Hybrid Identity and the Coming of Age Genre in Caribbean Women's
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
NARRATIVES OF BECOMING: HYBRID IDENTITY AND THE COMING OF AGE GENRE IN CARIBBEAN WOMEN’S LITERATURE by LIANNE VELLA A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of African Studies and Anthropology College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham June 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT The coming of age genre is a popular and longstanding one within the Caribbean, particularly with reference to female writers. This thesis considers how women writers from across the Caribbean have reconceptualised and altered the coming of age genre to narrate their female hybrid Caribbean identities. I focus on a close textual analysis of four main novels - Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban - as well as considering several other secondary coming of age texts from across the Caribbean, all of which emerge from various distinct linguistic and cultural contexts. In doing so this work looks at the links between texts from across the region in order to discuss how the female genre differs from the masculine tradition, how it presents a gendered identity formation and how that process of becoming is marked by the hybrid identities of the authors and their protagonists. CONTENTS Introduction: Formations of Becoming .......................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Language and Voice .............................................................................. 25 Chapter Two: Narratives and Storytelling ................................................................... 72 Chapter Three: Mothers, Bodies and Sexuality ......................................................... 122 Chapter Four: Homes and Histories ........................................................................... 183 Conclusion: Mapping a New Coming of Age ............................................................ 230 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 243 INTRODUCTION: FORMATIONS OF BECOMING The coming of age novel provides a vehicle for the discussion of identity and its surrounding issues. Through the movement from childhood to adulthood this genre allows a discussion of personal identity and selfhood and works as an allegory, or parallel imagining, of nationhood and national identity. As such, it is particularly useful as a trope for newly independent countries or areas with complex identities. In the Caribbean, the issue of identity has always been of particular importance and so it is this area of the world - and how they choose this genre to express those anxieties and issues - that is of interest to me. In this thesis I will be comparing a number of coming of age narratives from across the Caribbean, which are written by women writers and which feature female protagonists, in order to discuss issues of identity formation, with a particular emphasis on hybrid identity. The coming of age novel as a genre emerges out of the tradition of the bildungsroman. It has sometimes been called the novel of formation or the novel of development but the bildungsroman specifically refers to a particular set of texts that emerged from Germany and were read in an Enlightenment context. It appeared as a term in 1819 and was retrospectively attached to a certain kind of narrative, such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795). It is often defined as ‘a novel recounting the early emotional development and moral education of its protagonist’ (Millard, 2). Consequently, the bildungsroman values certain notions of linear progression and coherent identity. It relies heavily on Enlightenment ideas of human perfectibility and Romantic views of childhood as a discrete season of youth, out of which emerges a creative and coherent individual. As the term has evolved however, the genre has been variously defined and there is some debate, particularly among German scholars, 1 as to its precise meaning and translation. It has since been adopted to refer to any novel of youthful development but critics, such as James Hardin, have argued that ‘there is no consensus on the meaning of the term bildungsroman’ (x) and that literary critics have ‘tended to use the term ahistorically’ in ways which change its meaning particularly outside of the specifically Enlightenment context of ‘bildung’ (Hardin, xi). As a genre term then, the bildungsroman seems problematic for use in a contemporary context. It provides a useful foundation for thinking about novels of childhood and of development into adulthood but it is also mired in its particular European and Enlightenment context. As such, although this study will remain aware of the structure of the bildungsroman and how it informs the texts discussed, it will also remain aware of the corresponding limitations. Thus, I will be using an overlapping term, one which contains the same idea of a narrative that follows a character’s progression from childhood to adulthood but which is less rooted in a European, Enlightenment tradition. The alternative term ‘coming of age’ is defined as ‘to reach maturity’ or ‘to reach full legal adult status’1. The term coming of age obviously produces its own set of semantic difficulties. To come of age is to become an adult, to reach a certain status where one has the rights and responsibilities of a mature individual but all of these defining terms are of course, imprecise and culturally relative. Coming of age is therefore an unstable definition and, as a corollary, is a more flexible genre term. This terminology has been much used in anthropological research, such as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa however, it has also been used in its literary form in the discussion of texts, for example Marjorie Garber’s Coming of Age in Shakespeare or Ken Millard’s Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. The question of course becomes: 1 Several dictionaries use either one or both of these definitions. 2 when do characters come of age? Formative experiences or the reaching of that illusive term maturity can, after all, occur at any age. Merle Collins’ Angel for example, could be termed the coming of age narrative of Angel’s mother Doodsie as much as it is for the title character, even though Doodsie is already legally an adult woman and a mother at the start of the text. Barbara White, an influential critic of the genre, chooses to narrow the definition of coming of age to a very specific age: ‘I have as a general rule restricted my discussion to fiction with major characters between twelve and nineteen’ (xii). Thus, her discussion of the female coming of age novel centres on adolescence as the time of change and she defines her texts and the genre accordingly. This narrow view of the genre seems to be, to some extent, arbitrary and restrictive. In contrast, Susan Fraiman’s discussion of the bildungsroman or, as she prefers to call it, the novel of development expands the concept of coming of age rather than limiting it. She sees the period of becoming as ‘a lifelong act continuing well past any discrete season of youth’ (Fraiman, x). This broader view of the genre seems more fitting and useful. My choice of the term coming of age is informed particularly by its imprecision, its ability to include texts which the term bildungsroman would exclude because its structural definitions are more severe. The coming of age novel refers to any novel where a process of becoming occurs and as such, as a genre, while it may be imprecisely defined, it allows a discussion of what coming of age can actually mean; of what a coming into selfhood, into an adult interaction with the world, would look like. The texts studied here follow their characters from childhood beyond what would normally be considered the period of adolescence and young adulthood and in doing so, extend outwards the confines of what can be considered a coming of age narrative or coming of age experiences. All genre definitions are fluid and are remade with every text as they fit into or reshape 3 the genres we give them. The collection of texts addressed here aims to further expand the definition of the coming of age novel by depicting the process of coming into oneself as a continual and often unresolved process, one in which becoming is actually a series of becomings, out of which emerge ever changing and fluid identities. Thus the coming of age genre, as I will be discussing it, denies the structural rigidity and historical fixity of the bildungsroman and the self-imposed limits of the novel of adolescence that Barbara White refers to. Terms such as coming of age and becoming seem particularly apt when discussing the Caribbean given Stuart Hall’s pronouncements on identity. A foundational Caribbean cultural theorist, Hall maintains that ‘we should think, instead, of identity as a “production” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (222). Hall’s influential work moves the discussion of identity away from the rigidity implicit in the traditional bildungsroman to a discussion of on-going production and so the notion of narratives of becoming encapsulates more of the discussions surrounding Caribbean literature than other attendant terms. Another reason to be aware but wary of the bildungsroman is its particularly masculine context. E.K Labovitz discusses the female bildungsroman in her critical study The Myth of the Heroine and her aim is to uncover a set of texts that may be called female bildungsroman.