Hannah Godwin Dissertation

AMERICAN MODERNISM’S GOTHIC CHILDREN by HANNAH GODWIN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2017 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Hannah Godwin Title: American Modernism’s Gothic Children This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Mark Whalan Chairperson Paul Peppis Core Member Mary Wood Core Member Ernesto Martinez Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on ﬁle with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2017 ii © 2017 Hannah Godwin iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Hannah Godwin Doctor of Philosophy Department of English June 2017 Title: American Modernism’s Gothic Children This dissertation delineates a range of literary endeavors engaging the gothic contours of child life in early to mid-twentieth century America. Drawing fresh attention to fictional representations of the child in modernist narratives, I show how writers such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter turned to childhood as a potent site for negotiating cultural anxieties about physical and cultural reproduction. I reveal the implications of modernist technique for the historical formation of American childhood, demonstrating how these texts intervened in national debates about sexuality, race, and futurity. Each dissertation chapter adopts a comparative approach, indicating a shared investment in a specific formulation of the gothic child. Barnes and Faulkner, in creating the child-woman, appraise how the particular influence of psychoanalysis on childhood innocence irrevocably alters the cultural landscape. Faulkner and Toomer, through the spectral child, evaluate the exclusionary racial politics surrounding interracial intimacy which impact kinship structures in the U.S. South. Welty and Porter, in spotlighting the orphan girl-child, assess the South’s gendered social matrix through the child’s consciousness. Finally, Faulkner, in addressing children as a readership in his little-known gothic fable, The Wishing Tree, iv produces a compelling site to examine the relationship between literature written for the child and modernist artistic practice. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Hannah Godwin GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2017, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2008, Wake Forest University Bachelor of Arts, English, 2004, Wake Forest University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Modernist Literature and Culture Gender Studies Childhood Studies Southern Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon, 2010-2017 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Sherwood Travel Award, University of Oregon, May 2015 Oregon Humanities Center Graduate Research Support Fellowship, University of Oregon, March 2014 Graduate Research Award, University of Oregon, December 2012 vi Center for the Study of Women in Society Travel Grant, University of Oregon, October 2012 English Department Conference Travel Award, University of Oregon, June 2012, October 2012, July 2014 Graduate School Travel Award, Wake Forest University, April 2008 Graduate School Richter Grant for Research Abroad, Wake Forest University, Research performed at Oxford University, Wadham College, England, July 2007 Graduate School Summer Research Award, Wake Forest University, June 2007 Medieval Studies Travel Award, Wake Forest University, May 2007 PUBLICATIONS: “ ‘Who are you?’: Modernism, Childhood, and Historical Consciousness in Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree.” In Faulkner and History. Eds. Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many have aided in the completion of this project––advisors and colleagues, friends and family. First, I’d like to express my gratitude to my dissertation chair, Mark Whalan, for his thoughtful and constructive feedback, confidence in my work, and generosity of spirit. I couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful advisor. I’d also like to thank Mary Wood and Paul Peppis. Working with them both from my very first moment of arrival at Oregon has been nothing but edifying and delightful. Ernesto Martinez inspired me to think about desire, memory, and the body in new and productive ways. Anne Laskaya has always been a model of kindness and support. Molly Westling has offered southern comfort and fascinating conversations about Eudora Welty. At Wake Forest University, I was fortunate to build both personal and professional relationships with three amazing women––Mary DeShazer, Gillian Overing, and Miriam Jacobson–– all of whom ignited my belief in pursuing this path. I am especially thankful to Mary for introducing to me the weird wonders of Djuna Barnes. While at Wake, I was fortunate to earn a Richter Grant to travel to Oxford, England to study early modern witchcraft, an experience forming the beginning of my interest in sexuality studies. And from one Oxford to another––I would like to thank the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon for granting me a Graduate Dissertation Research Support Fellowship to attend the 2014 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, Mississippi. The rich conversations there nurtured my thinking on childhood and southern studies and revived my spirit. Forrest Galey and the staff at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History deserve my appreciation for their meticulous viii assistance as I worked with Welty’s papers. My dear friends at Oregon ––Anna Carroll, Diana Martinez, Francesca Gentile, Amanda Bartenstein, Paul Bellew, Bill Fogarty, Matt Hannah––have provided a special community. Thanks, friends, for often indulging my need for ping pong, champagne, and concerts at the Wow. Thanks, too, to Jenny Noyce and Rachel Bash for their thoughtful comments on the beginning stages of my work during our writing group. I’d also like to express deep gratitude for my students, in literature and writing courses here at Oregon, and at the Charter School of San Diego and the Jeff Griffith Youth Center in Los Angeles, for inspiring and rewarding me in ways I could never have anticipated. Much love to my best girls spread across the country–- Lauren and Maryann in North Carolina, Kati in Kentucky, and Linsey in California. Finally, I could not have completed this work without the love and support of my family, both human and animal. Love y’all: Mom, Dad, Pittman, Tucker, Yoshi, and Harliss. ix To my grandparents, who would have loved to see this work come to fruition. x TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: “A CREATURE MADE AFRESH”: CREATING THE GOTHIC CHILD ...................................................................................................... 1 II. “TWO WORLDS––MEET OF CHILD AND DESPERADO”: GOTHIC CHILD WOMEN IN BARNES’S NIGHTWOOD AND FAULKNER’S THE SOUND AND THE FURY.. .................................................................................................... 31 III. “SOMETHING HIDDEN”: SPECTRAL CHILDREN IN FAULKNER’S ABSALOM, ABSALOM! AND TOOMER’S CANE ................................................ 73 IV. “SHE MIGHT LEARN EVERYTHING”: THE ORPHAN GIRL-CHILD IN WELTY’S DELTA WEDDING AND PORTER’S ‘MIRANDA CYCLE’.............. 150 V. CODA: “WHO ARE YOU?”: CHILDHOOD, MODERNISM, AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN FAULKNER’S THE WISHING TREE ..... 247 REFERENCES CITED............................................................................................... 263 xi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “A CREATURE MADE AFRESH”: CREATING THE GOTHIC CHILD “People are mostly layers of tenderness and violence–-wrapped like bulbs” (Welty, Delta Wedding 42) “All futures are rough!” (James, The Turn of the Screw 18) “Child, what art thou?” implores an impassioned Hester Prynne to her daughter Pearl in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic romance The Scarlet Letter (1850). Deceptively simplistic, the child’s response, “I am your little Pearl!” (68), becomes complicated when considering her accompanying bodily movements, for “while she said it, Pearl laughed and began to dance up and down, with the humorsome gesticulations of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney” (66). Teasing her mother’s ardent inquiry, three year-old Pearl’s answer and exertions only heighten her mother’s distress. And sensing maternal upset, Pearl seeks to amplify Hester’s confusion. Her mother’s earnest question and Pearl’s frank yet discomfiting answer gestures toward her position as one of the most estranging children in all of American literature. Consistently characterized as both devilish imp and innocent sprite, Hawthorne’s Pearl emblematizes the conflicting cultural impulses surrounding adult thinking on childhood. This exchange between child and adult establishes Pearl’s peculiarity and discloses the unusual power dynamics between mother and child. Little Pearl, result of an illicit union, possesses a preternatural knowingness and capacity to provoke adult unease. As embodied product of 1 sin and a furtive history, Pearl’s inauspicious origin troubles her mother. Hawthorne’s text focuses on the “narrative concerns of a secret history” (Reid xxix), but this history goes beyond the personal

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