THE FEMALE BODY IN ENCHI FUMIKO’S LITERATURE. A GENDER PERSPECTIVE
THE FEMALE BODY IN ENCHI FUMIKO’S LITERATURE. A GENDER PERSPECTIVE

Summary/Abstract: One of the prominent female writers of the postwar period, Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986) succeeded in describing the modern real woman1 in her works as she delved into the dynamics of gender in modern society. By doing so, she criticized the persistence of values belonging to the patriarchal system that preserve the idea of gender difference to the detriment of women. Enchi challenged the idea of a purportedly standard universal body that is an idealized composite of the “best” features of real bodies and to which women are being subjected to. As some feminists have argued, for women, the body is a primary signifier of the self to the outside world and the links between identity and embodiment are more explicit for women than for men. This should be taken as one of the main reasons why Enchi felt the need to explore the characters psyche by relating it to the female body. In Enchi’s works, living with a radically unpredictable body or a body that has lost functions or parts calls into question the stability and continuity of identity. The female characters in Enchi’s novels might not express their emotions, but their anguish manifests itself on the level of their bodies. That is to say, psychological suffering is being transformed into a corporeal suffering. In this essay I am analyzing the meaning, characteristics and ways of portrayal of the female body in Enchi Fumiko’s works while referring to former critical studies and modern gender studies.

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