INFORMATION to USERS This Manuscript Has Been Reproduced

INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microShn master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from aiy type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 3 0 0 North Z eeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313.'761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Nmnber 9411906 Disembodied and re-embodied voices: The figure of Echo in American Gothic texts Beutel, Katherine Piller, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1993 Copyright ©199S by Beutel, Katherine Piller. All rights reserved. UMI SOON. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 DISEMBODIED AND RE-EMBODIED VOICES: THE FIGURE OF ECHO IN AMERICAN GOTHIC TEXTS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Katherine Piller Beutel ***** The Ohio State University 1993 Dissertation Committee: Approved by K. Burkman j J [J A. Jaffe ^_ Adviser J. Prinz Department of English Copyright by Katherine Piller Beutel 1993 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Katherine Burkman for her help throughout the process of producing this dissertation. I also thank the other members of my committee, Audrey Jaffe and Jessica Prinz, and my husband, Mike, for his encouragement and support. 11 VITA October 13, 1966...................... Born - Cincinnati, Ohio 1988 ................................. B.A., The University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio 1989 ................................. M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Studies in: Twentieth-Century American and British Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Composition and Professional Writing 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEGMENTS............................................ il VITA........... ill CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION................................... 1 CHAPTER II: AS I LAY DYING: IMPOSSIBLE SILENCE............................ 47 CHAPTER III: THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY: ECHOES AND PROPHETS.......................... 100 CHAPTER IV: BELOVED: HAUNTING AND HEALING ECHOES ...... 162 CONCLUSION ................................................ 209 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................. 226 IV CHAPTER I: Introduction She was under the apple tree and Dari and I go across the moon and the cat jumps down and runs and we can hear her inside the wood. "Hear?" Dari says. "Put your ear close." I put my ear close and I could hear her. Only I cant tell what she is saying "What is she saying, Dari?" I say. "Who is she talking to?" (As I Lay Dying 204) The scene, just before Dari burns the barn near the end of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, is in some ways one of the most horrible in a novel that gives us so many atrocities--by the time we reach this scene we have read of Vardaman boring holes into the coffin and Addie’s face, the family dragging Addie across country for selfish motives, buzzards circling overhead, and Cash with his leg encased in cement lying on the smelling coffin. But when Dari brings Vardaman to listen to their mother’s body as it hisses and gurgles while decomposing ("talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling"— 202), we are again made 2 painfully aware of the condition of Addie’s body within the coffin (if the buzzards and disgusted townspeople were not enough) while we also see Dari’s increasing disturbance and Vardaman’s inability to comprehend death. Vardaman’s questions here are on one level childishly inappropriate; his mistaking the noises of putrefaction for Addie speaking shows how far he is from understanding death (although from his perspective he has every reason to believe Dari’s contention that she is speaking). On another level, however, Vardaman’s questions have deeper significance--since Just a few sections earlier we have in fact heard Addie speak, long after the novel presented her death. We have just heard her life’s story in her own very "real" voice. As we read the chapter attributed to Addie, we too could ask "What is she saying?" and "Who is she talking to?" since her story in her own "voice" appears as such a digression and is so packed with emotion and philosophical richness. Perhaps a more basic question that comes to us as we read Addie’s section, however, is simply "Why is she talking?" She supplies us with a great deal of background information on the family that helps explain the relationships we see among them, but we still suddenly have to deal with the fact that Faulkner has given us a voice from a dead character. Of course, Faulkner does not show the words of Addie’s chapter as coming directly from the coffin (like the 3 gurglings Vardaman hears); we have no reason to believe we should see a true ghost in this novel. But we do have a voice whose origin is quite questionable since we know the "source" is dead. Even though none of the voices in this novel "speak"— since we just seem to be overhearing their consciousness— something different is going on with Addie, whose consciousness (or identity, self) has presumably ceased to exist. Addie’s voice is present only as echo— like the mythological figure of Echo who has voice after the "death" or destruction of her body. Faulkner’s novel asks us just what it means to have a "dead" voice or a disembodied voice from some other realm "speaking." When William Butler Yeats called for a "living voice" in literature early in this century, his notions of "voice" in texts were grounded in a tradition that, although challenged by theory, still is discussed today. Especially when we read narrative texts we expect to "hear" many voices— voices of the author, narrators, and the created characters, voices reflecting ideology and personality, voices we can label "ironic," "realistic," or "multi faceted." As Bette London reflects, voice is very much a "subject of contested meaning; organic center of the text, agent of aesthetic unity, site of a personal presence, instrument of ideology, effect of mechanical reproduction, product of political technologies" (3). Voice as a critical concept is still very much alive, although we now may be 4 more likely to recognize the "dead letters" that make up any relatively fixed and permanent written text. ^ "After structuralism, one might say, narratives no longer speak to us: they have become texts, grammatological systems of literary ’proauction’ within which an ’author function’ can be isolated. Like Prufrock before his mermaids, we can hear the ’voices’ of our literary canon ’singing, each to each,’ but we rarely say they sing to us" (Pecora 146). Without endowing a book with life, we often do operate within an illusion of characters’ having voices that make them seem "real" or "living"— especially in a modernist tradition that values "characterization." As Michel Beaujour explains, "representation (dramatic or otherwise) aunounts to a conferral of presence upon the dead letter of the text, thus creating the illusion of an authorial voice or that of lifelike characters" (275). The voices that characters are given in texts contributes to what James Phelan has called their "mimetic" quality. ^ But in As I Lay Dying. Faulkner presents us with a voice that subverts what otherwise seems to be a focus on characters’ consciousnesses as autonomous, a voice which, by its presence when it should be absent, makes us question the connections between voice and identity (or the possibility of either) in the novel. This questioning of "presence" while still presenting the illusion of interior consciousness may be a particularly modernist characteristic.^ But it is also a problem that continues in more recent American texts, that "echo" Faulkner’s novel, in similar ways questioning connections between voice and presence. Flannery O ’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away also includes a central voice that remains a presence although its source— the character Mason Tarwater— dies early in the narrative. This voice too is "disembodied," though in a different way from Addie’s (since it seems to live on in Mason’s nephew), but O ’Connor’s text also gives us a "voice" that in odd ways comes to have a body (when the nephew’s own rebellious thoughts take on corporeality, for him at least). Even more recently, Toni Morrison has given us a narrative that includes a "re-embodied" voice in the form of a corporeal ghost and some disembodied voices (attributable to the three main female characters and the "angry dead") that float outside of their house for others (their friend Stamp Paid and the reader) to hear. In all three of these texts disembodied and re-embodied voices provide inherent questionings of consciousness and identity. The echoes from Faulkner are understandable--although neither would like to admit influence, O ’Connor saw Faulkner as an imposing predecessor for any Southern writer, and Morrison studied Faulkner closely as a graduate student.

Load more