Yonogi The Search for Glory and Idealized self
The Search for Glory and the Idealized
Self in Arishima Takeo’s Aru onna: A
Psychoanalytical Approach
Reiko Yonogi
Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
Abstract: Aru onna (A Certain Woman, 1919) by Arishima Takeo
(1878-1923) stands apart from other Japanese writers’ works in the
modern period because of the subject matter and writing style. Aru
onna is a novel of the revolt of a modern Japanese woman against all
constraints upon her freedom. Satsuki Yoko, the main female character, struggles to realize herself, but she fails to do so. This essay applies
a psychoanalytical approach to analyze Yoko’s character development,
mainly based on Karen Horney’s theory elaborated in her last work
Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization,
published in 1950. It explores how Yoko’s effort to achieve self-realization turns to self-alienation and eventually to self-destruction. Horney
created a theory of character development that emphasizes the influence
of cultural values, environment and social relations. Although it is very
unlikely that Arishima knew of Horney, he was very much interested in
theories of human psychology, which were fairly new to Japan. Arishima seems to convey the idea that Yoko is a victim of her environment,
and her failure to realize herself was rather because of her social and
personal environment, an idea which anticipates Horney’s theory of
character development.
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Aru onna ( A Certain Woman, 1919) by Arishima Takeo (18781923) presents a very important question about the social status of
modern Japanese women. By exploring how Yoko, the main female
character, becomes aware of herself and her intrinsic personal worth,
and how she loses her battle at the end, we can get a glimpse of
women’s struggle at the turn of nineteenth-century Japan. Although
Arishima has not been as critically acclaimed as his great contemporaries, Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) or Mori Ogai (1862-1922),
his family background and his receptivity to Western influence give
him a unique place in the history of Japanese literature. His early education in a Christian milieu and his understanding of the religious
and historical background of European literature, together with his
native sensibility and passion, enabled him to create distinctive literary works. Yasukawa Sadao cites notable critics such as Masamune
Hakucho, Noma Hiroshi and Okuno Takeo who have pointed out
that Aru onna alone could have established him as a major novelist
among modern Japanese writers, and have praised the work as an authentic realistic novel comparable to nineteenth-century European
novels (237-39).
Arishima Takeo was born in Tokyo during the period when Japan was in the process of modernization. Due to his father’s interest
in Takeo as the oldest child in the family, he was sent to a mission
school. His father believed that the Japanese from then on had to
learn Western cultures and customs. Thus, Arishima was exposed to
Western customs and manners as well as Chinese classics at an early
age. This exposure to Christian education had a strong influence on
his later development, and this spirit and atmosphere of Western
culture became an essential part of Arishima.
In August 1903, when he was twenty-five, he sailed for America
to study at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and in June 1904 he
received an M.A. in history. After his graduation he stayed for two
years attending lectures at Harvard University and then later spent
time at the Library of Congress reading books. In September 1906,
he left for Naples, Italy, where his younger brother was studying
painting. They traveled together visiting museums in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France. Later he went alone
Yonogi / The Search For Glory And Idealized Self
to London and in April 1907, he returned to Japan after almost four
years’ stay abroad.
On the ship back home from Europe, Arishima read Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina ,which impressed him greatly (Strong 3). Senuma
Shigeki and Honda Shugo said that the reading of Anna Karenina
inspired Aru onna (A Certain Woman), as did Hedda Gabler by Ibsen, which he read while he was in Washington, DC. (qtd. in Kosaka 41). Thus Yoko, the protagonist in Aru onna, is partly Anna,
partly Hedda. Yoko also is partly Flaubert’s Emma Bovary (Strong
3). Yoko is often referred to as the Japanese Madame Bovary; Shinoda Koichiro observes that Arishima is writing about what would
have happened to Emma Bovary if she had been born in the Far East
around the turn of the century (82).
