individual agencyとの繋がり
●we cab understand this stuckness in repetitive motion, and its relation to agency and history, if we replace the notion of naturalist determinism with the more nuanced concept of compulsion. Compulsion, we will see, draws together several aspects of the "natural-ist" project. Most broadly, it has the potential to name an understanding of agency in which individual will and its subjection to rationalizing "forces" appear as more deeply intertwined. More specifically, to the extent that nature appears not as the presocial wilderness in these text but as an important feature within human social life, various everyday rituals taking place around the fact of embodiment (sex, birth, death, illness, cleanliness, etc.) take on new interest . . . . Dedicated to making order out of our bodily lives, these rituals appear at their most elaborated as pioneering literary representations of what we would now term "obsessive-compulsive" behavior.
●強迫神経症的行動様式は日常生活を"rationalize"しようとする衝動の顕われで、1890年代以降の心理学研究においてこの症状の症例が激増するのはこれがまさにmodernityと密接に関わっていることを示唆する。が、日常をrationalizeしようとする衝動は逆に主体をendless spiralに向かわせることになる。every attmpt at a more perfect order leads inexorably to order's failure (and thus to the repetition of the attempt) (10).
●In place of what Mark Seltzer has nicely termed the "all-or-nothing" accounts of human agency--as either wholly lost or heroically regained--that have tended to dominate critical descriptions of both this era and its writings, one finds in the emphasis on compulsion a much more equivocal portrayal in which will and its loss, rationalization and its impossibility, go hand in hand (27).
●it is the very focus on the domestic and daily that opens up a space for the representation of new perversities, new tensions and open-ended struggles within that feminine realm. The inclusion of more and more details of daily, bodily life within history's text (as the individual life represents it) leads not to that feeling of more perfect completeness but rather to its opposite, to the sense of the impossibility of completion--what I have been terming the compulsive sensibility (30).
●while naturalism is more commonly grasped as a literature of determinism, the sense that both its characters and its authors alike are driven by a compulsion to repeat has produced a more drastic sense of the negation of agency. Determinism, after all, can still allow for the sense of a beleaguered soul struggling against external forces, whether social or natural; compulsion would indicate more of a participation, even an investment, in one's own reduction from agent to automaton (39).
●Compulsion, rather than determinism, can offer a way into thinking this continuously problematic slippage between naturalism's scientific ordering and its wild abandon, its distance from its subjects and its excessive closeness to them, at one and the same time^^particularly if we adopt the more complex understanding of compulsion, as "feeling of incompleteness" or "doubting mania," at word during the period itself (277).
●What is especially disturbing about the idea of compulsion is the way it breaks down the split between the self-governing subject and the governed one, insisting that some of the trap is built from within (279).
[Chapter 1--The Compulsion to Describe: Naturalist Subjects, Naturalist History]
世紀転換期のジェンダーロール強化戦略（"rest cure" for women and "west cure" for men）を完全に内面化しようとする男と女は、その「完成」の不可能性からobsessive compulsionに陥る。終わりのない動きとして「男性化」「女性化」を論ずるFleissnerはもちろんButlerのgender performativityにも触れている。テクストはGilman の "Yellow Wall Paper" と Craneの The Red Badge of Courageで、両者ともcompulsionのどこにもいかないstucknessが逆説的に人物達のcreativityを創出している、とする。同時にNew Historicismの全てを歴史的文脈に還元しようとする衝動と自然主義の「完全な描写」への果てなき欲望、両者のディテールに対する妄執の共通性を論じる。●For Lukacs, naturalism's false sense of fixity, its tendency less to narrate than to endlessly descrive, results directly from its "obsession with monographic detail." Indebted as it is to the "thick description"D of Clifford Geertz, new historicism manifests a similar inclination, with results that can help us get a t its more striking duplication of the naturalist mode (46).
●And again, this was Lukac's chief point about naturalism's fascination with detail--that it was the beginning of the move away from realism's historical emphasis altogether, and toward modernisn, or "art for art's sake," art about itself (47). なるほどこれは面白くて、自然主義がある意味である程度の全体性を保ったリアリズムからfragmentaryなモダニズムへとスライドしてゆくときの橋渡しになったと。→their ... protomodernist formal qualities, which reveal a participation in the protagonist's fragmentation of reality, risking the reader's absorption in the similar process (57). 自分を"literary impressionist"と位置づけたCrane。
●Similarly, Lukacs most feared that description would transform living persons into "inanimate objects," mere bodies meant to stand as labeled exhibits (often of particular pathologies) for the text's clinical gaze (47).
●naturalism's attempts to totalize not for their hyperbolic character but for the apparently opposite reason that they fail to achieve order, thus remaining stuck in the attempt to do so.⇔Realism, by contrast, may not appear obsessional about creating a complete picture of history because it does a neater, more successful job of it (48).
