Subject in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and Annie Proulx Joyner, Carol L
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Cultural Mythology and Anxieties of Belonging: Reconstructing the "bi- cultural" subject in the fiction of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and Annie Proulx Joyner, Carol L The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1531 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Cultural Mythology and Anxieties of Belonging: Reconstructing the "bi-cultural" subject in the fiction of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and Annie Proulx by CAROL L. JOYNER Submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. University of London 2002 Cultural Mythology and Anxieties of Belonging: Reconstructing the "bi-cultural" subject in the fiction of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and Annie Proulx The thesis considers the construction of cultural identity in the writings of Tom Morrison, Annie Proulx, and Amy Tan. It consists of three chapters, one dedicated to each of the writers. In the examination of these writers the focus is upon the construction of the "bi- cultural" subject in the contemporary United States. The paradigm of analysis is constructed through discourses of space, landscape and physical geography. The first chapter is devoted to Toni Morrison and is divided into two sections dealing with the novels Beloved and Jazz. The first section examines how spatial discourses disrupt binaries that marginalise the black community. It concentrates upon the location of the "porch" in the novel and parallels it with the "porch" as a black spatial icon. The Jazz section examines the idealised space of the City. It focuses on the material layout of American Cities and discusses its relationship to constructions of American cultural identity. The debate is used to highlight how the geographical marginalisation of communities parallels their cultural alienation. The second chapter is split into two sections, the first focuses upon The Joy Luck Club, the second concerns The Kitchen God's Wife. Tan's work is discussed in relation to cultural geographic debates about mythic geography. It deals with the different ways in which Tan's texts try to palliate cultural anxieties about "belonging" by constructing a culturally soothing mythic location. An idealised version of the Chinese-American community is sustained through her constructions of both San Francisco and China, which she employs and negotiates in different ways in the two texts. The third chapter examines three Proulx texts, Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and Close Range Wyoming Stories. The chapter explores the different ways these texts negotiate cultural belonging in relation to geographic migration. Postcards is considered in relation to the literary discourse of migration. In Accordion Crimes the employment of similarly positivist conceptions of the construction of a "home" in North America is examined. The final section examines the problematic nature of "location" as both geographically and textually soothing. The Epilogue suggests the possible extension of the thesis and foregrounds the importance of the materiality of spatial construction to the cultural anxieties the thesis examines. Cultural Mythology and Anxieties of Belonging: Reconstructing the "Bi-Cultural" Subject in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and Annie Proulx. Acknowledgements: p. 5 Introduction: Partiality and Representation p.6 Chapter One: Morrison as Icon p.26 Beloved: Cohesion Produces Collapse, the Embrace of Liminality p.28 Jazz: Ambivalence, Rupture and "the Concrete Thrill of Borderlessness" p.6l Chapter Two: Amy Tan as Mythmaker, Anxieties of Belonging and the Culturally Soothing "Synthetic Region" p. 85 The Joy Luck Club: The Reader as a Member of a Community of Understanding p. 101 The Kiichen God's Wife: The Materiality of Discursive Authority p. 134 Chapter Three: Proulx, Problematising Positionality p. 170 Postcards: Literaiy and Cultural Iconography - A Redrawn Discursive Map? p. 187 Accordion Crimes: American Immigrant Experience as Paradigmatic Subject Position. p. 223 Close Range - Wyoming Stories: the Return to the Synthetic Region? p. 248 Epilogue: p.271 Bibliography: p. 273 Internet Bibliography: p. 291 Television and Film Bibliography: p. 294 Journal Bibliography: p. 295 S Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Lisa Jardine for her support throughout this thesis. As to other acknowledements I have had so much support that it's difficult to know who shouldn't be here. I would like to thank Brycchan Carey, Margaret, Eric and Judy Homberger, Susie Jordan and Lisa O'Sullivan for their support and help both on a personal and professional level. For food, finance, love, thick skins and protection from the Green Hare, I thank my family, Jen, Richard, Clare, Az, Dot. For being me bessie mate: Anna Jones - and for living with me - Elem Zacharias and Jon Connerty, as well as many friends, including, Sue Widgery, Beverley Turner, Mark Steel, Jeremy Town, Chris White, and the Cohens. 