A Study On Hysterical Women In Japanese Modern Literature(1895～1930)

From the end of the 19 th century to the 1930 s,Japanese literature and even political and cultural discourses were full of statements about mental illness.During this period,hysteria,as a mental illness closely related to women,began to appear in the literary texts created by modern writers.The appearance of hysterical female images,on the one hand,is closely related to the overall Westernization process of modern Japanese medicine.Various statements about hysteria,under the guise of "science",participated in the construction of "femininity" in modern Japan: women are irrational,Unsound and morbid.On the other hand,it is closely related to the rapid transformation of modern Japanese society.The coexistence and repetition of new ideas and old ideas,as well as the huge gap between ideals and reality,constantly threatened the mental health of modern women.It is against the background of this era that women’s mental illness has become the description object of modern Japanese writers.And discourse about hysteria provided a "scientific" perspective for modern Japanese writers to describe the inner spirit of women.This paper firstly uses the method of historical sociology to sort out the popularization path of hysteria discourse,and then focuses on literature created from 1895 to 1930 to analyze the disease manifestations and pathogenesis of hysterical women,and exposes the various conflicts that Japanese women faced in the modern society,where the family system,education system,concept of marriage and love have undergone rapid transformation.The first chapter takes Higuchi Ichiyo’s later work The Caprellid as the research object,and analyzes the miserable fates of a mother and her daughter,who were both only daughters and unable to avoid the onset of hysteria,despite of the diametrically opposite marital status of "poor marriage" and "rich marriage".The tragic ending implies that the only daughters in the Meiji era could not control her own destiny at all.In the Meiji era,women’s mental illness was usually linked to failure in love.But Higuchi Ichiyo,with a woman’s unique sensitivity,paid attention to the economic difficulties and the self-identity crisis encountered in their marriage,and this shows the writer’s properties of early critical realism.Furthermore,the mental illness of hysteria began to get rid of the superstition of "possession of the fox demon",and was adapted as "encephalopathy" since the Meiji era.However,with the development of modernization,different encephalopathies were described as something not only closely related to gender but also related to social stratification.Mental diseases caused by overuse of the brain by men are considered to be "modern" and "intellectual" diseases,caused by overthinking of male white-collar workers in the process of social modernization.In other words,"social factors" are generally considered to be the main cause of these diseases.In contrast,hysteria is seen as a "female" underlying neurological dysfunction,and its pathogenesis is seen as physiological and individual,so that the cause of hysteria in women is "internal" rather than "external",and social factors are often ignored.In the context of such a historical era,Higuchi Ichiyo’s The Caprellid and other works concerned women’s survival from the perspective of family system and other realities,and revealed the deep social factors that lead to the onset of hysteric,which is especially valuable.The second chapter takes Mori Ogai’s Half Day as the research object,investigates the predicament that women faced in traditional families,especially those women who uphold the new concept of marriage.This chapter exposes the correlation between women’s "hysteria" and moral from the perspective of androcentrism.Dr.Takayama’s wife longed for a new family with husband and wife as the unit,but she was unable to express her desire in rational words like a male intellectual,nor could she suppress her desire like a traditional woman.Instead,she vented her dissatisfaction with the present situation in irrational words,and showed rejection and hostility to her mother-in-law in behavior.In the middle and late Meiji era,when the words of a good wife and a good mother and the idea of family statism occupied the mainstream discourse,the demand of Dr.Takayama’s wife violated the family ethical norms of the Takayama family with "filial piety" as the core,and also shook the ideological cornerstone of the family nationalism.As such,her claims and behaviours are considered "psychopathic" and "blasphemous".In fact,the wife’s irrational words were her distress signal to her husband.Under the Takayama family’s ethical order centered on “filial piety”,the wife is not only at an absolute disadvantage economically,but also emotionally isolated.The Takayama family’s defense made it difficult to gain a foothold for the wife.And this caused strong survival anxiety.However,under the cover of modern psychiatric discourse,Dr.Takayama brought his wife’s irrational words into the category of hysteria with a seemingly rational and objective attitude.This condescending "medical stare" reflected the one-sidedness of Dr.Takayama and the complete disregard for his wife’s emotional needs.And Hysteria is a disease labelled by men who failed to shape women’s morality.The third chapter takes Natsume Soseki’s Grass on the Wayside as the research object,and analyzes the conflict between husband and wife in modern families and the nature of women’s hysteria.The Kenzo’s family had realized the form of a modern family,and there were no external factors that affect the relationship between husband and wife,such as contradictions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law,prostitutes,etc.But it was still impossible to establish a ideal family that was surrounded by love.The individualism is an important reason that hinder the formation of love.Kenzo tried to realize the ideal of living for himself,but