Relationality in Alice Munro, Joan Riviere, Jane Campion and Alice Walker

Gender, Race and Reading: Relationality in Alice Munro, Joan Riviere, Jane Campion and Alice Walker by Erin C Rozanski A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Erin Rozanski 2017 Gender, Race and Reading: Relationality in Alice Munro, Joan Riviere, Jane Campion and Alice Walker Erin Rozanski Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2017 Abstract This thesis considers the question of femininity in psychoanalysis and cultural life, through an analysis of how short stories by Alice Munro and Alice Walker and film by Jane Campion stage and engage with it. In chapters one and two, I argue that Munro’s stories in Open Secrets assemble myths of feminine survival that take on a truth value as plausible alternative descriptions of culture to those stories which psychoanalysis describes as ultimate. As such, “The Jack Randa Hotel” and “Open Secrets” provide a complex commentary on gender and its relationship to questions of knowledge. My contention is not so much that Munro’s stories “resist” or parody psychoanalytic understandings of gender, as that they disclose latent possibilities in the original that are not fully available to distanced, linear/discursive thought. Correspondingly, my work considers psychoanalysis not as a closed or discrete set of textual practices, but as a cultural text open to continual signification and resignification by successive generations of writers – and thus, ameliorative reinterpretations. This approach offers a way of moving beyond the false dualism of a “psychoanalytic” perspective which ii disregards the claims of history and an historical one which reifies a transparently self- available subject – by embracing, in order to qualify, the validity of each. Chapters three and four consider the normativity of “whiteness” in the construction of gender in the West, as it bears on a specific psychoanalytic text and concept (chapter three) and shows up in the grammar of Jane Campion’s film (chapter four). Chapter three reads Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929) in terms of how it encodes this norm. Chapter four considers the implications of my reading of feminine masquerade in chapter three for film theory. I analyze how Campion’s In the Cut deploys signifiers of racial difference to foreground its white female lead’s crisis of subjectivization. In a final chapter, I conclude the thesis with a reading of Alice Walker’s “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells,” which speaks to the possibilities for (or limitations on) solidarity between white and black women, and to the omissions of white feminist theory with which Campion’s film contends. iii Acknowledgments Many people helped bring this PhD into the world. Loving thanks to my parents for my first life lessons, and to my brother for sharing them with me. It has been an honour and an inspiration to be in conversation with my thesis committee. Thank you to my supervisor Mary Nyquist for her support over the long haul, and for the many conversations through which I significantly shaped my thinking. To Garry Leonard for his perceptive insights which helped me to clarify my direction, and for the numerous bridges to additional texts and territories to explore. Thanks to Naomi Morgenstern for her careful reading, intuitive insights, and for keeping space for me to do the work. Thanks to the Department of English for University of Toronto Fellowship funding, and to the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program for additional funding assistance. To John O’Connor, Karina Vernon, Daniela Janes, Sonja Nikkila, Alexandra Peat, Margaret Herrick and many others for teaching partnerships which formed an all-important background to (and break from) the PhD. Thanks to Diana Ojeda for her friendship and a running conversation on topics esoteric and beyond. To Kfir Feffer for his generosity at a critical moment. And to Pearl Levey for many helpful empowering suggestions. Gracious thanks to the department of English for their support in the final months of the program. To Lynne Magnusson for believing I would succeed, and generously giving of her time to support that outcome. To Marguerite Perry for her unflagging warm support and late afternoon phone calls which kept me on track. And to Tanuja Persaud for her warm encouragement at the defense and many years of helpful support in the Graduate Coordinator’s office. Gratitude to Julie Rivkin for coming all the way from Connecticut for the defense, and for her engaged conversation and careful reading of my thesis. Thanks to Robert McGill for his thoughtful and engaged questioning, which gives me directions to think through and pursue for the future. And to Graham Sanders for his kind chairing of the event. Thank you to Mrs. Wai Mak and the Mak family for their love and support over the years. Love and thanks to my partner, Henry Mak, for sharing the journey with me, including its hardships, and for his love and generosity and courage. