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영어

This paper inverstigates Mishima’s plays focusing on the “maid”. Mishima put a lot of effort into drawing “home,” the smallest unit of human relations in society, and “family play” is one of the characteristics of his plays. The family form that Mishima drew is a postwar modern family model represented by a nuclear family, and its nature depends on the gender role division of work, such as “white-collar worker husband and homemaker wife”. In a word, the woman is confined in the home, and it is said that it is to be responsible for the home administration as a “housewife”. However, in the home depicted by Mishima, there is no figure of a woman who actually manages as a housewife, that is, a mistress who behaves perfectly as a mother and wife. Instead, the “maid”, who is another person who has entered the home, appears. In Tada hodo takai monowa nai (1952) confirmed in this paper, there was a fierce confrontation with the mistress in the “maid”, but the mistress gradually disappears. These changes may be deeply related to the process by which modern family forms take hold. In a word, the standpoint of the woman named “housewife” that the modern family system was born was confined in the home instead of erasing the existence of “maid” from the society, and it was made to take charge of housework and the child care. It can be said that women exclusively responsible for the function of housekeeping in the home shifted from “maid” to housewife, but the fundamental change does not occur, and the woman who became a housewife can be said to be the weak position than “maid”. In other words, because placed in the position of a housewife, the woman is not recognized professionally like a “maid” and could be regarded as being demoted to an existence with only empty power as a mistress. Mishima’s “maid” is the literary figure that can most effectively explore the power of women that results from the fact that the modern family specializes in home economics and the problems that inevitably accompany it. It can be said that there was.