Arishima began writing in the period when many new ideas and
writings were coming in from the West and being translated into
Japanese. In September 1911, only several months after Arishima
began serialized publication of Aru onna no_gurinpusu (A Glimpse
of a Certain Woman), the book’s earlier version, the women’s group
called Seito (“Bluestockings”) was founded by Hiratsuka Raicho
(1886-1971). The name “Seito” is the Japanese translation of the
English literary group of eighteenth-century London called “Bluestockings.” Seito published a literary journal under the same name.
Raicho advocated that women must awaken as individual human
beings and liberate themselves from obstacles to their development.
Seito became a symbol of Japan’s new liberated woman, and women
in this group were called rather derisively the “New Woman” and
“Awakened Woman” by the journalistic world, and aroused much
excitement, curiosity and criticism. However, Arishima was interested in this type of new woman who rebels against the conventions of society and the age. He was intrigued by the value placed on
the individual’s intrinsic worth which this new type of woman was
trying to attain, at least figuratively. Thus during the period when
Arishima was working on Aru onna, the “New Woman” movement
which appeared at the turn of the century in the West was active also
in Japan.
Aru onna was not really appreciated and recognized during
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Arishima’s lifetime. A few years after his death in 1927, Masamune
Hakucho praised Arishima’s artistic talent, his observations of human psychology, and his well-knit sentences. He said that Arishima
was unparalleled among Japanese writers (90). Since then, other
writers have also praised the work. However, there are some of his
contemporary writers who criticized his use of the language as unJapanese (Yasukawa 1-2), and the subject matter of the novel as
immoral and scandalous because the work involved an adulterous
relationship. Today, Aru onna is regarded as a representative modern
Japanese literary work, and a work of authentic realism.
Aru onna is the story of a woman who finds her environment
inimical because she cannot conform to the standards of society.
Satsuki Yoko is a strong-willed, progressive, capricious and beautiful woman who is also manipulative and selfish. She often shows
vehement emotion. She rebels against the conventions of society
and its morals, and struggles to live as she pleases. When she is nineteen, she marries a man named Kibe Kokyo against her parents’ and
relatives’ wishes. Yet, soon after she marries him, she finds out that
Kibe is a useless man who displays “unusual sexual desires with his
poor physique” and wishes to be around Yoko all day. Yoko, strongwilled and self-assertive, cannot stand him for long, and after two
months she leaves him, even though she has a new life already growing inside her. She tells everyone that she has been made pregnant
by someone else.
The novel begins after Yoko has a daughter, Sadako, whom she
sends to live with a wet nurse. At the beginning of the novel, Yoko is
preparing to leave for America to join her fiancé, Kimura, whom she
is going to marry after she is divorced from Kibe. Yoko accepts this
marriage to Kimura unwillingly because it is the only way for her
to be reconciled with her society and to be able to live and support
her two sisters since both of her parents have died. On the ship to
the U.S., however, Yoko meets Kurachi, the ship’s purser, a married
man with two daughters, and falls in love with him. She is attracted
to his animalistic masculinity. When the ship arrives in Seattle, she
pretends to be too sick to land because of her abdominal pain and
goes back in the same ship to Japan.
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After she comes back to Japan, she and Kurachi live together.
Since their affair becomes a scandal, Kurachi loses his job and starts
working as a spy for foreign agencies. In the meantime, Yoko takes
in her two sisters to live in the house she shares with Kurachi, who
has now divorced his wife. Yoko’s abdominal pain, which had been
giving her trouble, becomes worse as time goes on. In fact, Yoko’s
abdominal pain is described throughout the novel and only later in
the novel will the reader know that it is attributed to a problem of
the uterus. Furthermore, she feels jealousy towards one of her sisters, Aiko, who is growing into a beautiful young woman, and also
towards Kurachi’s ex-wife. Thus, Yoko becomes more and more
emotionally insecure and begins to deteriorate psychologically and
physically as her hysteria becomes more severe, and she often wanders between reality and dream.
