Critiquing Misogynistic Discourse: The Trope of the ‘Poison Woman’ in Early Meiji Popular Narratives
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This chapter compares Japanese ‘poison woman’ (dokufu) narratives, a group of popular fictional texts produced in the late 1870s and early 1880s, in order to analyze how the signification of both real and fictional ‘evil’ women in these stories participates textually to undermine anterior misogynistic discourses within Meiji Japan. Using Julia Kristeva’s attention to the symbolic and semiotic language levels of texts to show how these narratives, while often appearing to condemn their female characters, in fact highlight the false premises of contemporary moral rhetoric directed at women. This comparison considers the two most well-know texts in the genre, Kubota Hikosaku’s New Tale of Omatsu the Strolling Minstrel on the Open Seas, (Torioi Omatsu kaijō shinwa, 1878) and Kanagaki Robun’s The Story of the She-devil Takahashi Oden (Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari, 1879). I argue that inherent in the creation of the poison woman literary trope was a conflict between significations of woman at symbolic and semiotic levels of texts. Because of this conflict, these texts ultimately provided their readers with an insightful critique of contemporary society and its views on women rather than a criticism of the female characters themselves.