不釣り合いな結婚の生態(2) : 「息子の拒否」の場合 : 共感の通路を求めて

The Son's Veto in Life's Little Ironies by Thomas Hardy presents an interesting perspective in relation with the foregoing story An Imaginative Woman. At the end of An Imaginative Woman, the father-and-son relationship is denied by the father who suspects the parenthood of his own son, his suspicion engendered by his wife's imagination. His wife, Ella, is imaginative enough to fall in love with her rival poet Robert Trewe whom she is never to see. Her passionate love for him is her reaction to the barren marital life with her unromantic, practical husband. Ella is in a sense scorched to death by her own imaginative hankering for 'a congenial channel' with someone who has the same disposition as her. In The Son's Veto, Sophy, who was formerly a chamber-maid at the vicarage of her native village and is now the wife of the vicar, hankers for 'a congenial channel' with someone of her kind; she is intrinsically 'a child of nature'. As the wife of the vicar, Sophy is given the duality of personality: the woman and the lady. This duality is strongly accentuated by the vicar himself and their son who is educated to be a vicar like his father. In this story the denial of the mother-and-son relationship is taken by the son Randolph. His veto on the re-marriage of his mother with her former suitor Samuel Hobson is not only a rejection of her intention, but a denial of her essential aspect as 'a child of nature'. In this paper The Son's Veto is analyzed from the viewpoint of the dual aspect of the protagonists in relation with the same theme of hankering for 'a congenial channel' found in An Imaginative Woman.

公開日:2010年1月24日で登録したコンテンツは、国立情報学研究所において電子化したものです。