DESIRING SCHOOLGIRLS: VISION, GENDER, AND SPACE IN EARLY-TWENTIETH CENTURY JAPANESE FICTION AND CULTURE

Abstract

This dissertation examines the diverse representations of the jogakusei in early twentieth century Japanese fiction. It focuses on the various ways schoolgirl characters are envisioned, narrated, and consumed by analyzing how the literary representations produce distinct spaces and, in the process, shape images of the gendered subjects who inhabit them. Each chapter of the dissertation is devoted to close readings of a literary text: Kosugi Tengai’s Makaze koikaze [Winds of the Devil, Winds of Love, 1903], about a schoolgirl imperiled by poverty and unwanted male attention in the city, Tamura Toshiko’s Akirame [Resignation, 1911], about a schoolgirl’s desire for independence and quest for homosocial space, Mushanokōji Saneatsu’s Omedetaki hito [A Blessed Person, 1911], about a narrator’s subject-forming navigation of city space in pursuit of his schoolgirl obsession, and Yoshiya Nobuko’s Hana monogatari [Flower Tales, 1916-1926], a cycle of stories illustrating the space-making practices of schoolgirl same-sex partnership in the all-girls school. The examination of each work foregrounds how modern spaces and places are fashioned through acts of narration and reading. It further contends that such practices in turn affect how gendered identities and images were remembered, represented, and imagined. In its study of schoolgirls, the dissertation foregrounds how their image is constituted by and within narrative representations of space. Through the metaphor of vision and modes of seeing, which extends to acts of narrating and reading, the dissertation seeks to illuminate how literary texts and their reading practices produce gendered identities and engender spaces.