he could not recognize his wife as an existence with an independent personality.This double-standarded individualism exposes the limitations of the Meiji intellectuals.The narrator casts a critical eye on the protagonist,reflecting Soseki Natsume’s deep perception and reflection on the proposition of "self/other" in the late stage of his creation,that is,the individual should not deprive the self of others in the process of pursuing self-construction.The wife Osumi was a woman that grown up in a high-level bureaucratic family and had certain independent thoughts.Osumi couldn’t accept herself as an appendage of her husband,and at the same time couldn’t be convinced by her husband’s seemingly authoritative preaching.The standoff caused by the idea of individualism could only be broken when the wife fell into hysteria.This kind of plot setting is very meaningful.Women’s hysteria means the loss of subjectivity.Only in front of women with mental illness can men relax their vigilance and show a warm side,which reflects the Meiji intellectuals’ fear of women’s subjectivity.As for the wife,hysteria perversely expresses a woman’s desire to establish a self-identity based on the ethical identity as a wife.When this desire is defeated in the power struggle of the husband and wife,the only way to temporarily satisfy herself is to submit to the desires of the husband through the onset of illness The hysteria of Grass on the Wayside is a metaphor for the power relationship between the husband and the wife in modern Japanese family,permeating Soseki Natsume’s confusion and despair about building a benign relationship between the sexes.The fourth chapter takes Arishima Takero’s One Woman as the research object,analyzes the rebellious behavior of the protagonist Hayatsuki Yoko and the onset of hysteria,and reveals the inevitability of the new women’s failures in pursuit of complete self-liberation.Yoko ’s behavior of escaping from the shackles of marriage and pursuing her own instincts was radical,but she had no clear understanding and plan for the way out after escaping from marriage,and could not survive in the society without relying on femininity to gain financial support from men.Yoko ended up dying in hysteria and uterine disease.Uterine disease and hysteria are like two sides of the same coin,showing Yoko’s gradual progress towards a tragic end from both physical and spiritual aspects.The relevance of uterine disease and hysteria in this work was criticized by Yamamoto Yoshiaki as "fell behind the contemporary medical cognition".However,in combination with Arishima Takero’s thoughts on women’s liberation,it is inevitable that uterine disease appeared as an important part of hysteria.Arishima Takero’s thought about women’s liberation based on thorough humanitarianism.In One Woman.Yoko is the experimental product of the female liberation experiment attempted by Takero Arishima.She tried to pursue complete personality freedom and liberation.However,as a weapon against the patriarchal society,she had nothing but "sex",so she ccould only rampage on the road of rebellion based on instinctive impulses,and had nowhere to escape under the moral siege of the real society represented by the newspapers and media,and eventually died in the hysteria of physical breakdown and mental breakdown.Hysteria reveals the utopian color of Arishima Takero’s female emancipation thoughts,showing his reflection on the new women’s rebellious methods and effectiveness based on instinctual impulses.The fifth chapter takes Haruo Sato’s Rebirth as the research object,and analyzes the tragic situation of unmarried women and the deep reasons of her hysteria after encountering love scandals.On the surface,the tragedy of the protagonist Tatsuko Aono stemmed from love.On the way home from sleeping out with the young writer,Tatsuko was questioned by the police and fell into a whirlpool of public opinion,and then experienced multiple tragedies such as the loss of a father,husband,and son,and thus suffered from hysteria and attempted suicide.However,behind all the tragedies Tatsuko experienced,there was a strong shadow of patriarchal ideology.After the love scandal was exposed,Tatsuko completely gave up her main power under the dual effects of public opinion and family pressure.When faced with an ethical dilemma,Tatsuko always went against her true feelings and stands in the position of safeguarding the family’s reputation.Such ethical choices directly led to the betrayal of the emotional object,and then Tatsuko fell into extreme self-criticism.The tragedy of Tatsuko is a tragedy in which women constantly repressed her self-consciousness under the constraints of patriarchal ideology and repeatedly made ethical choices that went against her inner truth,resulting in self-alienation.The author Haruo Sato arranged for a professor of psychiatry to help Tatsuko get rid of hysteria and move towards a "new life".But in the end,Tatsuko gained the power of rebirth from the Zeppelin spaceship full of fictional elements.Such an ending reflects the improbability of unmarried women caught up in the scandalous time of being freed from the yoke of patriarchal ideology and of being rescued.Nowadays hysteria has almost disappeared as a mental illness,but some things have undoubtedly lasted longer than the name of hysteria.Today,in many people’s minds,men are synonymous with rationality,while women have hysterical tendencies.This notion is still deeply ingrained.This concept obscures the irrationality of the social order itself.By studying hysterical women in modern literature,we can get a clearer glimpse into the inner conflicts,their anxiety,their pain,and their marriage life of modern Japanese women more clearly.This further exposes the morbidity of the modern Japanese social order itself,which is concealed by the disease name "hysteria".In this sense,the research process of hysterical women is also a process of deconstructing hysterical disease images and exposing the morbidity of social order.