英文摘要 |
This article tries to look inside the general attitudes of Japanese readers towards Oscar Wilde's Salomé through Mori Ogai's translation in the 1920s by incorporating Michel Foucault's sexual discourse as used in his History of Sexuality. There are certain themes shared between Foucault's book and Wilde's Salomé that readers of them can hardly ignore: the hysterization of women’s body, powers of death and over life, true love, spiritual and physical love, precocious sexuality, incest, perverse sexuality. Such shared interests of two authors should not nonetheless be understood as sheer coincident, instead, they attest to a deeply entrenched mindset governed by the sexual discourse, namely books on sexual pathology both have read, which predominates the Christian West since the Victorian era. And it is exactly this mentality defined as sexual discourse by Foucault that sets apart how Salomé is interpreted in late Meiji era Japan and its Western counterpart, which is a form of translation in a broader sense that results from cultural differences. |