茅盾の性慾描寫論と「蝕」「野薔薇」における性愛

Abstract

Mao Tun began his literary activity around the May Fourth movement. He did not appear first as a novelist, but as a well-known intepreter, critic and editor in China. In his youth he had showed concern for such issues as women's liberation, sexual love and the relation between literatrure and sex. Some of his more concrete ideas were expressed in Sexual Description in Chinese Literature in June 1927. Three months later he wrote Disillusion to establish himself as a novelist. Interestingly, much more sexual descriptions could be found in his earlier novels than in such later masterpieces as Midnight or Spring Silkworms. By comparing his trilogy Eclipse with some of the stories in his first anthology of short stories Wild Roses, this study aims at explaining Mao Tun's idea of sexual descriptions in narratives and the actual techniques he himself employed in his works. According to Mao Tun, the description of sex in literary work is "to express morbid sexual desire, itself a kind of social and psycological disease worthy of studying". He praised Guy de Moupassant's style and technique which did not describe sex scenes, but emphasized more on the logicas well as the content of the plot. His theory apparently showed traces of naturalism, and he denied traditional Chinese pornographies and demanded that more sexual literature should appear in China. However, his own works did not seem to indicate his philosophies. The idea of sexual intercourse as morbid disease which Emile Zola suggested in his works Nana and Terese Requin had not been dealt with in depth by Mao Tun. What he had depicted were