The Female Horizon Of Takeda Tae

Takeda Taijun was a Japanese post-WWII writer who has profound associations with China;until recently,most Sino-Japanese scholars have focused their views on Takeda Taijun's wartime experience,as well as the thoughts generated based on such experiences but are less concerned about her literary creations on females.In fact,Takeda Taijun was a writer endowed with her own thoughts and had a strong desire for writing about females.During her lifetime,Takeda Taijun created a great number of works themed at women;nevertheless,due to the fact that her works associated with China attracted the attention of most researchers,for a long time,her serial works themed at females have been ignored.The works of this series possess unique features;in contrast to the perspectives of most male writers who wrote by regarding females as objects,Takeda regarded females as the subjects of narration and the viewing subjects for observing the world;she constructed a textual space starting from female horizons and is female-dominated.Not only can this space reflect the internal world of the whole text,it can also scrutinize the ex-text realistic world.The Author defines such a textual space with female characteristics as the writers' "female horizon".Such concepts as female writing,women's outlooks,female horizons and female images have all been covered in the semantic domain of the "female horizon".This Thesis regards "female horizons" as the research basic tone and Takeda Taijun's serial works of female themes as the research subjects,and it is divided into such three parts as an introduction,four chapters of expounding and conclusion for elaborations in an attempt to answer the following questions: 1.what is the significance for a male writer to construct a female-dominated speech space in a text and reflect and observe the text world starting from a female subjectivity.2.how the "female horizons" were constructed in the texts and what characteristics they possessed.3.What the writer's realistic examinations were reflected from the female-dominated text space.It is hoped that in this Thesis this work's value can be sufficiently tapped in an attempt to provide a new perspective for the research of Takeda Taijun.In the Introduction,an overview of Sino-Japanese studies on Takeda Taijun was conducted,with an emphasis laid on the previous research linked to "females".On this basis,it proposes the research value of her serial works with female themes and defines the concept of "female [horizon",thus elaborating on the researchmethodology and writing thoughts of this Thesis.Chapter One of this Thesis regards the text of The sage woman and chivalrous woman as the research subject,and the text was Takeda Taijun's first work that was published and regarded females as the first-person narrative perspectives.The analyses of the text reveal the construction process of Takeda Taijun's female horizons.The text regarded the "chivalrous woman"---Madame Mei " as the " I " of a first-person narrator,and through the narration by " me ",a speech space featuring female subjectivity was constructed.In such a speech space,there was always a " sage woman "--" Maria ",who had been watched and commented by " Me ",and these two females formed a dualism structure.The two persons' confrontation structure was not only a metaphor of the " flesh and spirit ",the western religious thoughts and the oriental chivalrous spirit",its dissolution in the end of the texts were also the subversions of the hierarchies of the dualism.The significance behind such a subversion were Takeda Taijun's concerns about the female subjectivity,the "discoveries" about the Chinese chivalrous spirit,and they were also the deconstruction and criticism of Japan's civilized world in recent time.In the text of Sage woman and chivalrous woman,it can be seen that by constructing a dualism of "chivalrous woman/sage woman,Takeda Taijun made the females as the center of the text,and the subjects and objects of speeches as well as the subjects and objects of viewing were all women,with males marginalized and becoming the background for the contrasts of females.Due to the successful construction of the " female horizons " in the text,in this " perspective ",a breakthrough was made in the model of speech structure with men as the center,and subverted the dualism hierarchical order of " male/females,thus featuring a deconstruction force that spans over the boundaries of social genders.In Chapter 2,the text of Kill the mistresses as the research subject and the post-WWII loss of the Japanese subjectivity was examined.Kill the mistresses was adapted from the continuous five cases of wives' killing the mistresses that occurred in Tokyo.Back then,it was the period of Japan's occupation by the US,and under the guidance of the American power institutions,Japan was promoting the democratic reforms of such various fields as politics,economy and culture in an all-rounded way,and the social trend of the women's lib movement was also fledgling from here.The cases of the wife's killing of the mistresses were closely associated with such a social background.Therefore,when conducting analyses of the novel text of Kill the mistresses themed with the serial cases,it is necessary to adopt the adopt the empirical research methods.The Author,by searching the reports of the cases of the same era by themagazines and newspapers,as well as such data as the questionnaires by the Japanese women's organizations on the women's democratic consciousness,conducts a comparison between the narrations by the media reports of the same era and the narration in the novels' texts.It was revealed by the analyses that there was a space of public speeches in the texts that are consistent with the reality and construed by the speeches on the newspapers and magazines,and the space advocates that the wives' killing of the mistresses are justifiable self-defense and they should be judged as innocent.The characters in the texts were all the readers of the newspapers and magazines,who blindly followed the speechcrafts of the public speeches and adopted the speech formats which are consistent with the public speeches,with power gradually permeating