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Chronotope and Polyphony in Contemporary Women's Literature

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Chronotope and Polyphony in Contemporary Women's Literature T.C İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Anabilim Dalı Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı Yüksek Lisans Tezi Chronotope and Polyphony in Contemporary Women’s Literature Eser PEHLİVAN 2501161072 Tez Danışmanı Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Sinem YAZICIOĞLU İstanbul-2020 ABSTRACT CHRONOTOPE AND POLYPHONY IN (CONTEMPORARY) WOMEN’S LITERATURE ESER PEHLİVAN The aim of this dissertation will be to analyze the discourse formations and subversions in the novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood and Unless by Carol Shields. Through a poststructural reading of the uses of two Bakhtinian concepts, namely “chronotope” and “polyphony”, this study will show how each of the novels expose the constructed nature of the gendered subject, and how a variety of voices introduced in these novels challenge the unitary subject formations, and creating a new narrative space for experiences that are not within the norms of culture. KEYWORDS: Subjectivity, Feminism, Chronotope, Polyphony, Bakhtin iii ÖZ CHRONOTOPE AND POLYPHONY IN (CONTEMPORARY) WOMEN’S LITERATURE ESER PEHLİVAN Bu tezin amacı, söylem oluşumlarını ve bunların ters yüz edilişlerini Shirley Jackson’ın We Have Always Lived in a Castle, Margaret Atwood’un Cat’s Eye ve Carol Shields’ın Unless romanlarında incelemektir. İki Bakhtin terimi olan zaman-uzam ve çokseslilik kavramlarının postyapısalcı bir okumayla, bu çalışmada kavramların cinsiyet ilişkilerinin edimsel yönlerini nasıl açığa çıkardığını ve romanlarda tanıtılan çok sesliliğin, tek özne oluşumuna karşı nasıl meydan okuduğu gösterilecektir. Bu durumun anlatıda kültürün normları içerisinde yer almayan yeni tecrübe alanları yarattığını gösterecektir. ANAHTAR KELİMELER: Öznesellik, Feminizm, Zaman-Uzam, Çokseslilik, Bakhtin iv PREFACE The aim of this study is to analyze the ways Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, and Carol Shields adapts and appropriates the concept of the female subject. I will discuss each novel with regards to their relation to the feminist waves they were written under, and scrutinize how with each novel, the ways and means of constructing a gendered subject alters. To highlight the changes, I will use Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony and chronotope in dialogue with Julia Kristeva’s and Judith Butler’s theories regarding the construction of a gendered subject. I would like to thank certain people who have been pivotal in the course of my writing. Firstly, I would like to thank my thesis advisor Assistant Professor Sinem Yazıcıoğlu, working with her was truly a privilege. Even though the process of writing this study has been, at times, strenuous and anxiety inducing, I always looked forward to our meetings. She always managed to understand my chaotic ramblings, and guided me through countless moments of crisis. I could not have done this without her ceaseless support. I am grateful for everything she taught me over the years I have known her, and I am thankful that she helped me laugh through all of the stressful times that came with the writing process. I would also like to express my gratitude to my classmate and best friend Dina İslam, I am so lucky that I got the chance to go through this journey with you, I would not have wanted it any other way, you are my rock. I also want to say thanks to İrem Aslanhan, for the constant love and support she gave me during my hardest times. Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents for their patience and unconditional love; it is because of the support of the two that I get to do the things I love. Eser Pehlivan İstanbul, January 2020 v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................iii ÖZ .............................................................................................................. iv PREFACE .................................................................................................... v ABBREVIATIONS LIST .............................................................................. vii INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 Chapter One Chronotope and Polyphony in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle 21 Chapter Two Chronotope and Polyphony in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye 45 Chapter Three Chronotope and Polyphony in Carol Shields’s Unless 71 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................... 96 BLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................... 99 vi ABBREVIATIONS LIST Ibid : In the same source Ed. by. : Edited by Trans. by. : Translated by vii INTRODUCTION In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first philosophical feminist treaties A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, this seminal book became the backbone of the waves of feminism, especially laying the groundwork for the first-wave feminists. As a socio-political movement, feminism, or feminisms, is a complicated term to define as other movements that are concerned with human rights. Over the years, there have been many branches of feminisms concerning different races, religions, and sexual orientation but for a better understanding, the evolution of feminism can be observed under three waves. The first wave of feminism spans from the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, and even though it is called the first, this movement by no means marks the origin of feminism, but is an outburst of an accumulation of women activists and writers of centuries past. First-wave feminists were concerned with the suffrage movement and an equal recognition with men under the law. This aspect of the movement meant putting an end to the nineteenth century notion called the cult of domesticity, which placed women as subordinate and homebound objects of their husbands. This refusal of domestic bounds and objectification became what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call “women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere” (1988:4), positioning the woman as the other, in search for a subjecthood that does not merely frame her as a lesser version of her male counterpart, which puts the notion of what it means to be a subject at the heart of the feminist movements. In 1949, at the intersection of the first and the second wave of feminism, Simone de Beauvoir published her key work on feminist philosophy The Second Sex, in which she asks her famous philosophical question “What is a woman?” (13), situating womanhood not as a biological but a cultural construct, adding “[…] every female human being is not necessarily a woman” (Ibid.); in other words, having the biological components that scientifically make up the female of the species in themselves are not enough to make one into the culturally inscribed category of women. In an interview, Julia Kristeva states that The Second Sex adds to the already existing notions of women’s 1 bodily autonomy and their right for social, economic, and political equality the idea of “transcendence as freedom” (166). Beauvoir’s views situate her work as the middle ground between the second and first wave of feminism, which exposed the role of women as the inessential object to the essential male subject and brought attention to the necessity for every feminist philosophical or political work to position woman as the subject. As Kristeva argues in the interview mentioned above, in the process of subjectivization, feminist movements fell into the fallacy of assuming a collective identity that negated the I of the woman as an individual but adds this problem is not neglected in Beauvoir’s work, which according to her “hardly eradicates the ‘subject’ or the ‘individual’ within woman” (168). In other words, the value of Beauvoir’s work does not only come from her recognition of woman as a social entity rather than a biological one but also through her acknowledgement of female individuality that has been collectivized with the mythification of their identity through the lens of patriarchal politics that established them as an object. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue, “de Beauvoir was […], the first major contemporary feminist to articulate what now seems to all (except for a conservative minority) to be woman’s basic right to personhood” (1994; 370). The problem of subjectivity became the main concern for second-wave feminists. Writers such as Adrienne Rich in the United States, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray in France, foregrounded the individual experiences of womanhood rather than collectivized and monological versions that assumed to speak for all women. In the United States, Betty Friedan’s pivotal book The Feminine Mystique (1963) marks the transition from the first-wave into the second-wave. In it Friedan asserts, “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive” (12), as the fifties was also a time in the United States when the feminist movement had taken a backseat, but still many works of literature and movies, by both men and women reflected the claustrophobic anxiety created around women’s existence within the public sphere. For example, Douglas Sirk’s movie All that Heaven Allows (1955), which at the time of its release fell under the category of women’s picture, subverts the very image of the fifties’ both at its interior and exterior, as he uses the lighting and colors of the movie to expose the fakeness of the 2 suburban landscape of his melodrama of a woman pressured to
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