Master's Degree Programme Femininity in Philip Roth's American
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Master’s Degree Programme In European, American and Postcolonial Languages and Literature “Second Cycle (D.M. 270/2004)” Final Thesis Femininity in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy Supervisor Prof. Pia Masiero Assistant supervisor Prof. Simone Francescato Graduand Giulia Scordari Matriculation Number 866056 Academic Year 2017 / 2018 Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I ........................................................................................................ 5 1. American Pastoral .................................................................................. 5 1.1. American Chronicle ............................................................................. 5 1.2. What is wrong with their life? ............................................................. 7 1.3. Dawn Dwyer ........................................................................................ 9 1.4. Meredith (Merry) Levov .................................................................... 28 Chapter II ..................................................................................................... 49 2. I Married a Communist ........................................................................ 49 2.1. Voices are Indispensable .................................................................... 49 2.2. Eve Frame .......................................................................................... 53 2.3. Sylphid Pennington ............................................................................ 67 Chapter III ................................................................................................... 78 3. The Human Stain ................................................................................... 78 3.1. Life as Fiction .................................................................................... 78 3.2. Delphine Roux: nobody knows anything ........................................... 81 3.2.1. Delphine Roux and American Pastoral ......................................... 103 3.2.2. Antithetical Women: Delphine and Marcia Umanoff ................... 109 3.3. Faunia Farley .................................................................................... 111 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 129 Selected Bibliography ............................................................................... 133 Introduction The three novels that constitute the American Trilogy—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain—published between 1997 and 2000, concern the life of three formidable men, Seymour Levov, Ira Ringold and Coleman Silk, and each one is set against an important moment in American history. As the name itself says, the trilogy investigates fundamental aspects of both America and the men who are part of it. Each novel is characterized by the presence of the same narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, who crosses the paths of these men and is so much engaged by their lives that he cannot but write about them. The focus of my thesis will be on the novels’ female protagonists. Despite the centrality of masculinity, femininity is an essential aspect of the American Trilogy. The protagonists of the three novels, in fact, are males who perfectly embody the type of masculinity typical of their era and their lives, the way they act, they feel, their goals and experiences are defined by their being males, in particular by their being American men, and are interwoven with their women’s lives. The representation of male characters is closely linked to that of the women they live with and one must be seen in light of the other. The portraits of these female characters represent a pivotal depiction of femininity, not only because in every novel they play a significant role in defining the male protagonists’ lives but also because they forge their identities and their private life inside the American society, as men do. A crucial theme in the trilogy is exactly the life of these women being part of societal and historical changes and as manifestations of American national identity. The objective of this thesis is exactly to see if the female characters are equally rich and independent characters, or if they solely exist to play a secondary—and negative—role in their men’s lives. All the women in the novels are presented through the point of view of the male protagonist, which is typical of Roth’s work. The female characters are objects of the men’s gaze, objects either of the men’s desire or disdain, and 1 sometimes both. In some cases, their portrayal in the American Trilogy has been considered, for this reason, as a proof of Roth’s misogyny or as Roth’s personal vengeance against some women of his own life. Some reviewers, such as Linda Grant, have argued that his ex-wife Claire Bloom is the model on which Eve Frame has been built as character1. This view is shared by many literary scholars, starting from Mary Allen who, in 1976, writes that «in his creation of heroines Roth projects his enormous rage and disappointment with womankind as a man who rails at the world because he has never found in it a woman who is both strong and good»2. In addition, Dale Peck’s review “Dangerous Girls”, published in July 1997 in The London Review of Books, defines American Pastoral as «anti-woman»3. This opinion was echoed in 2006 by the literary scholar Elaine B. Safer who explicitly defines I Married a Communist as «clearly a retaliatory act»4, and in 2008 by the writer Vivian Gornick who, attacking the author for misogyny in her book The Men in My Life, affirms that «for Philip Roth, women are monstrous»5. I do not want to look at the three novels’ portrayals of women as the proof of Philip Roth’s vengeance or misogyny. However, I do recognize that these women negatively affect the male characters’ lives, so I consider it essential to further analyze the six female characters that inhabit the American trilogy. In the first chapter I will focus on American Pastoral’s main female characters: the Swede’s wife, Dawn Dwyer, and their daughter Merry Levov. In the second chapter, which is dedicated to I Married a Communist, I will analyze Ira Ringold’s wife, Eve Frame, and her daughter Sylphid Pennington. Finally, in the third and final chapter, I will examine The Human Stain’s main female characters: Coleman Silk’s colleague, professor Delphine Roux, and his younger 1 L. Grant, “The Wrath of Roth”, The Guardian, 1998. https://bit.ly/2RIIz6c 2 M. Allen, The Necessary Blankness: Women in the Major American Fiction of the Sixties, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 1976, p. 96. 3 D. Peck, “Dangerous Girls”, in The London Review of Books, 3 July 1997. https://bit.ly/2FglKWn 4 E.B. Safer, Mocking the Age The Later Novels of Philip Roth, New York, State University of New York, 2006, p. 129. 5 V. Gornick, The Men in My Life, London, The MIT Press, 2008, p. 125. 2 lover, Faunia Farley. I will look into how they shape their existence in society, how they as individuals are thrown into the heart of important changes in that society, how “public” and “private” are defined in the realm of the novels, with an accurate description of everything that pertains to them: from clothes, to speaking habits, to psychical condition, and a comparison between the six women, with regard to the recurring features that connect them. My method to approach and discuss the female quest for selfhood in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy will be a comprehensive one, ranging from close reading of the texts and psychoanalysis—I drew in particular from Lacan’s and Chodorow’s studies on matrophobia—to Bataille’s theories on eroticism and literature, and the feminist studies on “Object relations” and on women’s autobiographical texts by Susan Friedman. I also used Rivière’s and Luce Irigaray’s concepts of femininity as constructed through masquerade, which is an artificial contrivance, a cultural fabric, a mode of enacting gender norms. The female protagonists perform femininity as an attentively elaborated social mask, or refuse to do so. These theorists illuminate my analyses of the female characters’ system of identity construction. My objective is also to show how Roth’s portraits of women don’t represent his misogyny, but they are the means to achieve his goal, to give, as Henry James said, a sense of reality. «The protagonist who provides the central standpoint around which the dialogue accrues», so the protagonist through which this goal is achieved, states Debra Shostak in her book Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives, «is almost always male, almost always Jewish, and frequently a writer»6. Here this writer is Nathan Zuckerman and the protagonists are all males but the narrative choice is merely a medium. «The primary purpose of Roth’s fiction is […] inquiry into subjectivity, then the way for him to approach the nature of the subject is through its contextualization, in the world, by others»7. Women characters condition male ones. Roth challenges their performances as 6 D. B. Shostak, Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2004, p. 10. 7 Ibidem. 3 he does with male identities. Identities caught in the web of historical events. The allegation of misogyny does not allow us to go further and see that there is much more behind these characters, and can be considered only according to «the logic that misogyny emerges from a