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Interpretive Crisis and the Time of Reading: Alice Munro’s “Open 13 Secrets” Chapter 2: Enactment or Unreliability? Form and Femininity in Alice 32 Munro’s “The Jack Randa Hotel” Chapter 3: Recognizing Masquerade (In Theory): Women, Work and 63 Whiteness in Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” Chapter 4: Masquerade and Representation in Jane Campion’s In the Cut 102 Chapter 5: Race, Rape and the Temporality of the Look in Alice Walker’s 135 “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells” Conclusion 148 Appendix 159 Works Consulted 164 v List of Appendices 1. Objectivity in Post-Positivist Realism and Psychoanalysis vi 1 Introduction What would it mean to consider psychoanalysis as telling meaningful truths about social reality, but not the only truth? What is the role of literary and cinematic texts in such an endeavour? This thesis considers the way in which fiction by Alice Munro and film by Jane Campion dialogue with psychoanalysis on questions of gendered subjectivity. Along the way, I take up the way in which the construction of femininity as in question in the psychoanalytic narrative (as well as in the cultural formation that it both explains and is a product of) is framed through an assumption of normative “whiteness” that places under erasure, and enacts the racialization of, non-white subjectivities and especially women. This association hearkens back to structures of Euro-colonial slavery and its aftermath and is ongoing, as Bhabha argues1 – a fact which presents unique challenges to reading as an ethical act through which the present tense of history is conducted. In psychoanalysis, the question of what femininity is is fundamentally unanswerable; the attempt to answer it instead motivates or sets in motion desire as the wish to penetrate an enigma or secret. In his famous lecture on “Femininity,” Freud writes: Throughout history, people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity […] Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women, this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem. (342-43) Freud’s construction of the topic of his lecture condenses a series of propositions. By suggesting that the “nature” of femininity is a “riddle” for those in the audience who are men, Freud considers that the question of what femininity is cannot be answered. Femininity is fundamentally in question or is, itself, a question – somehow equivalent to the attempt or the desire that it sets in play to answer or discover “it.” As Shoshana Felman writes, because women are the question, in Freud’s discourse, they cannot ask it, cannot “be the speaking subjects of the knowledge or the science which the question seeks” (“Rereading Femininity” 21). The representation of femininity is equivalent to the thing itself, or there is no such 1 According to Bhabha, the colonial era is still with us; thus, its effects cannot be construed as object of a knowledge that remains, itself, un-displaced (94). 2 distance between signifier and signified specifying a female subject as the referent of the question, “What is a woman?” Female desire is instead recruited into the story of the male subject as enigma – that which constructs the male quest for identity and self-definition by its elusive nature, or reciprocal missing-ness. Yet the very finality of this seeming exclusion – one which begins with a statement of limitations on knowledge, but expands to assert the prerogative of the quest for it as defining the masculine position – contains its own reversal, or asks to be read against itself. Felman considers Freud’s letter to Marie Bonaparte, in which he writes: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have never been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”2 Acknowledging that this question may not have an answer or be accessible to any man or woman in Western culture, Felman yet asks what the possibilities are for it to be re-appropriated (re-read, re-written) as a question asked by and for women? (What Does a Woman Want? 3) If the answer within Freudian discourse is that there are seemingly none, this answer equally contains its own insistent echo; “According to whom?” or to what objective observer outside of culture, reporting on it? The question of gender is thus transferred onto the space of literature, possibility, the inventive, that which might be, rather than or as a continuation of what merely is. As Stephen Heath notes, theory’s proximity to the prerogative of truth-telling, as it regards even the attempt to de-center the perspective of the observer as inevitably subjective, inadvertently contributes-in to a phenomenon in which it is assumed that what supposedly “is” will “always be.” Psychoanalysis “seems to fix things forever in the given, and oppressive, identities, with no connections through to the social-historical realities that it also seems accurately to be describing” (Heath 56).

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