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A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading of Daniel Defoe's Novels Under the Light of Lacanian and Kristevan Insights

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A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading of Daniel Defoe's Novels Under the Light of Lacanian and Kristevan Insights T.C. ANKARA ÜN İVERS İTES İ SOSYAL B İLİMLER ENST İTÜSÜ İNG İLİZ D İLİ VE EDEB İYATI ANAB İLİM DALI A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading of Daniel Defoe’s Novels Under the Light of Lacanian and Kristevan Insights Doktora Tezi Leyli Jamali Ankara-2006 T.C. ANKARA ÜN İVERS İTES İ SOSYAL B İLİMLER ENST İTÜSÜ İNG İLİZ D İLİ VE EDEB İYATI ANAB İLİM DALI A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading of Daniel Defoe’s Novels Under the Light of Lacanian and Kristevan Insights Doktora Tezi Leyli Jamali Tez Danı şmanı Prof.Dr. Meral Ç İLEL İ Ankara-2006 T.C. ANKARA ÜN İVERS İTES İ SOSYAL B İLİMLER ENST İTÜSÜ İNG İLİZ D İLİ VE EDEB İYATI ANAB İLİM DALI A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading of Daniel Defoe’s Novels Under the Light of Lacanian and Kristevan Insights Doktora Tezi Tez Danı şmanı : Prof. Dr. Meral Ç İLEL İ Tez Jürisi Üyeleri Adı ve Soyadı İmzası .................................................................... ........................................ .................................................................... ........................................ .................................................................... ........................................ .................................................................... ......................................... .................................................................... ......................................... .................................................................... ......................................... Tez Sınavı Tarihi .................................. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1 PART I Jacques Lacan’s Symbolic and Gender Distinctive Roles in Defoe’s Four Early Novels CHAPTER I The Order of Order ............................................................................. 11 A. The Birth of a Notion: Jacques Lacan’s Symbolic Order ..................................... 11 B. An Order of Their Own: A Feminist Reading of the Symbolic............................. 15 C.The Augustan Side: Symbolic Order and Eighteenth Century Gender Emergence and Politics of Female Subjectivity ....................................................... 18 D.Defoe’s Symbolic Dilemma: To Be or Not To Be a Patriarch............................... 27 CHAPTER 2 Robinson Crusoe : The Isle of Men ..................................................... 34 CHAPTER 3 Memoirs of a Cavalier : The Battlefield of Absence ........................... 54 CHAPTER 4 Captain Singleton : Washed Away by the Waves ................................ 71 CHAPTER 5 A Journal of the Plague Year : Darker than the Plague ........................ 91 PART II Lacanian Imaginary, Kristevan Semiotic and Subversion of the Paternal Order in Defoe’s Two Later Novels CHAPTER 1 In the Mirror of Imaginary ............................................................... 111 A. Pre-Symbolic Bliss: Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary Order ..................................... 111 B. A Semiotic Version: Julia Kristeva and the Imaginary....................................... 116 C. Authorial Chora: Semiotic Notion of Subjectivity and the Author’s Voice......... 119 CHAPTER 2 Moll Flanders : The Queen of the Tides ........................................... 123 CHAPTER 3 Colonel Jack : The Taming of the True.............................................. 152 PART III Lacanian Real: Reversal of Gender and A Step Beyond Subjectivity in Defoe’s Last Novel CHAPTER 1 Beyond the Order ............................................................................. 175 A. Over the Imaginary Fence: Lacanian Concept of Real ....................................... 175 B. Sisters of Each (Other): The Real in an Androgynous Mirror............................ 177 C. The Real Challenge: A Feminist Reading of Androgyny ................................... 181 CHAPTER 2 Roxana : The Undefoed Defoe........................................................... 186 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 210 APPENDIX A ....................................................................................................... 220 APPENDIX B........................................................................................................ 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................. 225 1 INTRODUCTION The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse Daniel Defoe’s novels under the light of Lacanian and Kristevan insights to extract the nature of his subjectivity construction. The inconsistency of Defoe’s voice as a writing subject between his conduct books and fiction, and the unstable progression within his novels indicate the possibility of a psychological transformation of this leading spokesman of patriarchal ideologies into a degenderized androgyn. Poststructural psychoanalytic feminist criticism appears to be the most appropriate method to examine the possibility of such a psychological transformation, because it interrogates the very nature of subjectivity as a fictional construct of patriarchal discourse. Based on this ideology, the present study aims to examine the nature of Defoe’s subjectivity construction via the patterns imposed on the female characters in his fiction. Studied chronologically, these works tend to correspond to the Lacanian tripartite model of identity construction in reverse order, due to their departure from the Symbolic and progression towards the Real. Theoretically this indicates Defoe’s engement in a similar progression in the process of becoming (a)subject. To examine the nature of this progression effectively, three significant and interrelated concepts should be studied simultaneously. These three contributing notions which would lead the study towards its proposed hypothesis are: subjectivity, as perceived by poststructuralism, gender identity, as defined by eighteenth century patriarchal dicourse, and the novel, as a textual space reflecting eighteenth century gender trauma. In other words, by assuming that Daniel Defoe is an individual whose masculine gender identity is defined by eighteenth century patriarchal discourses and by recognizing his novels as textual spaces reflecting his possible gender trauma, the application of the poststructural psychoanalytic feminist theory of subjectivity construction would reveal the otherwise inaccessible alternative voices of Defoe’s Self as a writing subject. The first of the three contributing concepts, subjectivity, along with notions such as identity, self, autonomy and authenticity has been central to many debates in 1 literary studies. In literary criticism the Anglo-American tradition, practised by scholars like Arnold, James, Eliot, Richards, Fry, just to name a few, focuses on the idea of liberal humanism celebrating the prevailing view of the individuals as not determined by social and economic circumstances but as fundamentally free to create themselves and their destiny through the choices they make. From mid and late twentieth century, literary criticism was influenced by the poststructuralist perspective of scholars like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard. This new perspective, practised by critics like De Man, Hartman and Miller, was broadly anti- humanist and ahistorical, and stressed new accounts of human subjectivity prioritizing the linguistic operation as the medium of self-conception. As a poststructuralist psychoanalyst, who influenced the new mode of criticism, Jacques Lacan was among the new theorists who used his studies on language to introduce the idea into the process of identity construction. As Lacan notes, in his Ecrits (1966) and Seminaire XI (1973), identity is a linguistic construct and human beings are constructed in language. Lacan maintains that a subject does not come into being until it has acquired a consciousness, that is until it has made a progress from the primordial androgynous state through the Imaginary. Here, the subject develops a concept of the Self, and enters into the Symbolic realm of Language, also the zone of predefined forged cultural codes. The Symbolic system which serves to perpetuate the human subject into society is associated by Lacan with the Name of the Father ( nom- du- pere ) the masculine realm of the phallus and the construction of gender identity (1977: 5). It is this aspect of Lacan’s theories that proves inspirational for a number of feminist literary critics like Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva whose quest is the interrogation of subjectivity to locate the feminine which has been lost or suppressed in the male dominated systems. Drawing on the Lacanian tripartite model (SIR), these French feminists* were the first to see the potential of these concepts and arguments _____________________________________________________________________ * The term French feminism is used in this study for the ease of reference because many commentators have used this term when analysing the work of Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. However, as Susan Watkins argues, there are many difficulties with this categorisation which makes 2 for the feminist critique of the patriarchal social order. Literary texts became the object of study for these scholars, who examined them in terms of a politics of style that revealed the suppressed feminine in male writing and in the male Self. French feminists argue that some elements of the Imaginary that cannot be expressed within
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