●The problem . . . is that for the compulsive subject or history writer here, the possibility of completion (or achieved identity) itself "provokes" endless noncompletion in a dialectical way (51).
●a ... sense of gender, as not so much an achieved state but rather an ongoing, compulsive practice (69)
[Chapter 2--The Great Indoors: Regionalism, Feminism, and Obsessional Domesticity]
Naturalismと同時期に全盛を迎えたregionalismは、戸外に舞台を設定したhypermasculineな自然主義との対立から屋内のhyperfemininityを体現するジャンルであると論じられるが、Fleissnerはこの二者を貫く主体の行動様式としてcompulsionをあげ、両ジャンルの橋渡しを試みる。この時、Mary Wilkins Freeman に代表されるNew Englandのregionalist fictionは家庭を舞台に下obsessional quest storyとして読まれる。●the great outdoors and the "great indoors" merge (78).
●the ceaseless attempt to manage nature's incursions links the rigorous housekeeper to the male frontiersman, for in neither case can that quest's vitality be distinguished from its appallingly obsessional excess (78).
●In naturalist texts, "nature" (whether the vast open spaces of McTeague, the animal in Vandover, or motherhood in Gilman's story) began to take on an "unnatural" perverse cast, related directly to its disorderliness, its vast unknownability and vertiginous expanse (88).
●naturalism and realism can both be understood as literary forms that seek to provide a God's-eye picture of the social field; yet whereas realism sticks to the social as such, naturalism includes the body and sex in what it seeks to order and classify (98).
[Chapter 3--A Mania for the Moment: Fadmongering and Feminism in Henry James]
Henry Jamesの作品中、最も「自然主義的」とされるThe Bostoniansを分析し、この作品がfeminismを"fad"—一時的流行—として歴史化し、それを過去として徴づけようとする様が、世紀転換期のアメリカが New Womanをマスメディアにおけるアイコンとして「消費」することによって脱政治化しようとした様と並行に論じられる。この時期のフェミニズムとスピリチュアリズム（またはメスメリズム）の相関関係も興味深い点。●the mastery of a novel like The Bostonians lies in the wealth of sheer information--sensual as much as factual--that it provides about "the past." Specifically, this is the version of pastness made available by the notion of the fad: history as perfectly legible, hence containable and charming, because of its absolute distance from out present. For these readers, the feminism that James depicts was a fad of the nineteenth century; thus, to write about it is by definition to write about a "moment," one now long gone (135).
●the problematic association of the New WOman in the 1890s with fad culture (143).
●the twinned facts of the new Woman's ubiquity as a cultural signpost in the 1890s and her rapid descent from view after the turn of the century--the very "skyrocket" trajectory that would seem most clearly to define her as a fad.
●contemporary feminism seems drawn to the figure of the turn-of-the-century New Woman in order to explain itself. She is brought back to life in order to function as a crucial "foremother," the first step in a century-long story of feminist progress that ends with our present moment (143)
●the New Woman's historical fleetingness is explained by way of her transformation from a "real" political threat into a trivial cultural fad (144)
[Chapter 4--The New Woman and the Old Man: Sentimentality and 'Drift' in Dreiser and Wharton]
自然主義はthe New Womanたちのfemale bildungsromanであると同時に墜落してゆくthe Old Manたちのsentimentalizationを可能にするジャンルである。社会に打ちのめされ、経済的に不能に陥ることによって男達はseduction novelの女主人公さながら、センチメンタルに涙に暮れることができる。●The male characters have lost out decisively in a modern world that seems disposed economically to favor the women they once loved. The women thus dwell in comparative comfort while the men scrape haplessly by (162).
●it is the older man's story that best fits prevailing views of naturalism as a "plot of decline"; the young woman's plot, by contrast, moves in a nonlinear fashion epitomized by a language of "drift" これは卓見である。たしかにそうなんだよなぁ。
●if naturalism is often characterized as rendering human sentiment in economic terms ... we need to see that it can also render economics in sentimental ones (168).
●As a number of women's labor histories have documented, the post-Civil War period, and particularly the 1880s and 1890s, saw a dramatic rise in the rate of rural female migration to the "great cities" in search of work. Indeed, "the drift of population from the farms to the cities in the 80s and 90s was termed by one contemporary male 'largely a woman movement,'" and statistics back this observation, showing that men tended to migrate later and in small numbers (178-79). なるほどこれもおもしろいポイントで、世紀末の都市への移住は主に職を求める女のものだった、というのはなにかに使うことになるだろう。それからこのあとに続く、女優というのは（批評ではあり得ないこことのように扱われているけど）世紀末の女にとっては現実的な選択であった、というのも。女の労働を消費に結びつけることによって男のvictimizationがなされたのは自然主義小説内部だけのことではなく、社会的な動きだった、と。
[Chapter 5--Saving Herself: Gender, Preservation, and Futurity in McTeague]
NorrisのMcTeagueを妻Trina McTeagueの視点から読み直し、Trinaのhoarding obessionをvirginityという価値を失ったとされる女の身体が、母性による再価値付けをかわしながらfetishismとautoeroticismによって自らを価値付ける契機として読む。この章はかなりMcTeagueに割かれているので正直読んでいないのでなんともいえないが、プロット紹介だけ読むにMcTeagueはけっこう面白いに違いない。●the clock serves as an emblem not of women's turn away from nature, but of their relentless subordination to it: they experience their own bodies, that is, as an inexorably ticking "biological clock" (204).
