The Complex Problem of a Woman Violinist in George Gissing's The Whirlpool

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  • ギッシング『渦』に描かれる、女性ヴァイオリニストをめぐる複雑な事情

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Abstract

  The Whirlpool (1897) is a novel that shows Gissing's awareness of the changes taking place in the role of women in society and family in fin-de-siècle England. An ambitious female violinist, a woman whose concept of herself is fundamentally based in modern city life, attempts to pursue a professional career even after marriage, but ends up failing both in her career and her role as a housewife, and subsequently dies from an overdose of sleeping medicine. Critics such as Paula Gillett and Lloyd Fernando have regarded this pessimistic plot of The Whirlpool as evidence of Gissing's anti-feminism. I would like to consider this novel, however, not as an example of Gissing's anti-feminism, but rather as a sympathetic approach to the woman question of his day. Although Gissing depicts the practical difficulty of self-realization of women, we can see it, I maintain, as social criticism, an attempt to outline the problems residing in his society. <br>  In this paper, I am concerned with Gissing's treatment of women, but specifically with his treatment of women artists. In several of his novels preceding The Whirlpool, Gissing had dealt with the motif of artistically gifted women. This paper examines if there can be found a link between these women in the previous novels and Alma, as well as a difference between them. The problematics around the new relationship between men and women in the transitional period, as presented by Gissing, are also explored, particularly by focusing on the significance of the city of London, and of the characterization of Alma as a female violinist.

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