One day, the doctor urges Yoko to have an operation on her uterus. The medical term for her suffering is “retrodisplacement or retroversion of the uterus” and “inflammation of the internal membrane
of the uterus.” Here Arishima seems to be influenced by a belief that
female hysteria is linked to sexuality and thus he uses her problem
with the uterus as the cause of her hysteria (Egashira 108). At the
end of the novel, Yoko is on her deathbed, moaning in agony after
the failure of the operation on her uterus; however, she is desperately
and willfully defying death. Yoko cries, “. . . . Why should I have to
die like this, in such, in such. . . . Must be somebody, somewhere,
who. . . Can’t anybody help me? Oh God, it’s too much. . . . too
much. . . . ” (Arishima 380, ch. 49).
Apparently Arishima was very much interested in human psychology, and in the second half of Aru onna, he echoes aspects of
the treatise on hysteria in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis
(1859-1939), a contemporary of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Indeed, the psychological elements of Arishima’s novel may be analyzed from a number of Freudian and post-Freudian perspectives.
In particular, Karen Horney’s (1885-1952) theory of neurosis can
be usefully employed to analyze literary characters, especially in
analyzing the character of Yoko. It is unlikely that Arishima knew of
Horney’s work, since her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our
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Time, was not published until 1937; however, his work anticipates
her theories by emphasizing the importance of environment on the
character development of the protagonist. It is useful and intriguing
to employ Horney’s theory to analyze Yoko’s character, because Horney emphasizes the importance of social and cultural influence on
the development of personality. So far, I have not yet encountered
any articles that discuss Yoko’s character development using Karen
Horney’s psychoanalytical viewpoint.
Karen Horney (1885-1952), a psychoanalyst born in Germany,
created a theory of character development that emphasizes the importance of culture and environment. She began with a study of classical psychoanalysis, and had been a Freudian, studying with Karl
Abraham (1877-1925), a friend and devoted follower of Freud.
However, in the 1920s she began to question some of the traditional
Freudian views, especially those issues relating to feminine psychology. She especially opposed Freud’s notion of the female version
of the castration complex: the girl’s disappointing discovery of the
“fact” of female castration and its inevitable consequence, penis envy
(Westkott 53). In their Foreword to Karen Horney’s Neurosis and
Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, Jeffrey Rubin
and Stephanie Steinfeld mention: “Much of what Freud viewed as
basic drives Horney came to view as secondary manifestations, the
outgrowth of inner conflict and of character structure” (Rubin 7).
According to Horney, Freud overemphasized the biological sources
of human behavior, assuming that the feelings, attitudes, and kinds
of relationships that are common in our culture are universal (qtd. in
Paris, Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding
102). Thus, Horney moved away from instinct theory and toward an
emphasis on family dynamics and culture, and argued that culture
is more important than biology in the production of psychological
characteristics. She emphasized in particular the necessity of understanding the environmental and social context in which neurotic
conflicts are expressed.
Horney’s theory is very important in analyzing Yoko’s personality, because Yoko lived in a patriarchal Japanese society where the
head of the household, a man, often had an unquestioned authority
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over other members of the family, and thus especially women’s freedom was quite severely suppressed. Yet, it was a transitional period of
the Japanese nation from feudal to modern society, when new ideas
came into Japan from the West, and some women became aware of a
new sense of self and awakened to their self-worth. Yoko’s personality development had a great deal to do with her cultural background
and family environment.
In this essay I will use a mainly Horneyan psychoanalytical approach to analyze the character of Yoko and discuss the inner conflicts which eventually brought her to destruction. The theory I am
using is elaborated in Horney’s last work titled Neurosis and Human
Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, published in 1950.
Although this work was published over 50 years ago, her theory is
very relevant today and remains a valuable approach to understanding the human psyche. As Westkott has observed, “Horney’s theory
of neurosis is not only an explanation of character development and
conflict but also a critique of the social relations and cultural values
that give rise to psychological suffering” (Westkott 12). Thus, Horney’s theory of character development emphasizes the influence of
cultural values and social relations, and remains quite important for
feminist criticism today.
Karen Horney believes that human beings have an inherent nature, a “real self,” and that they have an inherent urge to grow and
develop these innate potentialities of this “real self.” Healthy growth
results from the process of actualizing this self, and neurotic development reflects the opposing process of becoming alienated from
it. Unlike Freud, who has a tendency to explain neurotic drives as
libidinal phenomena, Horney believes that the core of neurosis is
in human relations, which is brought about by cultural conditions,
and is therefore a disturbance in one’s relation to self and to others.