●Childbearing is the sanctioned way for women emptied of the value their bodies once signified to regain it in another form, indeed, the point of virginity as value (the value that must be lost) is that it stabilizes paternity (value regained).でも生んだ瞬間に価値は女自身ではなくてその子供に賦与される (213).
●Norrisの"Why Women Should Write the Best Novels--and Why They Don't"というエッセイは面白そう。女の完璧主義と溜め込み性について書くNorris。
●Perhaps, then, the magpielike pregnant women are indeed like Trina, consuming to attain what remains forever out of reach. Perhaps, in feeding their growing bodies, they strive for an endless pregnancy that will keep those bodies even in a state of potential, their value bound up securely in themselves, not yet lost to the world (230).→"an absolute, unrealized potential" (231). The hoarding, the eating, the self consuming all serve to render a future endlessly possible because endlessly deferred, as for the compulsively saving Trina, who is always expecting because she never delivers.
[Chapter 6--The Rhythm Method: Unmothering the Race in Stein, Chopin, and Grimké]
●自然主義小説の女性登場人物たちのback and forth movementをdeath driveに結びつけて捉える。母性として物象化される自然（いわゆるbiological clock）に抗う主人公達は、母性に賦与される主体の可読性をも拒否し、名付け得られることのない主体性とともにたゆたうこととなる。こうした前後運動的リズムがプロットのみならず文体にも顕著に見られるGertrude Steinはプロトモダニストとして自らを位置づけたが故に自然主義の文脈からは外されてきたが、Three Livesの"Melanctha"におけるAfrican American cultureとrythmicな意識の流れの連関、そして彼女のdeath driveは、自然主義内のAfrican American文学の位置づけを考える際のヒントを提供する。しかしMelanchtaがそんなにAfrican American writers (LarsenとかWrightとか)に評価が高いというのは驚きだなぁ。たしかにMorrisonのJazzなんかはもろにStein節なわけだけれど。でもこれでSteinがなんとか博論に組み込めそうな気はしてきた。The Making of Americans はこの文脈でものすごくしっくりくる。つまりcompulsionや前進なき前進、永遠の妊娠状態という。それからAwakeningの最後、Adeleの出産がEdnaにとって壊滅的なダメージを与えるというのも、どちらかといえば母性に対する敗北ではなくて、妊娠状態が終わり、出産へ、という時計的なものに対する敗北として読んだ方がしっくり来る気がする。これはAwakening論の書き直しの際に必ずいれたいところ。●Can there be a naturalist motherhood? In the more familiar understanding of the genre that this book has sought to question, of course there can: as men become primitive warriors, women achieve their own glory as "mothers of the race." The turn-of-the-century female story we have been tracing, however, tends to work against this very imperative, becoming arrested in tis compulsive motion considerably prior to the moment in which childbearing might as a real possibility. . . . Such women's disregard for those bodily rhythms that were meant to keep them "in mysterious rapport with moon, tides, reproduction, race, climate, and all the environment" placed the entire race in danger of extinction (233).
●Ednaの「成長／目覚め」は"an aimless drifting" であり"a drifting off" である、というまったく正しい指摘。"a repetitive, rhythmic, back-and-forth movement that recurs throughout Chopin's text, pushing against the more familiar notion of Edna's trajectory as a linear individual "evolution" toward independence (or, alternatively, a downward, Hutstwood-like decline) (241).
●to read Stein's works in the company of her fellow American naturalists in particular can highlight her similar interest in the compulsive sensibility that breaks down this divide between self and circumstance, as well as in the turn-of-the-century female bildungsroman as privileged site for exploring this set of concerns (252).
●The Making of Americans, as representing the culmination and final transformation of the naturalist problematic of the "compulsion to describe," continuously coming up against the "felling of incompleteness" (254).
●Stein affirms her own training by William James in the view that an "unselective" individual Melanctha will necessarily work fatally against her own Darwinian instincts for "self-preservation." By "unselective," she means not only that Melanctha willfully refuses the female evolutionary role of "selecting" the proper mate . . . . More complexly, Melanctha lives according to something like the principle of the naturalist narrator, who is open to taking in "everything" and refuses to establish the perceptual boundaries that make a stable life story possible (260).
