Working mother: The birth of the subject in the novel Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Thompson, Ruthe Marie, 1957- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 16:53:17 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/288733 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text dvectfy^ from the origmal or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are m ^pewriter &c^ iM^e others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reprodoctioii is dependent upon tiie quality of the copy submitted. 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Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howdl Infiniiiation Compuv^ 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Aibor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 WORKING MOTHER: THE BIRTH OF THE SUBJECT IN THE NOVEL by Ruthe Thompson Copyright © Ruthe Thompson 1997 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1997 UMX Number: 9806841 Copyright 1997 by Thon^aon, Ruthe Marie All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9806841 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. Ail rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against wiauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeh Road Ann Artior, MI 48103 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Ruthe Thompson entitled Working Mother: The Birth of the Subject in the Novel and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirei^nt for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy J Igar A. Drycfen Barbara A. Babcock Date ff]^ f- Meg Lota Brown Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requiregient. 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my teachers Lynda Zwinger, Edgar Dryden, Meg Lota Brown, Barbara Babcock, Thomas Joswick, and Judith Roof for their advice, encouragement, and critical acumen. Lynda Zwinger has been an astute and supportive mentor. Her work has been indispensable to my thinking about this topic, and her thoughtful guidance made the writing possible. Colleagues Ann Brigham, Jonathan Dryden, and Deirdre Day-MacLeod read early chapters of the project and offered helpful criticism. Most of all, I am grateful for their friendship. DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to Sara Dynaa, Joseph Dynan, Peter Lothringer, Patricia Thompson, and Carl Thompson. They know why. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 7 Introduction; Mothers in the Novel 8 Birthing the Novel: Periodical Mothers 23 Sex and the Silly Mother; (Re)Producing the Female Subject in Pride and Prejudice 91 "Never Was Bom!"; Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Mothers of Persuasion 144 "Ten thousand dollars of income and the most charming eyes"; Mothers and Aunts in Washington Square 205 Working Mother 235 Works Cited 276 7 ABSTRACT One of the primary objectives of the realist novel has been to imitate the linguistic processes that assert and maintain the idea of a coherent identity. In Working Mother: The Birth of the Subject in the Novel, I present a developmental view of the birth of the subject as articulated by some of the architects of the novel. In an examination of James and Henry Austen's Loiterer, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Henry James' Washington Square, I locate and analyze narrative sites that mirror, presage, and/or encourage the production of readerly subjectivity across the body of a female or feminized figure, usually a mother. I employ a psychoanalytic and semiotic point of view to demonstrate the mother's role in narrative subject formation via the process of "suture." Margaret Homans, Christine Boheemen, and others have argued that the novel— and mdeed all of Western culture—depends upon the repression of the mother. In Homan's useful formulation "the mother's absence is what makes possible and makes necessary the central projects of our culture." Active subjugation, incorporation, and disavowal of the maternal—ejecting the mother from the story, separating her from the protagonist, and fi'om the reader—enable subjects to be produced in the novel form. Aggressivity as well as narcissism, disavowal as well as incorporation, help to jettison the originary feminine from the novel, leaving an absent space in which the subject can enunciate. 8 INTRODUCTION Mothers in the Novel In her preface to a 1986 trade edition of The Feminization of American Culture, first published in 1977, Ann Douglas reveals that her study culminated in a personal disappointment. 'T must add a personal note here," Douglas writes. As I researched and wrote this book, I experienced a confusion which perhaps other woman scholars have experienced in recent years. I expeaed to find my fathers and ray mothers; instead I discovered my fathers and my sisters. Looking back at her research more than a decade after its completion, Douglas articulates for the 'mothers' of her study a traditional narrative role. In her search for intellectual models and ancestors, Douglas locates the patriarchy and a sisterhood; mothers, she intimates, never fiinction in an authoritative cultural capacity. Working Mother: The Birth of the Subject in the Novel approaches the problematic of literary motherhood fi-om an alternative perspective. Although very few maternal characters play heroic or principal roles in the Anglo-American novel, mothers do perform an essential part in the narrative construction of characters, narrators, and implied readers. In a recent study of mothers in Victorian novels, Natalie J. McKnight notes that "Mothers' absence in numerous novels creates a vacuum that destabilizes the protagonists and therefore incites their development and the action of the novels in general... When she is absent, she becomes a great motivator and instigator" (18)/ McKnight's analysis of plot and thematics considers many of the same issues that concern me theoretically. I consider the missing mothers of the novel and the literary journal from a psychoanalytic and semiotic point of view to demonstrate how mothers foster the formulation of narrative subjectivity, particularly in the novel genre. A continuing look at Douglas' preface helps to explain: The best of the men had access to solutions, and occasionally inspiring ones, which I appropriate only with the anxiety and effort that attend genuine aspiration. The problems of the women correspond to mine with a fnghtening accuracy that seems to set us outside the processes of history; the answers of even the finest of them were often mine, and sometimes largely unacceptable to me. (11). Like the novelists, critics, and journalists examined in my study, Douglas positions motherhood as the empty groundwork of narrative, the blank page on which she can posit her argument about the weakening of American culture under the influence of female and clerical sentiment. Virginia Woolf wrote that "women writing think back through their mothers"\ Working Mother demonstrates precisely how we think subjectivity through the maternal trope, rendering our literary mothers outside subject status. I suggest that it has been culturally necessary for essayists, novelists, and journalists to adhere to a tradition that positions mothers as mere conduits to the 10 larger issues of narrative and to the linguistic realization of primary characters, in order to create the illusion of coherent subjectivity that has been a hallmark of the novel form. A larger question, which it is beyond the scope of this study to answer and which I pose here as an idea for future research, might consider whether figures other than mothers ever perform this linguistic function in Western narrative.^ In Douglas' preface, the absent mother creates a sense of identity for the voice of the critic and narrator, as well as for readers of the volume to whom she offers her experience as a model when she suggests that "other women scholars" may have experienced a confusion similar to hers.