Motherly Affection as Tactics: Negotiating the Bourgeois Household in Higuchi Ichiyō’s Kono ko

ABSTRACT

This article explores the discursive formation of mid-Meiji households by analyzing Higuchi Ichiyō’s Kono ko (This Child, 1896), a novella comprising a young mother’s monologue in its entirety. Earlier scholarship has treated the piece as a story about the mother’s conformity to dominant gender ideology, primarily regarding her husband. To demonstrate negotiations between the mother and domestic staff within her household, given the existing power structure, this study also highlights changing relationships revealed in the monologue. I employ the framework of Michel de Certeau’s “tactics,” which explains an individual’s creative means of opening up a space for alternative interactions without drastically changing the dominant structure. These “tactics” can help us better understand the role of the mother’s emotional expressions that leads her to reformulate her domestic work relations. This new relation, I will argue, does not deviate from the emergent Meiji bourgeois culture that appreciated individual spontaneity to maintain both efficient and affective labor. By offering a close textual analysis of the piece, this study aims to broaden our understanding of mid-Meiji bourgeois domesticity and the complex gender and class relations of modern Japanese discursive space.

ABSTRACT IN JAPANESE

本稿は樋口一葉の短編『この子』（1896）からみる明治中期の家庭に関する言説形成を考察する。『この子』は若い母親の独白で全編が構成されている。先行研究では本作品における母親が夫との関係を通じて支配的なジェンダー観念に服従する点に着眼したものが多くみられるが、本稿では、独白にあらわれた既存の権力関係のもとで進行する母親と女中たちとの家庭内での交渉を明らかにしたい。ここではミシェル・ド・セルトーのいう「戦術」−−既存の権力構造を大きく変えないまま、支配される個人がより支配的でない関係性を実現させるような独創的な実践—を分析概念として用いる。「戦術」によって、母親の感情表現が家庭内における関係性の再構築に果たす役割についてのより深い理解が可能になる。こうして再構築された関係性は、明治期に出現した中流文化に特有の、効率的かつ情緒的労働を維持するための個人の自発性への依拠から大きく逸脱するものではない。『この子』の詳細なテキスト分析を通じて、明治期の中流家庭生活に関する全般的な理解を深めるとともに、近代日本の言説空間におけるジェンダー関係と階級関係の錯綜を明らかにする。

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic labor
• Higuchi Ichiyō
• Kono ko (This child); bourgeois household
• strategy and tactics

KEYWORDS:

• 家事労働
• 樋口一葉
• 『この子』
• ブルジョア家庭
• 「戦略」と「戦術」

Acknowledgement

I thank my colleagues at Yonsei University Underwood International College for commenting on my initial draft and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes on contributor

Tomoko SETO is Assistant Professor of Japanese History in Asian Studies Division at Yonsei University Underwood International College, South Korea. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (modern Japanese history) at University of Chicago. She is the author of ‘“Anarchist Beauties’ in Late Meiji Japan: Media Narratives of Police Violence in the Red Flag Incident” in Radical History Review (#126, Fall 2016). Her research interests include early socialism in Japan, theories and representations of social movements, politics of oral narrative performances, and urban popular culture in East Asia. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 I added the last two sentences that Saito omits here. Henceforth, all translations from the original are mine.

2 The Chinese characters of her name are 實子. Rika Saito reads the name “Saneko,” which is more realistic as a woman’s name, but I rely on the hiragana syllabary “Jitsuko” that appears in the magazine that first published this piece in 1896.

3 For this passage, I referred to Michael Bourdaghs’s unpublished translation introduced in his graduate seminar at University of Chicago in 2008.