According to Horney,
The real self is the “original” force toward individual growth and fulfillment, with which we may achieve full identification when freed of the
crippling shackles of neurosis. Hence, it is what we refer to when we say
that we want to find ourselves. In this sense, it is also (to all neurotics) the
possible self in contrast to the idealized self, which is impossible of attainment (158).
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When the real self is not allowed to develop in a healthy way, it will
develop into a neurosis and a loss of self. In other words, alienation
of self occurs, and the real self degenerates. According to Horney,
neurosis begins as a defense against basic anxiety which is produced
by a threatening and inimical environment. She discusses three main
ways in which a person can cope while attempting to overcome feelings of hopelessness and isolation and to establish for him/herself a
safe and comfortable environment. As a defensive move, he/she can
move toward people, against people or away from people. Bernard
Paris explains that these moves give rise to the neurotic solutions
of compliance, aggression and detachment, terms Horney used in
Our Inner Conflicts; and self-effacement, expansiveness, and resignation, terms used in Neurosis and Human Growth” (Paris, Imagined
Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict
in Literature 19). In Neurosis and Human Growth, there are three
expansive solutions: the narcissistic, the perfectionistic and the arrogant-vindictive. The healthy person moves flexibly in all three directions: moves toward people, against people or away from people.
The self-alienated person, however, is not flexible; he/she moves toward
people, that is to be driven to comply, or moves against people, to fight, or
to be away from people, to be aloof, regardless of whether the move is appropriate in the particular circumstance, and he/she is thrown into a panic
if he/she behaves otherwise (Paris, Third Force Psychology and the Study of
Literature 45).
Thus, when a person does not develop his “real self ” in a healthy way,
the move becomes compulsive, and it generates basic conflicts with
regard to others. This conflict will lead to self-idealization.
Since Horney believes that neurosis is produced not by a conflict among the id, the ego and the superego, but instead by conflict
between the individual and his environment, it becomes important
to consider the environment in which the character, Yoko, lives--a
patriarchal society. In fact, the author Arishima conveys the idea
that Yoko is a victim of her environment. The male-oriented social
system does not allow Yoko to develop her potential (“real self ” in
Horney’s term) fully, and so her natural instinct is suppressed.
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On one occasion, Arishima writes the following letter to a fellow
writer, Ishizaka Yohei, on October 19, 1919:
Do you not admit the fact that women had been men’s slaves even before
slave labor existed and even after the liberation of slaves? Do you not admit the facts that even today women are relegated to a lower position than
men and that strangely enough men and women alike do not question this
strange phenomenon? (Arishima Takeo Zenshu, 8:373).
Later Arishima claims that women who had to make unnatural compromises under these unfair circumstances will hold grudges against
men, and the war between the sexes is declared. And he continues
to say that:
Yet women cannot get rid of love for men, and these contradictory instincts
which struggle with each other are the sad fate of present-day women. I feel
pain watching it. Thus Aru onna was written. . . .I believe that art is the irresistible expression of human existence. In this novel, I cried out my own
pain of existence in this world (Arishima Takeo Zenshu, 8:373).
This is Arishima’s vindication of Aru onna. The last sentence reminds us of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”. In fact, Donald
Keene says that “Yoko is Arishima’s alter ego in the same sense that
Madame Bovary was Flaubert’s (Keene 488). In Aru onna, Arishima
seems to project himself into the character of Yoko, who embodies
the dilemma of living in a period of transition from traditional to
modern society in Japan. In his introduction to his translation of
Aru onna (A Certain Woman,) Kenneth Strong claims that “the dramatic quality of A Certain Woman is the direct reflection of a life in
which Japanese and Western values and attitudes clashed head-on”
(Strong 4).
