A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Monstrous Happiness: A Comparative Study of Maternal and Familial Happiness in Neoliberalism in Japanese and British Women's Writing in the 1980s Nozomi Uematsu DPhil University of Sussex June 2016 2 Statement I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature:................................................................................... 3 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Nozomi UEMATSU DPhil in Sexual Dissidence in Literature and Culture Monstrous Happiness: A Comparative Study of Maternal and Familial Happiness In Neoliberalism In Japanese and British Women’s Writing in the 1980s Summary My thesis is a feminist comparative project on Japanese and English women’s writing, historicised within the social discourses of the 1980s, reading the literary texts of Foumiko Kometani, Doris Lessing, Banana Yoshimoto and Jeanette Winterson. Treating these texts as contemporary, this thesis questions the rhetoric of optimism, with ideas such as “liberty” and “happiness” in the beginning decade of neoliberalism, interrogating how this rhetoric empowers and influences women’s life choices in the 1980s. Simultaneously, I consider how these women writing in the 1980s respond, criticise, and explore this optimism in relation to maternity and maternal relationships: I examine the rhetoric of maternal/familial happiness in relation to the neo-liberal narrative of normativity. In this sense, happiness works as a force for normativity. I argue that neoliberalism offers women new possibilities for various kinds of labour: it opened up more labour opportunities in the public sphere both in the UK and Japan, whilst nonetheless continuing to encourage women to engage in physical labour, child birth through marriage and heteronormative relationships. These two contradictory agendas, the new opportunity for women to work in the public sphere and the requirement to stay at home to reproduce, nurture and look after family members, caused a huge tension in neoliberal lives, and the fictions that represent them at the time. Building from the works of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, I argue that happiness is the affective glue that holds together and smoothes over this tension between women’s self-fulfillment in the public sphere and in the domestic sphere. To be happy, after all, women were told (and are still told) they needed to be proximate to the conventional family unit. This study thus seeks to contribute to comparative literature across the East and the West, affect studies, contemporary women’s writing and feminist literary criticism. 4 Table of Content Aknowledgement Introduction Part One …………………………………………………….6 Part Two……………………………………………………42 PartⅠ Chapter One………………………………………………………….......84 Leaky Maternal Bodies: Disability, the Disenfranchised and (Un)Happiness in Thatcher’s Britain in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988) Chapter Two…………………………………………………………….130 The Battle for Bloody Freedom: The Representation of “Good Blood” for “Freedom” in Foumiko Kometani’s Passover (1985) PartⅡ Chapter Three…………………………………………………………...163 In Pursuit of Bloody Happiness: Every Happiness Has a Blood Lining: A Collusion between Postfeminist Labour and Women’s Happiness in Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen (1987) Chapter Four…………………………………………………………….220 The Troubled Monstrous Mother: Maternal Desire, Technology and Happiness in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) Conclusion…………………………………………………………...….261 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….299 Appendix………………………………………………………………..310 5 Acknowledgements Most of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors Dr Pam Thurschwell and Dr Rachel O’Connell who made this journey possible. The professional as well as warm support, guidance, and encouragement I received from both kept me writing till completion. I also would like to thank Dr Vincent Quinn who tutored me in summer 2012. Thank you for finding the potential in this project, and giving me the chance and confidence in writing when I most needed it. I am also grateful to Prof. Asako Nakai, my supervisor at Hitotsubashi University. Also my sincere thanks goes to Dr Natsumi Ikoma, who taught me feminism and happiness in life in Tokyo. I feel grateful to my friends for their intellecutal conversation and great sense of humour: Jenny Greenshields, Feras Alkabani, Pei Yun, Yoshinori Yamashita, Maho Sakoda, Rosy Carrick, Sarah Chadfield, Reika Ukawa and Nao Uesaka. I am so indebted to my parents (Shinichi and Chidori), my Indian parents (Anil and Jyoti) as well as my Scottish parents (Donald and Lynda) who “adopted” me here in the UK. All of you made this completion possible with your care and help for me. Moreover, I am truly honoured to be supported by Rotary International and Hitotsubashi Jyosui Alumni for their financial support, as well as archival help from The Keep to assist my research by the Mass Observation Archives of the 1980s. Finally, this thesis is for my partner Aneesh Barai. Words simply could not express enough how grateful I am to you, to reach this stage. Your devoted encouragement, fortitude and company made every page and every paragraph of my thesis. Thank you for believing in me. 6 Introduction: Part 1 “Women’s Happiness” in Neoliberalism Are not women of the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them. (The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir)1 [W]hile I believe that increasing the number of women in positions of power is a necessary element of true equality, I do not believe that there is one definition of success or happiness. Not all women want careers. Not all women want children. Not all women want both. I would never advocate that we should all have the same objectives. Many people are not interested in acquiring power, not because they lack ambition, but because they are living their lives as they desire. (Lean In: Women, Work, and The Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg)2 In 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, she already recognised the difficulty of defining and measuring happiness, specifically that of “women”. Seen in the quotation above, de Beauvoir talks about the difficulty of defining women’s happiness partly because of class differences between women: ‘women voters’ and ‘working-woman’ are presumably considered ‘more educated’ than women in a ‘harem’ and ‘house keepers’, yet their class difference does not necessarily promise which category of women become happier. Over 60 years later, at the time of neoliberalism, when women in most nations can vote and pursue their careers (although this is not 1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H.M. Parshley (London: Penguin, 1972 [1949]), p. 28. Emphasis by de Beauvoir. 2 Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and The Will to Lead (Croydon: WH Allen, 2013), p. 10. 7 universally the case), the CEO of the Social Network Service Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg continues this focus by writing on the complication of defining woman’s happiness. Sandberg acknowledges that there is no one meaning of ‘happiness’ or success, since happiness depends on one’s desire for life, choices that one makes. Yet, with her disclaimers against a single meaning to happiness, Sandberg implies that women’s happiness depends on women’s choice: the choice to have children or not; the choice to have career or not; the choice to have both. Either choosing a career or not is still perhaps a question of transcendence and immanence in de Beauvoir’s existentialist terms: Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free and autonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego)—who always regards the self as the essential—and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.3 3 De Beauvoir, p. 29. 8 According to de Beauvoir, the possibility of women’s fulfilment (transcendence) is limited, and constantly in conflict with their immanence, which is to be trapped in the endless cycle of daily routines such as washing and cooking, and even larger tasks like giving birth. Women’s achievement is a constant ‘drama’, as on the one hand, all people naturally regard themselves as essential, but on the other hand, women are made to feel othered and inessential by society.