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Proquest Dissertations INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photograph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm 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 any 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 affect 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 corner 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 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9111699 Fluid bodies: Narrative disruption and layering in the novels of Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood Epstein, Grace Ann, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1990 Copyright ©1990 by Epstein, Grace Ann. All rights reserved. UMI 300N.ZeebRA Ann Arbor, MI 48106 FLUID BODIES: NARRATIVE DISRUPTION AND LAYERING IN THE NOVELS OF DORIS LESSING, TONI MORRISON AND MARGARET ATWOOD DISSERTATION Presented In Partial Fullflllment of the Requirements for the Degree' of Doctory of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Grace Ann Epstein, B.A., M.A. » • • • « The Ohio State University 1990 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Barbara Rigney Marlene Logenecker _J^*d*€jL AM/ Eugene Holland Advisor Department of English Copyright by Grace Ann Epstein 1990 To Claire, Toby, Steve, Mom and Dad, iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my sincere appreciation to Dr. Barbara Rigney for her insight, encouragement, and practical guidance throughout the completion of not only this work but this entire degree. Thanks also go to the other members of my committee, Drs. Eugene Holland and Marlene Logenecker, both of whom were enormously helpful in focusing my writing and fielding theoretical ideas. I also thank Dr. Ann C. Hall for her support and enthusiasm for my work; my parents, for their financial and personal encouragement; and of course, Steve, Claire, and Toby, for their love, patience, and applause. iv VITA September 16, 1990 Born -Columbus, Ohio May, 1971 B.A. Capital University Columbus, Ohio December, 1986 M.A. English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1986 to Present Teaching Associate/Lecturer The Ohio State Univeristy, Department of English PUBLICATIONS "An Interview with Toni Morrison" Ohio Journal 10 (Spring 1986): 5-9. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Narrative, and the Novel v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .. • iv VITA v INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVE, DESIRE, AND THE FEMALE WRITER 1 notes o 20 CHAPTER I ANNA'S NARRATIVE SCRAMBLE IN THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK 21 notes 61 II MORRISON AND NARRATIVE ARCHEOLOGY 62 notes 110 III ATWOOD'S BODY/TEXT AND TEXTUAL BODIES ..111 notes 157 CONCLUSION: NARRATIVE DESIRE IN THE FEMALE TEXT 158 notes ..167 LIST OF REFERENCES 168 vi INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVE, DESIRE, AND THE FEMALE WRITER Feminist psychoanalytic theory in recent years, particularly in France, has focused much of its attention on the relationship of language to the constructions of femininity. At the forefront of the discussion for many of these theorists has been the way in which patriarchal discourse has shaped, confined, and, at times, obliterated the notion of female desire from the spectrum of language. Luce Irigaray in her book This Sex Which Is Not One illustrates how male discourse has relegated female desire to a position of lack, of nonexistence, or to the mirror representation of the desire of the.male subject. According to Josette Feral, the idea of the female "exists only in so far as she endlessly reflects back to [the male] the image of his manly reality. Woman has thus been transformed into the other side of a mirror present and absent, nowhere to be found but still here, skirting the grasp of the other as well as her own." (89). This emphasis on male desire and the male sex organ, the phallus—"the ultimate meaning of all discourse" (Irigaray, 67)—to the exclusion of female desire—has come about through a system of discourse which automatically privileges sight over other senses summarily dismissing the female organ, "the organ which has nothing to show for itself [and] lacks a form of its own," as inadequate or more often, nonexistent (Irigaray, This Sex 26). 1 2 Men have been the owners of philosophical discourse in western culture since the time of Plato, a discourse from which women have been systematically excluded. Women have found themselves in the unsatisfactory position of feeling alienated from their bodies and from their own desire, which cannot be realized through the relegation of their sexuality to a mirror (mere) reflection of the masculine, or their assignment to a position of lack (without a penis). In the absence of a discourse which articulates their desire in any other way, women, and women writers specifically, remain unable to construct any comprehensible notion of their desire beyond that to which it is relegated by traditional male discourse. Furthermore, Helene Cixous explains that "it is precisely because there is so little room for her desire in society that. [the woman] ends up not knowing where to put [her desire] or if she even has it" (1987, 82). Caught in a condition of alienation from discourse, as well as from desire, the female lives out a broken subjectivity bathed in contradiction, and, as traditional male narratives propose, signified by mystification. Woman is an abstraction, at times, even to herself. Certainly, a pivotal assumption which these theorists employ here is that discourse is significant to any cultural understanding of desire. Without language, any construction of desire for women is stymied. On a similar track, Peter Brooks examines the close connection of narrative to desire calling desire "the motor of narration," not only the theme of literature but "the very intention of narrative language and the act of telling" (RFP, 53-51*). For Brooks, narrative is the most significant way experience is structured. In 3 narrative terms, human beings attempt to assign meaning and formulate actions. While a profusion of narratives may exist in any culture, the basic function of assigning meaning to experience is the purpose of all narrative. That purpose is fueled by human desire, the desire to make connections, to make meaning and to attach to others. In this way, narrative becomes a kind of living body itself. Not surprisingly then is the fact that Brooks calls the story of Oedipus the "masterplot" for all narrative, and In so doing, acknowledges the privileged position of this narrative within culture (90-112). Both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti Oedipus: Schizophrenia-and Capitalism argue that the oedipus story is a narrative around which all other capitalistic narratives are arranged, one which founds the culture upon the singularity of sexual experience, designating all other narratives which digress from it as constituting madness and deviance. Deleuze and Guattari point to the prominence of the Oedipus narrative in psychoanalysis and literature with its emphasis on castration and lack. Tracing the history of psychoanalysis and its short circuiting of desire by insisting all desire be coded and prescribed within the Oedipal complex and its mythical plane of familial relations, Deleuze and Guattari also concur that the female has been deprived from ever acknowledging her sexuality since "there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the feminine, is defined as a lack, an absence. Th<3 idea of a single sex necessarily leads to the erection of a phallus as an object on high, which distributes lack as two nonsuperimposable sides and makes the two sexes communicate in a common absence—castration" (294- 4 295). It is this very Oedipal narrative which they believe structures and orders the experience of desire under capitalism. Similarly, Cixous also asserts that the primary couple throughout the history of western culture has not been the man and the woman but the father and the son (1987, 65), and Jessica Benjamin, in her study of sadomasochism in literature, similarly proposes that women serve as a prize in a competitive enterprise between men, a struggle for recognition between fathers and sons (289). These observations not only suggest the prevalence of Oedipal inscriptions within a patriarchal culture but indicate the nature of the marginalized position assigned to woman and the inconsequential stake her desire plays within the discourse of men. Oedipus as the model for narrative is at once a restrictive and unsatisfactory representation of female desire, prompting Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis to maintain that the nature of narrative is, for the female, essentially masochistic (1984, 103). To go a bit further, Ross Chambers emphasizes the relationship of desire to narrative as a type of seduction of the reader by the writer. The result of the work of both Chambers and Brooks, then, suggests that both in the inception and reception of the narrative, desire is the primary feature characterizing its success or failure.
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