In order to understand how Yoko’s character development and
her struggle toward self-realization are frustrated, it is necessary to
understand the background of her upbringing. Arishima does not
spend much time on her parents and her childhood. In fact, description about her parents is all in flashback, and when the novel begins both of her parents are dead and Yoko is already a 25-year-old
woman, once divorced, and preparing to go to the US to meet her
fiancé. Her father, a doctor, was weak willed, and her mother was
a strong-willed and spirited character who practically ignored her
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cultured husband at home. When Yoko decided to marry Kibe, it
was mostly because she wanted to win the battle with her mother
who showed feelings almost resembling jealousy and rivalry toward
Yoko and opposed the marriage vehemently. This opposition gave
Yoko more determination to marry Kibe because she took pleasure
in winning a man in the face of “competition.”
Yoko, raised in an atmosphere of Christian practice, was discouraged and repulsed by the people around her who practiced
Christianity. She found them hypocritical, too strict, and without
much compassion. When she was still an adolescent, out of genuine feeling of love for God, she made a silk sash with a pattern of
the Christian cross to offer to God. Her effort was discouraged,
however, when her teacher saw her making it and, thinking that
Yoko was making it for a man, demanded to know who the sash
was for.
Yoko lived in a time when people did not know how to deal with
such a woman as she who had been awakened to her self-worth but
did not know how to utilize it. It was a society where woman’s position was to be “ryosai kenbo” (good wife and wise mother). A woman who deviated from this standard was criticized as a bad woman.
Yoko, possessing a strong will and progressive thinking, could not
conform to this social convention. When she was young she wanted
to become a journalist, but the idea was frustrated because she did
not have a proper chance to develop her ability. When she married
a man and then divorced him soon after, people around her criticized her choice and then tried to make her get remarried against
her wishes to satisfy her family. These environmental factors obstructed Yoko’s unhampered psychic growth. Under these circumstances, instead of developing a basic confidence in self and other,
Yoko developed basic anxiety, which Horney defines as a feeling of
being isolated and helpless toward a world potentially hostile. This
is exactly how Yoko felt toward her surroundings. In order to keep
this basic anxiety in check, spontaneous moves in healthy circumstances become compulsive. Thus, Yoko’s “real self ” was not given
an opportunity to develop fully in a healthy way, and she did not
have a chance to develop her innate potentialities. Yoko’s real self
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moves against people and takes aggression and expansiveness as a
neurotic solution and so becomes narcissistic.
As mentioned above, Arishima maintains that women who had
to make unnatural compromises under unfair circumstances would
hold grudges against men, and if they wanted to be recognized by
men, they had to attract men sexually. Yoko, who knows that she is
very beautiful, uses her charm to manipulate men. Arishima seems
to say that this is the only way women at that time could get men’s
attention and cope with them. Yet women cannot get rid of their
love for men. This conflicting feeling between grudges against men
and desire for love, connection and approval from men is a difficult
question to solve.
In order to find the causes for the compulsive behavior Yoko
displays in the latter half of the novel, it is necessary to recall some
aspects of her character from the beginning of the novel. Yoko is a
proud woman who knows very well that her charm is powerful. In
the opening scene, when she runs to the train that is just about to depart, she smiles at the irritated ticket inspector “as sweetly as flowers
had blossomed” and he lets her in. Going into the train “unabashed,
confident as any actress making her entry in a comedy,” she is very
conscious of the other passengers’ eyes. She creates a self-image and
becomes a kind of actress playing out her role. Her narcissistic image of herself is greatly exaggerated. She arrogates to herself in her
imagination the queenly role she would like to play.
She had been born at the wrong time, in the wrong country. Some other
time, some other place there must be where a woman like herself would
not be out of place, where she could have the strength to act out proudly
the queenly role she knew to be hers (Arishima, A Certain Woman 130,
ch. 16).
Yoko thinks she can find her place in America where women are
thought of differently. Thus, when Yoko accepted Kimura’s proposal,
she had in her mind visions of America where she should realize her
idealized self. She thought “A new start in America, a rebirth, would
give her another chance to search for the self she had despaired of
ever finding in Japan” (Arishima, A Certain Woman 130, ch. 16).