into the mass speech space through the public speeches.Finally,Chenzi,as the focus figure of the text,was forced to set on the path of killing the mistresses due to his identity of a "wife".The process in which Chenzi was transformed from "no killing" to "killing" was a process in which power permeated into the individual speech space through the public space constructed by the media and finally obliterated the individual's subjectivity.The various problems occurring amid Japan's democratic liberation movements during the 1950 s was re-examined and reflected within the "female horizons".The tense confronting relation between the "wife" and the "mistress" was dissolved through the defamiliarized images of "wife" and "mistress" in the texts,thus revealing the true status of the women's lives in post-WWII Japan as well as the real reason for the intensifying of the contradiction between the "wife" and the "mistress".Furthermore,it criticized the fact that Japan's subjectivity was obliterated due to the "cultural colonization" of the US occupation institution and denounced the tragedy that females harmed each other due to the fact that they were exploited by the power system.The text sufficiently manifested the scrutinizing of Takeda Taijun's "female horizons" of the Japanese social reality,thus granting the "female horizons" a realistic depth.In Chapter Three,A woman's nationality was regarded as the main research subject and comparative analyses were also made in combination with the other two texts--The non-revolutionary and The firefly of Shanghai which were based on the same female mixed blood and Takeda Taijun's thoughts on "mixed blood " was examined from the female horizons."mixed blood " was a special thought of Takeda Taijun's,and it was also her methodology for comprehending and writing about the world The manifestations of the "mixed blood " thoughts are seen in a number of Takeda's works,and such imageries as the mixed blood s and "mixed cities" etc.were the carriers of themixed blood thoughts in Takeda's works.With the daughter of a mixed blood as the first person narrator,A woman's nationality' tells about the experiences of struggling for a living during the two historic periods of the war between China and Japan and post-WWII by "Me" and "my" Chinese father and the Japanese mother in the two"mixed blood ' cities of Shanghai and Tokyo.The texts were the concentrated manifestations of Takeda Taijun's thoughts of "mixed blood s".In the texts,the questionings were constantly raised by the surrounding people of this mother and daughter and themselves regarding whether they are Japanese of Chinese,and through the mixed blood,it revealed that such things as "races" and "nationality" and "breed",which seem to belong to the human intrinsic properties are nothing more than a "shell"of self-confinement,and it is a categorizing violence that is imposed on humans by the power system.The identity of a mixed blood,which cannot be categorized and defined,made them expelled by the system,but they obtained relatively more freedom as well as the pluralism that can make breakthroughs in the boundaries.Through the female horizons,they reflected how the tradition of females naming after their husbands after marriage and became the same nationality of the husbands' obliterated the females' subjectivity.The combination of the mixed blood and females and the definition of them as the first-person narrative perspectives bestow upon the dual deconstruction significance,and in addition of the subversion of the patriarchal center,female horizons also feature the pluralism of making breakthroughs in the boundaries and slipping the leash.Chapter Four,with the two novels of the writer's Takeda Taijun written in her late period--The Thirteenth sister and The Autumn Melancholy-biography of Qiu Jin as the research subjects,studies Takeda Taijun's "chivalrous woman's" perspective.Regarding the two chivalrous women,one was the "Thirteenth sister from the novel The Story of Child Heroes,a Chinese classic literary work,while the other was the chivalrous woman of Qiu Jin from China's modern society,thus reflecting from the side Takeda Taijun's acceptance of Chinese classic literature,as well as her interactions with the Chinese revolutionaries of the same era.These two aspects were also the sources of the chivalrous spirits in Takeda Taijun's works.The writing forms of these two novels--the vernacular and quasi-documentary literature also feature research value.The former was Takeda's imaginations based on the romanticism of China's chivalrous novels in an attempt to have a combination of connotations of China's " brotherhood " as well as the chivalrous spirit with the post-WWII Japanese social and cultural contexts.The latterwas Takeda's imagination based on the historical records and the on-site surveys in an effort to seek an all-rounded and comprehensive image of Qiu Jin that features literary classic significance.Through the research of these two works,it was possible to examine the significance of Takeda Taijun's " discover " a chivalrous woman and writing such a woman.In the post-WWII Japanese society which attached great importance to the western cultural values and neglected the Chinese traditional cultures,by repetitively creating the powerful and forceful images of chivalrous women,Takeda Taiju hoped she could become a classic model of the female images in Shakespeare's plays.Only in this way,the " chivalrous women could cross over the boundaries and nationalities and posses the strong vitality that can resist the erosions by the western values in the Japanese social contexts;they could also bring hope and the courage of rebellion to the women of the Japanese society.The "chivalrous women" in these two novels pushed the boundaries of Takeda Taijun's "female horizon" into a supreme limit,thus uplifting the dimension of the "female horizons" onto a spiritual level and featuring symbolic significance.In the Conclusion,the construction process,rough profiles and the construction significance are summarized and the specialties and their rich connotation are interpreted.This aims to make preparations for the further deepening and expansion of the future subject.