From 'cosseted daughters' to public actors: The transformative vision of Japanese women in Nakajima Shoen's (1861--1901) speeches, fiction, and diaries

This dissertation examines how the diverse genres of speech, fiction, and diary writing employed by orator, writer, and educator Nakajima Sh oen demonstrate discursive negotiations that locate her as a woman caught within changing and contradictory relationships between women and Meiji (1868--1912) society, literature, and law. Through her public lectures, published fiction, and posthumously published diaries, Shoen made use of opportunities to redefine women in Meiji Japan as needing education and independence. While previous scholarship has emphasized what Sh oen contributed toward the future of women's rights, she has often been judged by the success or failure of her feminist vision. What this dissertation explores is how Shoen complicates our understanding of the production of Meiji women's writing and how shifting perceptions of women and their potential as participants in all areas of society were supplied through complex and contradictory definitions of women's social identities. One way this is addressed is by interrogating the ways Shoen obtained legitimacy as a public figure and how her ideas and actions challenged and stretched the boundaries of that very legitimacy. By doing so, this dissertation considers how Shoen's genres of choice aided and directed her vision for Japanese women.;The dissertation's first chapter explores the discursive trail left by Shoen's famous speech "Hakoiri musume" (Cosseted Daughters, 1883), which led to her arrest and trial. It also examines how her confrontation with the State and the offending metaphor that transformed her speech from an educational lecture to a political speech help to depict the birth of a new kind of female defendant. The second chapter considers Shoen's semi-autobiographical work of joken shosetsu (women's rights fiction) Sankan no meika (Noble Flowers of the Hills, 1889) through which her use of narrative positions produces a new kind of fictional political heroine. The third chapter focuses on a collection of Shoen's extant diaries Sh oen nikki (Shoen's Diaries, 1884--1901) that includes entries from the last fifteen years of her life, a period associated with Shoen's retreat from politics. The diaries are narrated in a candid and forceful voice, presented in kanbuncho (classical Chinese style). The unlikely combination of a formal, intellectual style and intimate content in the diaries typifies similar tensions between the surface and substance of Shoen's discursive productions. In all these genres, Shoen's education in classical Chinese (kanbun) clearly gives her the means by which to receive recognition from male-dominated public and professional circles. While prose derived from kanbun has not often been acknowledged as one of the representative forms of modern women's writing, in Shoen's case, it was a necessary medium by which Shoen influenced definitions of women's writing and women's place in society.