『夜と昼』における母親像について : フェミニズム批評再考

抄録

Jane Marcus, the leading feminist critic in recent prolific Woolf studies provacatively presents Virginia Woolf as a radical political writer, by focusing not upon the formal experiments of proper modernist texts but upon the socio-political contents of the rather conventional realist novels such as Night and Day and The Years. My aim here is to examine her New Historicism-oriented feminist attempt at revaluating Night and Day, in terms of a privileged mother figure; it will also lead to reconsideration of the complex relationship between the representation of motherhood and feminism. Jane Marcus interprets this novel as representative of Woolf's socialist feminism. Its subversion of a male-centered social system on a symbolic level is substantially attributed to the inversion of the thematic structure of Mozart's patriarchal, anti-feminist opera, The Magic Flute with the negative image of maternity. It is by virtue of the positive, privileged figuration of motherhood that a collective reform project is allegedly achieved, overcoming the socially demarcated boundaries of class as well as gender. The comic ending such maternal power brings forth on the narrative, however, is in fact revealed to exclude a radical feminist Mary Datchet from the renewed or transformed society ; the covert presence of Mrs. Hilbery lies at the bottom of this repressive, ideological operation. Moreover, the inverted structure of comedy, which could be rewritten in terms of Northrop Frye' s conception of romantic comedy, I urge, should be further historicized, thereby leading to the socio-political interpretation of class differences, not gender differences. Therefore, Jane Marcus' analysis granting gender a theoretically privileged status is not capable of revaluating Night and Day as an effective discursive practice of socialist feminism. The feminist criticism, which simply identifies a mother figure with femininity, should be also reconsidered.