• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2002 Reconfiguring the American Family: Alternate Paradigms in African American and Latina Familial Configurations Mary Elizabeth Wright Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES RECONFIGURING THE AMERICAN FAMILY: ALTERNATE PARADIGMS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINA FAMILIAL CONFIGURATIONS By MARY ELIZABETH WRIGHT A dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2002 Copyright 2002 Mary E. Wright All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Mary Elizabeth Wright defended on October 11, 2002. Bonnie Braendlin Professor Directing Donna Nudd Outside Committee Member Linda Saladin Committee Member Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member Approved: Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the abovenamed committee members. ii Dedication To June Walters Wright (October 13, 1924-October 3, 1984) Because each paragraph pays homage to equally important entities that influenced and informed my personal and professional life, chronology as opposed to level of importance seems an appropriate method of thanks. I first thank my parents, Eugene W. Wright and June Walters Wright for their kind, persistent, and loving parentage. Theirs served as my indoctrination into familial theory, though of a different variety than the scholarly approach, and my one regret is that my mother couldn’t be here to accept this tribute to her wonderful and loving parenting. Her death instigated my interest in family scholarship. Secondly, my aunt, Jean W. Johnson and uncle, J.B. Johnson have been the best “second set” of parental figures one could hope for. Throughout my graduate studies, Aunt Jean has been my most tireless and best support, exhibiting the patience of Job and an unwavering determination to see me succeed that can only come from those who love. Her stalwart belief in me has truly been my inspiration. Finally on the familial front, my aunt and uncle, Bob and Janie Walters always gave me their faithful and loving support. Second, thanks to Dana Heller for her direct, continual, and generous mentoring during my master’s thesis where I began grappling with issues of familial theory she introduced into the classroom. She’s a brilliant and gifted scholar and teacher. Bonnie and Hans Braendlin deserve Herculean homage for not letting me fade into oblivion. Bonnie encouraged me through some frustrating times, assuring me she would go the distance if only I promised the same. Had any iii other professor been my major advisor, I might have joined the ranks of the terminally ABD; and Hans, bless him for the most direct, succinct advice know to the doctoral student writing a dissertation, of which I cannot print! However, I promise to pass it forward to other doctoral students with credit to Dr. Hans Braendlin, the source. Jerrily McGregory, Linda Saladin, and Donna Nudd receive my most humble appreciation for serving on my committee, advising me, and suggesting valuable methods to help improve my goal of serving this honorable profession to the best of my ability. Finally, my family and friends who continued to push me towards this end. Much thanks to Janet Puzz for allowing me to clutter a shared living space with library tomes, rough drafts, and stacks of photocopied articles. Suzy Phillips, and Debbie East cajoled, reassured, and soothed me during various stressful moments, forcing me into promises we knew I had to keep. My graduate co-conspirators, Daryl Carr and Tammy Farnan Clewell, continue to inspire me with their wonderful friendship and sage wisdom. Lastly, my sweet, sweet felines, Cleo and Cheshire who, during all hours of the day, visited me, flopped on open texts and scribbled drafts, and diverted me from overkill with their requests for petting and loving. I once read where Rita Mae Brown explained that if a cat does not sit on your work, toss it in the can. They’ve lolled all over this dissertation, but I happen to know they’re indiscriminate nappers and not literary critics. iv All together, we form an extensive kinship network of blood and fictive relations that supports my core idea that families need more than the nuclear configuration if they want to succeed and achieve their goals. Reliance on others builds solid foundations that support bigger and grander proposals and projects. Each person named above is as responsible for this dissertation as am I, but since only one name can appear on the spine, oh well! v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..vii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 1. CHAPTER ONE……………………………………………………………………..22 2. CHAPTER TWO…………………………………………………………………….64 3. CHAPTER THREE………………………………………………………………….187 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………264 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………216 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………...275 vi ABSTRACT In the United States authors whose work concerns ethnicity face a host of problems, of which the most obvious remains the preconceived notion that ethnic- themed literature is subordinate to Eurocentric literary work. Despite continued racial and ethnic prejudices, many women of color writing within the past thirty years work to triumph over such categorical stereotypes and through their efforts earned Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and tremendous readership loyalties. The African American and Latina women discussed in this dissertation stand up against the ideological, cultural, sociohistorical, and political voices still attempting to repress them, as they write to disseminate and preserve specific ethnic and cultural ideologies and practices. Through rewriting the Freudian family romance into family narratives, they explicitly express cultural identity. By asserting difference concerning families and communities, specifically in a society still largely resistant but more accepting of ethnic and cultural practices, these women insure that values and practices from their own respective backgrounds will survive assimilation attempts from the culture at large. As a result, in addition to identifying with a similar readership, they instruct those from dissimilar backgrounds about cultural ideologies to shrink the discursive boundaries between “dominant” and “subordinate” groups. vii In this study I aim to identify and discuss how portrayals of fictional families and communities in contemporary African American and Latina literature serve as valuable pedagogical tools in the advancement of a truly heterogeneous society. To accomplish this end, I utilize selective texts from four authors whose publishing histories range from 1970 to the present: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye 1970; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow 1984; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents 1991; and Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban 1992. I focus on the methods each writer engages from her specific cultural heritage to redefine the Eurocentric, middle-class American nuclear family into one that adequately represents our pluralistic culture. In resisting a dominant discourse that protects and promotes a nuclear family ideology, these authors construct paradigmatic narratives that preserve multifaceted family and communal ideologies, specifically extended families and reliance upon communal support, of African American, Dominican American, and Cuban American (Latina/o) value systems. In order to support ethnic variations as positive elements in a multicultural society and to redefine the American family as a varied and inclusive entity where an extended family or one comprised of a variety of non- consanguine members is just as valid as a nuclear family, we must create additional familial paradigms to the Freudian family romance. Texts that privilege a multiplicity of configurations help readers of all identities achieve a greater sense of ownership in this country that calls itself pluralistic. viii INTRODUCTION …[T]he continued interest in deconstructing and reconstructing family romance as part of our American cultural mythology shows that the symbolic currency of the family plot retains its value even as it continues to undergo reevaluation. Dana Heller in “Family Plots: The DeOedipalization of Popular Culture” Contemporary family romances locate the family as narrative nexus or, as Sigmund Freud explained, the family romance “embeds the engenderment of narrative within the experience of family” (qtd. in Heller xii). In Family Plots: The DeOedipalization of Popular Culture, a text I gratefully look to as a complex study of the family romance, Dana Heller reworks Freud’s definition to include contemporary family romances to then connect the family romance to the codification and transmission of meaning for a “postfeminist, postmodernist age” (3). By codification and transmission of meaning I refer to the literary, political, critical, theoretical, and sociohistorical texts that police the American family. Heller defines family romances as “narratives that communicate to the members of a reading or viewing public sphere a vision of domestic life presumably basic to the representation of legible identity” . “In other words, the family romance instructs the public as to how it should understand the relations of the private” (xii). I base this

Load more

  284

Copy Link