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Paper short abstract

Revisiting Ariyoshi Sawako’s The Doctor’s Wife, this paper explores how women’s voices are articulated through silence, bodily endurance, and rivalry, revealing a feminist subtext embedded within historical narrative.

Paper long abstract

Sawako Ariyoshi’s novel, The Doctor’s Wife, revisits the life of the historical figure Dr. Hanaoka Seishu by centering the perspectives of the women in his household. In doing so, Ariyoshi shifts the narrative focus away from traditional scientific achievement toward the significant personal sacrifices. The paper argues that the novel constructs a plural and relational model of women’s voices that emerges from the tension between historical context and feminist subtext.

Although the story is set in the late Edo period, Ariyoshi wrote the novel during a time in postwar Japan when literature was increasingly engaged with women’s rights. Under the traditional ie (household) system, women were systematically excluded from public authority, formal education, and intellectual recognition. Ariyoshi highlights these structural restrictions while simultaneously exploring how women find ways to express agency from within them. Rather than granting her characters overt power, she locates their "voice" in silence, physical endurance, and emotional strategy.

A central focus of this study is the rivalry between Otsugi, the mother, and Kae, the wife. This paper interprets their conflict not as a personal moral failing, but as a direct result of a patriarchal system that forced women to compete for limited social recognition. Their shared willingness to submit their bodies to experimental anesthesia is analyzed as an "embodied speech act"—a performance through which pain, risk, and sacrifice become forms of testimony. In this context, silence functions as a charged narrative space that conveys both resistance and deep affective knowledge.

Drawing on feminist literary theory and Japanese gender studies, this research challenges readings of the novel that frame these women primarily as passive victims. Instead, it proposes a redefinition of voice that includes internal thoughts and physical actions. Ariyoshi’s narrative reveals how scientific history often relies on the hidden exploitation of women’s bodies. Ultimately, the novel rewrites history from the domestic sphere, forcing a reconsideration of how gender, power, and agency operate in both historical and literary narratives.