6 Introduction Partiality and Representation Foucault best captures the enormity of the task facing those who wish to traverse the treacherous terrain of representation when he writes that "the visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss." Written texts contain an often hidden geography and an examination of that geography may clarify the unreflected ideologies of the text [... it] may also undermine dominant cultural representations of the other, by revealing that they are less regularities of nature than conventions of a situated - geographic - imagination.2 Both quotations are taken from James Duncan and David Ley's introduction to the collection Place/Culture/Representation. The latter provides a paradigm for the concerns of this thesis. The first quotation provides an imperative warning, one that is fundamental to the approach of the thesis, to debates about cultural anxieties of belonging as explored in the work of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and Annie Proulx 3. The Foucault quotation suggests the precariousness of the term "representation". It serves throughout as a reminder of the unavoidable partiality of any engagement with such a discussion. The complexity of "representation" is foregrounded in the quotation and this mirrors its status in the thesis. This thesis is not framed by a formal "Conclusion". This is partly as a result of the Foucauldian warning about the partiality of any examination of representation. However, the decision to refuse concluding the thesis is because to do so would be to 'J Duncan, David Ley eds., Place/Culture/Representation, (New York: Routledge, 1993) 4/5. 2 Duncan, Ley (eds.), 13 7 attempt coherence. My aim here, through an examination of the writers' engagement with spatial discourses, is to expose the point at which "bi-cultural" communities are constructed. Rather than regarding the authors as representative of the communities in which they are situated, the thesis argues that these communities exist through their construction in the texts. Critical preoccupations with arbitrating the authenticity of these writers' voices elide cultural anxieties indicated by the desire to construct and define the communities themselves. My interest is in examining the force of these anxieties within the text, and only to a lesser extent, their reflection in critical engagement. Proulx's texts, for example, tackle these anxieties head on as she problematises their constructions in her novels. The thesis, therefore, deliberately undermines attempts to see Morrison and Tan as "representative" of any discrete community. I am also concerned to explore Proulx's understanding of the subject's desire to locate themselves in those communities. I suggest that a new discussion is established as the novels are unpacked as mythic constructions meeting a predominating cultural need to locate the subject. 4 The thesis aims to situate the "bi-cultural" subject, and debates the use of the term as a palliative. I examine "bi-culturality" as a salve that engenders the anxieties it elides in contemporary usage. The presumption that these authors offer a mythically succouring version of "bi- culturality" is un-packed. The desire to position, or locate, the subject is examined. Positionality is explored in terms of the problematics its very use engenders. It is important to mention at the outset of the thesis that my choice of editions has largely been dictated by what I have observed to be most readily available in the United Kingdom. Bibliographic citations include the novels' first publication in the United States. 4 For a fuller discussion of the construction of Myth see Chapter Two. Although all three chapters engage myth not in terms of classical or religious mythology, but rather as a narrative strategy. 8 When I was six I was in a playground in Richhill, a small village between Armagh and Portadown in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. I was playing a group game with my cousins, I think it was about guarding a rope bridge, a piratical game but I do not remember clearly. We had not been playing long when the game was stopped by a contemporary of mine. I had shouted an instruction and my accent had been detected by the lad. He didn't know whether or not I was English, he just recognised that I was not local. He came over and asked me whether I was Catholic or Protestant. I didn't properly understand the question although I knew the answer was reasonably important. I was aware that I probably did not want to say Catholic, but I had no idea what Protestant meant and was nervous about the consequences of getting the question wrong, so I replied; "I'm neither, I'm Church of England". My response was met pretty blankly and we went on with the game.