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Black Women's Fiction and the Abject In University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2018 WRITING NEW BOUNDARIES FOR THE LAW: BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION AND THE ABJECT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS Angelique Warner U Massachussetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons Recommended Citation Warner, Angelique, "WRITING NEW BOUNDARIES FOR THE LAW: BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION AND THE ABJECT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1303. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1303 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WRITING NEW BOUNDARIES FOR THE LAW: BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION AND THE ABJECT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS A Dissertation Presented by ANGELIQUE WARNER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2018 W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies © Angelique Warner 2018 All Rights Reserved WRITING NEW BOUNDARIES FOR THE LAW: BLACK WOMEN’s FICTION AND THE ABJECT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS A Dissertation Presented by ANGELIQUE WARNER Approved as to style and content by: James Smethurst, Chair Manisha Sinha, Member TreAndrea Russworm, Member Priscilla Page, Member Amilcar Shabazz, Department Head W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies DEDICATION For Octavia Butler ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, James Smethurst, for his years of encouragement and his expertise in an area of literature that is so important to me. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the members of my committee, Professors Sinha, Russworm, and Page for their patient and thoughtful reading of my scholarly work and their counsel about how to continue my growth as an academic. A special thank you to all those whose support and friendship helped me keep moving forward. v ABSTRACT WRITING NEW BOUNDARIES FOR THE LAW: BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION AND THE ABJECT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS May 2018 ANGELIQUE WARNER, B.A. KENT STATE UNIVERSITY M.A., KENT STATE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNVIERSITY OF MASSACHUSSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Prof. James Smethurst. Many Black women authors have been pegged as mere victims by oppressive societies; their characters have been deemed psychotic or suicidal and the emphasis of the majority of the criticism on authors such as Adrienne Kennedy is on the oppressive society and not what Kennedy does with the terms of the oppressive society; that is, as an agent, as opposed to an object / victim. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, delineated in her Powers of Horror, is a critical tool that allows us to see the agency and operation of the egos of characters such as those of Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Octavia Butler. I argue that these Black women deploy ideas and terms comparable to Kristeva’s and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, which allow them to point out what is indeed abject in their respective racist, sexist and / or colonial worlds—that is, the oppressor who denigrates its victims, and lies, and creates what Fanon terms “zones” that isolate their would-be victims is abject as the creator of the abjection of these worlds. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………….......………………v ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………………………..vi INTRODUCTION: THE ABJECT IN BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION ………………………………………1 SECTION I: ABJECTION IN ADRIENNE KENNEDY CHAPTER I. KEEPING AN EYE ON MY ABJECT: THE THEATER OF ADRIENNE KENNEDY AND ITS ASSOCIATES ………………………..………………..…………………...………..……92 II. THE ABJECTION OF RACISM: MAINTAINING THE SYMBOLIC AS BEST WE CAN ……….137 SECTION II: THE SPACE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE RACIAL ABJECT AND ITS INTRUSIONS III. AFTER KENNEDY’S RAT’S MASS AND ESSEX’S AMERICA ………………….…………222 IV. THE IMAGISTIC AND SOCIO-SYMBOLIC CREATION OF THE ABJECT SLAVE SUBEJCT ………………………………………………………………………………………………...296 WORKS CITED ……………………………………….……………………………………………………….335 vii INTRODUCTION: THE ABJECT IN BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION In this project, I argue that Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject and its manifestations in the psyche of the individual and her collective (society) is a tool that opens the boxes that, in literary criticism, compartmentalize as psychotic some Black female subjects who expose the nonsensical basis of the laws of their respective oppressive societies; an examination of slavery demonstrates that customs that have become laws are, in fact, simply that—laws that exist because they are customary and have been bestowed with the attributes of being “god-given” and “True,” whereas in reality the Law is what is necessary and its “authority is without truth” (Sublime Object 36). While many critics have maintained that characters created by writers such as Adrienne Kennedy have ceased to be subjects, in effect (because they have lost their hold on the symbolic), a close psychoanalytic reading of these texts demonstrates that what Kennedy is describing is a subject trapped within an impossible universe (which coincides with Žižek’s description of the moral Law: “The voice of the Other telling us to follow our duty for the sake of duty is a traumatic irruption of an appeal to impossible jouissance”[89]; that is, Kennedy’s subject is in fact positioned to observe the tautological repetitions of the obscene ideology of racism, au fond; even given the fact that Sarah in Funnyhouse of a Negro arguably crushes her own face with “an ebony mask,” it is because she has “listened to her friends” and that is why her hair has fallen out). The texts of the writers I examine here revolt against degrading regimes in performative ways and in outright refusals to allow others to violate their personal boundaries; the subjects of these texts demonstrate a contrast between the social laws of individuals who are clearly capable 1 of signification (that is, they have the symbolic register), and the impossible “morality” of others who would like to turn them into objects, in effect. Even when a subject is destroyed by others around her, it is obvious that her boundaries have been irreparably dismantled, and what Kristeva would call abject literature takes the place of the dialogues and framing explanations of what has happened. Abject literature is essentially when suffering is the place of the subject, a narrative in which the inside / outside, subject / object boundaries are “incandescent”; finally, the “unbearable identity of the narrator and of the surroundings that are supposed to sustain him cries can no longer be narrated but cries out or is descried with maximal stylistic intensity (language of violence, of obscenity)”; finally, narration itself becomes essentially impossible— “the theme of suffering-horror is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation. If one wished to proceed farther along the approaches of abjection, one would find neither narrator nor theme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary—the violence of poetry and silence” (Powers 141). This is not to say, however, that the voices of Black women merely show that their respective oppressive worlds have silenced them; rather, they have used the abject support of the ideological fabric of their worlds against the people who have inflicted racist / colonial ideologies on them. My core argument has always been that Black women writers do more than display the filth of the outhouse (in Kennedy’s The Owl Answers ); it is that they leave the abject with its owners. The arguments that Black women writers like Kennedy recognize and articulate what the social fabric of the racist / colonial Self cannot name, and that the horror these writers articulate is universal, coincide easily with Kristeva’s theory of abjection; the way in which these women writers’ works (that I analyze) have similarities demonstrates the potential agency granted by the theory of abjection, and, more than that, that these Black Diasporic women writers, across a huge continuum of historical time and space, 2 make use of what Kristeva calls abjection in the way in which Kristeva herself uses it. “For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of the religious, moral and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and breathing spells of societies rest. Such codes are abjection’s purification and repression. But the return of their repressed make up our “apocalypse,” and that is why we cannot escape the drama of religious crises” (Powers 209). Writers as diverse as Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maryse Conde, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid demonstrate that “the artist is an undoer of narcissism and all imaginary identity as well, sexual included” (Powers 208)—that is, Black women’s use of what Kristeva calls abjection, the uncertainty in regard to boundaries (208), to speak back to societies that are deaf to them, and make that dismissal itself abject. As Jamaica Kincaid’s Xuela puts it, in the layered contexts in which she exposes the abject, scarred boundaries created by exclusion of the humanity of Lazarus and herself and everyone left out of the happy picture of the group assembled outside the church, “To condemn yourself is to forgive yourself and to forgive yourself for your transgressions against others is not a right that anybody can claim” (Kincaid 220)—the only way someone who has committed the sins of colonialists could atone would be to have no defense of himself whatsoever, and to have the list of his sins cried out forever (Kincaid 60); Kristeva states essentially the same, when she makes the point that “Who… would agree to call himself abject, subject of or subject to abjection?” (Powers 209).
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