Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 Separation anxieties: representations of separatist communities in late twentieth century fiction and film Brett Alan Riley Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Riley, Brett Alan, "Separation anxieties: representations of separatist communities in late twentieth century fiction and film" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3236. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3236 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. SEPARATION ANXIETIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF SEPARATIST COMMUNITIES IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY FICTION AND FILM A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Brett Alan Riley B.A., University of Arkansas at Monticello, 1994 M.A., Northeast Louisiana University, 1997 May 2006 ©Copyright 2006 Brett Alan Riley All Rights Reserved ii This project is dedicated to Kalene, Shauna, Brendan, and Maya. The world would be gray without you. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Rick Moreland for his invaluable guidance and insight. Rick, without you, this project might have been twice as long and half as good. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee—Dr. Jack May, Dr. John Lowe, Dr. James Catano, and Dr. Gregory Schufreider—for all the suggestions and encouragement. Your efforts have made me a better scholar. I would also like to acknowledge every teacher and librarian who ever directed, cajoled, and threatened me over the years; I have truly benefited from your perseverance. Special thanks go to Drs. Clark Davis, Betty Matthews, LaRue Sloan, and Kate Stewart. To my many students, thanks for helping me learn how to be a good teacher and for all the encouraging words during my work on this project. I pledge my eternal thanks and friendship to my fellow graduate students who supported me during my time in the program, especially Bill Scalia, Kris Ross, and Wolfgang Lepschy. Friends like you are rare, and our Thursday night sessions at the Chimes will be missed. To my parents, Donna and Jesse—thanks for all the love and support over the years. You have been constants in an often tumultuous world, and that is more valuable than you could possibly know. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the countless contributions of the four most important people in the world—Kalene, Shauna, Brendan, and Maya. Any success I have belongs to you as well. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..…iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv Abstract…….……………………………………………………………………………………..vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 Girl Gangs, Female Outlaws, Lesbian Subtexts……………………………...…………26 2 Religious Separatist Communities, the Invading Other, and the Sexual Self…………...81 3 The Separatism of Vietnam Veterans: Reality vs. Representation, Narrative vs. Memory, History vs. Myth, and the Return to ‘The World’……………………124 4 Intersections of Race, Gender, Experience, and Ideology: Representations of Separatism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise………………………………….…179 Conclusion……..……………………………………………………………………………….232 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………254 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………...261 v ABSTRACT In the late 20th century and beyond, American social movements advocating equality have increased national attention to issues of exclusion, inclusion, and multiculturalism within communities. As a result, studying the nature of communities—how the term “community” might be defined, who belongs to a given group or social structure, who does not belong, and why—has become increasingly important. American artists have responded by exploring these sites of social, political, and personal change in their works. Separation Anxieties: Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth Century Fiction and Film analyzes seven fictional works in which some group is philosophically and/or geographically isolated— sometimes by choice, sometimes not—from mainstream America. Each chapter in this study focuses on works that represent and explore a different separatist iteration. Each work utilizes a different representation of America’s dominant community. Their respective separatist characters distance themselves from dominant American society and create a new community defined by a limited set of characteristics—gender and sexuality, religious beliefs, experience, race. Yet the complexities of American life continually creep into their separatist spheres, complicating the characters’ attempts to belong; these complications often lead to conflicts within, or even to the dissolution of, the separatist communities. In these works, accepting complexities and individual voices is represented as more conducive to communal survival than suppressing alternate ideas and/or dissent. Studying these texts leads to a reconsideration of traditional American myth—the “Union,” equality, inalienable rights, the various freedoms that America is supposed to embody—and to a reexamination of why those myths might be rejected, of what kinds of communities might be formed, and of how those communities might succeed and fail. Separation Anxieties is an attempt to engage with and vi understand narrative constructions and, through them, the real-life ideals, communities, and people recognizable in the representation. vii INTRODUCTION Borders have a way of insisting on separation at the same time as they acknowledge connection . Borders between individuals, genders, groups, and nations erect categorical and material walls between identities. Identity is in fact unthinkable without some sort of imagined or literal boundary. But borders also specify the liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction, interconnection, and exchange. Borders enforce silence, miscommunication, misrecognition. They also invite transgression, dissolution, reconciliation, and mixing. Borders protect, but they also confine.—Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings The study of communities is increasingly important in the late 20th century and beyond. Historical and social movements in the United States advocating equality have increased national attention to issues of exclusion, inclusion, and negotiation with the nation’s multicultural makeup. Concurrently, dramatic leaps in communications and travel technologies—as well as increasingly complex international business relationships—have contributed to globalization. Three consequences of globalization are the destabilization of international borders, the creation of new communities, and increased attention to relationships among different groups. These changes have raised increasingly complicated questions about the nature of nations, of communities, of individuals’ places in these kinds of social structures, and of how different aspects of identity relate to issues of belonging. American artists have responded by representing these changes and exploring such questions in their works. Critical examinations of these artistic representations are crucial to understanding global and cultural changes, as well as these new iterations of American culture and art. Such a critical examination of literary and filmic art is the purpose of this project. To begin, I should examine the key terms of this project’s focus. The word “community” traditionally refers to a group of people who share a geographic space and some aspect of identity that is often related to that geography. For instance, an American may also classify 1 him- or herself as a Texan or New Yorker, citizen of Chicago or New Orleans, resident of a certain neighborhood or building. Though communal identity may be defined in terms of other characteristics, particularly at the level of the neighborhood wherein economic standing may help determine the limits of a community, the main marker remains a shared geographic space. Benedict Anderson revises traditional conceptions of community in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson argues that even nations are in some respects imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). He applies this idea in other, more abstract ways, arguing, for instance, that speakers of a common language form an imagined community regardless of their national origins or identity politics. Due to the increasing ubiquity of the term “community”—applied in diverse ways, including to online discussion boards and to widespread identity-based groups—critics studying different iterations of community in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries should find Anderson’s idea useful. Keeping in mind both traditional definitions and Anderson’s extensions of the terms, I should begin with a description of how this study adapts and revises these ideas. The term “dominant

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