老いた＜女中＞に見る生死の支配力 －三島戯曲『朱雀家の滅亡』を中心に－

Abstract

This paper inverstigates Mishima’s play The Decline and Fall of The Suzaku (Suzakuke no metsubo, 1967), which is an analysis of the female image representing Mishima literature. In this paper, I focused on the family drama as one of the characteristics of Mishima plays, and I turned my attention to The Decline and Fall of The Suzaku, which is set only at home among the plays. Mishima’s family style is based on the modern view of division of gender roles such as “men work, women work and raise children,”and the role of women in the family is a nuclear family. However, it should be noted that Mishima’s portrayal of a hostess is not a full-time housewife who is oppressed by her roles such as housework and childcare, that is, she is not the bearer of a wife and mother trapped in a family. Instead, an old maid appears. In The Decline and Fall of The Suzaku, the hostess was absent from the beginning, and there was only a “maid” in the house, and eventually the maids were confirmed to be completely in the position of hostess. These changes may be deeply related to the process of “modern families” becoming established. In other words, the position of a “full-time housewife” created by the modern family system, instead of eliminating the maid from society, she was confined to the home and took charge of housework and childcare. It can be said that women in charge of the functions of domestic affairs have moved from maids to housewives, but no fundamental change has occurred, and women who have become housewives are weaker than maids. In other words, because she was placed in the position of housewife, she was not recognized professionally like a maid, and she was demoted to a position where she had nothing but empty power as a hostess. It can be said that Mishima’s maid was the greatest power of women resulting from the full-time home administration in modern families and the literary figure that could most effectively explore the problems that inevitably follow. Orei in The Decline and Fall of The Suzaku, which overthrows the transcendent logic of life and death by her own life, can only live in the family of the master’s family. In this sense, it can be said that it is the image of a modern family mistress, or a full-time housewife. However, Mishima expresses the paradox of a “self- centered” human being by portraying women in the family as maids who are capable, skilled, intelligent and willful. In other words, “subjectivity” expressed by individual human beings can be said to be born only in restricted human relationships and can only be exercised under oppression. In this paper, I identified the self-reliance and control of the limitations of home through the image of women in Mishima’s modern family. Mishima’s female characters embody this contradictory dual nature.