And later:
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The girl whom women had envied and men worshipped as the possessor
in her one person of every physical and mental attribute of which her sex
could boast; the beauty who had held her head high in the face of every
misunderstanding and attack, imbued with a lofty conviction that she was
queen among women who by some mistake of Providence had been born
in the wrong country at the wrong time (A Certain Woman 359-360, ch.
45).
Thus, she is a very proud person and believes that she is special,
unique and superior to others. Gradually her idealized image becomes an idealized self and this idealized self becomes more real to
her than her real self. Thus the idealized image of self becomes the
perspective from which she looks at herself. Consequently, she has
always viewed others with a detached eye:
Yoko’s eyes saw through everybody around her, especially the men. Already
before meeting Kibe she had let many men approach her, given a due humility on their part, only to throw them off at the critical moment (A Certain Woman 33, ch. 2).
When she is fifteen, she has a real lover, ten years older than herself,
whom she toys with. After a short time, this young man commits
suicide. And “It was this experience that had overwhelmed her with
a hunger like that of a tiger cub after its first taste of blood” (A Certain Woman 75, ch. 8). Here Arishima seems to say that Yoko’s deep
unconscious grudge against men showed in her sadistic behavior
toward them.
Bernard Paris extends Horney’s definition of the aggressive trait
by asserting that “what appeals most to the aggressive person with
neurotic tendencies is not love but mastery of the other in a love
relationship” (Paris, The Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature 48). Yoko demonstrates this trait when she accepts Kimura’s
marriage proposal, and even after she returns from Seattle with Kurachi, she keeps Kimura, her fiancé, within her reach to get his economic support. This is her way of keeping her power over men.
Thus, she develops a narcissistic personality which seeks to master life (men) by self-admiration and the exercise of charm (Horney
212). When she meets Kurachi, a purser on the ship, she is irritated
and frustrated because he does not show interest in her at the beginning. Since she feels superior to everybody around her, she cannot
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stand his lack of interest. Also, since her neurotic pride in her own
imaginary superiority—her imaginary self—compels her to believe
that anyone who interests her must be superior, she makes Kurachi
out to be an almighty figure. Thus, when Kurachi succumbs to his
desire and seduces her, she cries within her “I have won,” implying
that it is she who succeeded in seducing and mastering him. She feels
very powerful. Yet, after they become intimate, the relationship with
him becomes the center of her existence. She even idealizes his social
stature in the following manner: “If the world had been less out of
joint, a man like him would never have ended up as the purser of a
paltry steamer. Like herself, he had been born in the wrong place, at
the wrong time” (A Certain Woman 133, ch. 16).
Thus, Yoko falls totally under his control. As a result, understandably, she develops a fear of losing him. Since Kurachi becomes
the sole center of her existence, she attempts to preserve the relationship at all costs. And thus, what Horney calls “morbid dependency”
begins with Yoko. At this point, at the beginning of the second half
of the novel, her neurotic tendencies begin to manifest themselves
more clearly. Also, the term “hysteric” appears more often to express
Yoko’s behavior. Once she suspects without proof that her sister
Aiko and Kurachi have some secret relationship, her imagination
grows endlessly, and Yoko becomes profoundly jealous and insecure.
Her hysteria develops and her lower abdominal pain worsens. Here
Arishima uses Havelock Ellis’ (1859-1939) ideas from Psychology
of Sex. It is well-documented in his diary entry written in English
on March 28, 1916, in “Kanso roku” (“Record of Observations and
Feelings”):
I acquired several facts in female psychology in matter [sic] of sexual life,
and the relation between hysteria and sexual instinct, which will amount,
through dexterous treatment, to rare literary production. I caught many a
point which I may profitably utilize in revising “A Glimpse of a Woman” (
qtd. in Keene 484-5 & qtd. in Morton 160).
Yoko’s behavior in the second half of the novel demonstrates the
connection between hysteria and suppressed libido. The fact that
Arishima attributes Yoko’s declining health to hysteria resulting
from an illness of the uterus, the core of femaleness, demonstrates
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Arishima’s utilization of Ellis. In his essay titled “Aru onna no shudai”
(“A Theme of A Certain Woman”), Sasabuchi Yuuichi maintains
that Arishima depended too much on Ellis’s observation on the relationship between hysteria and sexual instinct (qtd. in Yoshida 364).
