『草枕』の底流

―メレディスの詩句をめぐって―

抄録

　As is widely known, the English poem cited in Chapter 4 of Natsume Sōse-ki's Kusamakura (1906) is an excerpt from George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), an allegorical romance reminiscent of The Arabian Nights. The poem appears in a fantastic episode entitled ‘The Story of Bhanavar the Beautiful’. Comparative study of the two novels reveals a strong likeness between Bhanavar and Nami, the heroine of Kusamakura, in various ways. The description of Bhanavar by the shore of the lake at sunset, which represents a Pre-Raphaelite picture in prose, closely overlaps that of Nami on the bank of the Kagami pond. This iconographical analogy indicates that both the heroines belong to the tradition of the femme fatale who flourishes at the sacrifice of men. Also, Bhanavar is depicted as the Queen of Serpents, while the prototype of Nami can be traced back to Kiyohime, a serpentine woman popular in Japanese folklore. What distinguishes them from the stereotyped femme fatale , however, is that they suffer bitterly from their fate and consciousness of their sins, and that they seek salvation in death. In short, they are both cast in a legendary mould but have a modern, complex mentality.

　This paper attempts to examine how Soseki assimilated the Pre-Raphaelite image of Bhanavar, as well as her character of a modern femme fatale, into his heroine in an oriental setting, and to clarify his intrinsic kinship to Meredith who was no less a poet than a philosophical novelist.