The narcissistic woman writer

Abstract

Chapter 1 of this volume saw a coterie of critics active in the nascent modern literary community accuse women who wrote of a "lack of womanliness." So outraged were these critics by this alleged lack that they refused to read the work of women writers of the time. Members of this coterie would undoubtedly have been shocked had they read Setouchi Harumi's later declaration, featured in chapter 2, that the writing woman must be manly and immodest. The position taken by these male commentators confirms Yukiko Tanaka's belief that the woman who writes performs "an act of self-assertion" that marks her as the "antithesis of the selfless submission prescribed [for women] by Japanese culture.