The Viewpoint Of Gender In The Representative Works Of Natsume Soseki

Natsume Soseki is an outstanding representative of modern Japanese literature. His major works are created mostly based on "gender relations", represented by his Early and Late Trilogy. These works depict a series of male and female images with distinctive features. They all struggled in miserable relations, showing different characteristics in different type of love or marriage relationships. These works represented the highest achievement of Soseki.Confronted with the gender issues, Natsume always on the way of discovering and thinking. His thoughts and progress have been faithfully reflected by the characters in his works, and his view of gender have been more mature and more sophisticated. This paper intends to describe the relationships of men and women as a starting point, then explore the view of gender of Natsume revealed in his novels and summarize the deplementment path of the author’s gender views. What’s more, I also point out the limitations and improvement of his view of gender.The paper is divided into four parts:The first section describes the type of relations between men and women written by Natsume, mainly introduces eight different stories about marriage and love affair. I can divided them into3types:the warm type; the cold type; the "women are superior to men" type.The second section analyzes the characteristics of these gender relations. Alienation is one of the most prominent features. For men, they alienated not only with women, but also with the society and social relationship; and for women, they not only alienated with men, but also have their own confusion about their roles.The third section describes Natsume’s ideal model with gender relations and the causes of his ideals. Natsume persued spiritual love with real communication, he also loves gentle women a lot. All his ideals arose from Natsume’s life experiences, and his ideals also showed with the characteristic elements of that era.The fourth part describes the errors and limitations of gender inevitably revealed in the works of Natsume Soseki, and recognized his progress and breakthrough in this area.