Konishi Yuri mentions that madness and hysteria came to be represented as women’s sickness in Japanese literary texts in the 1910’s.
She believes that the reason why any woman who deviated from the
ideology of “ryosai kenbo” was criticized as not only a bad woman
but as hysterical and mad, is due to the ideology of dualism that
symbolically identifies men with culture and women with nature as
primitive and instinctive. (“Yokuatsu sareta gengo to sei: hisuteri to
iu hyosho” Chi no dezain: Perspective).
Since Yoko’s pride is based on physical charm and idealized selfimage, she becomes very vulnerable to the fear and the anxiety of
losing her feminine attraction and thereby losing Kurachi. After a
while she loses control of herself, confuses reality and fantasy, and
often wanders between reality and a dream state. Often not knowing what she is saying, Yoko experiences fits when she loses control.
Since pride and confidence are a defense against self-hate, their collapse results in that affliction. According to Horney:
Self-hate is perhaps the greatest tragedy. Man reaching for the Infinite and
Absolute also starts destroying himself. When he makes a pact with the
devil, who promises him glory, he has to go to hell--to the hell within himself (Horney 154).
One day Yoko sees herself in the mirror: “To a single, casual glance
at the mirror the face seemed so ugly, she wondered whether this
could really be the face she remembered. With a shiver she let the
mirror drop from her hand” (A Certain Woman 344). The image
of the mirror dropping on the floor is associated with that of death.
“Yoko was suddenly conscious of death’s menacing approach. From
that moment, shadowy images of its presence filled the room” (A
Certain Woman 345).
Thus, the self-hate eventually leads to self-destruction. Yoko’s
struggle toward self-realization finally turns to self-destruction,
which conforms to Horney’s terms of “loss of self ” and Kierkegaard’s
“sickness unto death” (Horney 158). For a person to be functioning
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well, he/she needs both the vision of possibilities and the realization of limitations. As Horney implies, when the neurotic personality loses the ability to distinguish the real self from the idealized self,
the character loses touch with real cause and effect. Yoko’s desire to
realize the idealized self is so strong that even toward the end when
she is regretting the way she has lived, she is asking who is to blame
for her failure. In between the periods of her madness, Yoko comes
to her senses and says. “I was wrong. . . .I should never have lived as I
did. Who was to blame? I do not know. But at least I repent. While
I live, I must atone….” (Arishima 369, ch. 47).
In the final analysis, Yoko chose her own course of life within the
confines of society; yet being part of a conservative male-oriented
society, Yoko did not seem to have the freedom to choose her own
death that Arishima had when he committed double suicide with a
married woman in 1923. Other female literary characters created
around the same period and to whom Yoko is often compared, such
as Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler and Edna Pontelier, chose on their own to commit suicide, but Yoko was not given that choice (Egusa 45). Instead Arishima drove her to madness
and eventual death caused by female illness. At the end Yoko defies
her death, and this imminent event is not only tragic but cruel because it is not her choice. This is possibly because Arishima wanted
to say that Yoko did not have a choice of her own death, but it is also
probable that judging from the fact that Arishima made Yoko repent the way she lived, he had to consider the feeling of the general
reading public of that time in Japan by punishing Yoko for behaving in such selfish and unreasonable ways. At the end, even people
close to Yoko seem to become distant, and the Reverend Uchida, on
whom Yoko relied as almost a Christ figure, does not appear in spite
of her prayers, symbolizing that even God deserted her. Arishima
seems to convey the idea that Yoko was crushed by a society that was
not ready to accept such a woman. According to Horney’s theory,
Yoko’s struggle toward self-realization was frustrated because her
society and family environment discouraged healthy development
of Yoko’s “real self.” Yoko’s tragedy is partly rooted in the time she
was born, and partly rooted in an inability to accommodate herself
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to the limitations of reality in a world which could never be of her
own making.
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