孤独なヒロイン : アニタ・ブルックナーの女性達 （学院創立110周年記念号）

岡田, 章子, OKADA, Akiko

Contemporary women novelists are interesting to me as my fellow travellers in the present-day society. Anita Brookner is particularly familiar and attractive because her novels deal with women who work in the universities and libraries. They seem to be my colleagues. Besides, the streets, the parks, and the shops which I saw in my recent visit to London are vividly described in her novels. These things stimulate me to imagine what England is and what British women are. Brookner's attractive appearance in her photograph also draws me into her world. Brookner's biography is not very well known. She withholds talking about herself and has stopped giving interviews because of the misunderstanding and defamation she had suffered. But in her novels, especially the first three, her life and character are living. Brookner's novels are permeated with profound loneliness. The first book, A Start in Life, is the most autobiographical. It opens with the striking sentence: "Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." Then she looks back at her unhappy life from childhood through her professional career. Meanwhile, the loneliness Ruth Weiss suffers is minutely expressed: how she hates to go home, how she sits alone at a coffee bar on the station platform, and how she stays up in the library until nine o'clock. This loneliness makes her devote herself excessively to her lover when she falls in love. She borrows a flat so that she can invite her lover to dinner at home. She prepares an elaborate dinner for him, which turns out to be meaningless, because he arrives hours late for a trivial reason. She marries her father's exmistress's nephew for convenience, but after six months he is killed in a traffic accident. This brief, loveless marriage gives her momentary security, which, Brookner says, all women need. In the end, she gets a position in a college and looks after her old father. The next novel, Providence, has autobiographical overlays and also reveals a lonely heroine. Kitty Maule is a visiting lecturer in a university. She falls in love with Maurice, her colleague. She, like Ruth, devotes herself entirely to him. Though she is an excellent teacher, her job is significant not for its own sake but for Maurice's sake. Staff meetings are great occasions to her, as she can see him there. She knows that "a man gets tired of a woman if she sacrifices everything for him," but she cannot get rid of her obsession because of loneliness. The description of the minutes waiting for her lover's message in a hotel is almost tragic. She has waited so keenly that when he appears, she is absent-minded. This love ends unfruitfully; after the lecture which she has to give to be promoted to a formal staff position, she finds that Maurice is going to marry one of her students, not very bright. Though she succeeds in getting the promotion, she is thrown into deeper solitude. The third novel, Look at Me, shows a slightly different approach. This time Francis Hinton tells her story in the first person. She works at a reference library in a medical research institute. Her daily life is lonely, especially on holidays. To herself, she names the melancholy feeling on holidays as the "Public Holiday Syndrome." To alleviate the feeling, she writes; she has already published two stories in an American journal. Francis is, in a way, a contrast to Ruth and Kitty; she has a lover named James for whom she does not have to wait. She knows when she can see him next time; she spends relaxing time with him. She does not write on these happy days. But the tragedy comes from her girlfriend whom she trusts. Her love is interfered with by the friend, and James falls in love with Maria, a flippant girl. Francis, in her unhappiness, starts to write again; the story ends with "I pick up my pen. I start writing." This is highly autobiographical, as Brookner says in an interview that she writes to remedy her neurosis. To Brookner, women cannot be happy with professional success; rather it is an outlet for frustrated feelings. She skillfully represents the solitude and the intimate thought processes of intellectual women. Generally they are old-fashioned and hardly seem to be the twentieth century's women. Brookner wants to say that women's loneliness, especially that of single women, cannot be changed, however the society changes. She does not write of men's solitude. Probably she writes only through her feelings.

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KJ00004272373

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孤独なヒロイン : アニタ・ブルックナーの女性達（学院創立110周年記念号）

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