「文学」の題材としての「性欲」 -『平凡』における「文学」の否定の意味-

Abstract

Around 40 years into the Meiji era, the Naturalism acquired the privilege to express the truth of life through sexual desire, and Futabatei Shimei's Heibon was published during this period of time. Although the naturalistic theory of sexual desire had been developed through the book of sexology since the early days of the Meiji era, sex and sexual desire had often been associated with the marriage system in order to control and maintain social order. Nevertheless, with the development of instinctivism around 30 years into the Meiji era, the idea of fulfilling human desire became very apparent and natural. This naturally led the literary society to actively delineate the subject of sexual desire through the media, and eventually through literature. Taking this historical time period into consideration, this paper sheds new light on the relationship between sexual desire and literature that are portrayed in Heibon, and considers this relationship as the subject of analysis to question the meaning behind the existence of this particular literature. In particular, Heibon portrays sexual desire as a concept of neuter gender, and unlike realist and Naturalism at the time, which differentiated love in physical and mental sense, it presents a new concept of how the different elements in the lives of men and women create friction and cause Ikioi(勢) to occur, regardless of each gender's respective sexual desire. This new gender relationship was developed to criticize and challenge the existing relationship between sexual desire and literature that were commonly portrayed in the older literatures, and it also presents a new literary paradigm for sexual desire by breaking away from the bisection of sexual desire and love physical and mental sense.