The female subject in Meiji literature

This dissertation explores sex as constitutive of the subject in Japanese literature in the 1890s and first decade of the 1900s. Literature on subjectivity has primarily focused on language or the state as productive of the subject. The importance of sex as one norm by which the Meiji (1868--1912) subject was constituted has not received the emphasis it deserves. Gender norms were in flux until the 1890s, and discourses of sex are crucial to subject formation. This study endeavors to correct this omission, thereby complicating and broadening the possibilities of the female subject.; In an effort to interrogate the female subject to determine the possibility of her subversion of or resistance to ideological interpellation, I analyze the female subjects in the literature of three authors, Shimizu Shikin (1868--1933), Higuchi Ichiyo (1872--1896), and Shimazaki Toson (1872--1943). In assuming varying subject-positions from reinscribed normative ones to abjected ones, the writers' characters reveal inconsistencies in the system that determines their subjectivity and defines rules governing naturalized categories of sex and gender.; The Introduction problematizes the categories of "literature" and "women's literature" as naturalized, artificial ones that obscure the historical, social, and political moments of their production. One chapter devoted to Shikin and another to Ichiyo analyze these writers as subjects themselves negotiating to write as women in a male-dominated literary world. Also, I examine the female subject-positions in Shikin's short stories "Tosei futari musume," ("Two Modern Girls," 1897) and "Imayo fufu katagi" ("The Nature of the Modern Couple," 1897), among other stories and essays. In the chapter on Ichiyo, I focus primarily on the short story "Jusan'ya" ("The Thirteenth Night," 1895). Finally, I treat the full-length work of prose fiction, Ie (The Family, 1910--11), by Toson. Here, I consider cultural categories of high and low to further investigate the female subject. I argue throughout this project that subject-positions assumed by female characters and in some cases, their creators, reveal an ambivalence towards their own positions and demonstrate the necessity of considering sex in a discussion of the subject.