Uncivilized women and erotic strategies of border zones or demythologizing the romance of conquest. Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Armstrong, Jeanne Marie. 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 09/10/2021 00:43:45 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187509 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced 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. 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Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313n61-4700 800/521-0600 UNCIVILIZED WOMEN AND EROTIC STRATEGIES OF BORDER ZONES OR DEMYTHOLOGIZING THE ROMANCE OF CONQUEST by Jeanne Armstrong A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the COMPARATIVE CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1996 OMI Number: 9626552 Copyright 1996 by Ar.mstrong, Jeanne Marie All rights reserved. UMI Microfonn 9626552 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microfonn edition is protected against unauthorized copying unde.· Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by____ ~J~e~a~n_n~e~A~r~m~s~t~r~o~n~g~ _________________ entitled Uncivilized Women and Erotic Strategies of Border Zones or Demythologizing the Romance of Conguest and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy/Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies 10; I t't'/. C1b B~ra Babcock, Ph.D. Date L.l.:a:\~ .(!, / I~ I ~ 10 Chuck Tatum, Ph.D. Date I~ ~ \~c:::, b Ann Weekes, Ph.D. Date 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 requirement. ~ ',I ab /v-/'Jff'-; Dissertation Director Date Barbara Babcock, Ph.D. 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 head of the major department of the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................... 5 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ..........................................7 CHAPTER 2: TRACKS BY LOUISE ERDRICH ............................ 53 CHAPTER 3: MY AL BY ERNA BRODBER ..............................86 CHAPTER 4: NO COUNTRY FOR YOUNG MEN BY JULIA O'FAOLAIN .... 120 CHAPTER 5: DELIA'S SONG BY LUCHA CORPI. ....................... 156 REFERENCES ....................................................... 197 5 ABSTRACT The contact of two different cultures in the colonization process produces a zone of cultural mingling that resembles Victor Turner's concept of "liminality" referring to states or persons that elude classification. This study considers the repercussions of colonization on the lives of women characters in novels about four different "post- colonial" contexts -Native American, Jamaican, Irish and Mexican American. These novels reflect both the unique historical circumstances of each context and common themes that occur due to colonization and transcend the specific cultures such as the mourning of personal and collective loss, liminal states of consciousness and m,ingling of cultures. The introductory chapter examines the particular historical contexts of each novel and the theories of Abdul JanMohamed and Frantz Fanon on colonization. This study also applies the work of Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva, Gloria Anzaldua, Homi Bhaba and others to an examination of the subversive cultural formations that evolve through the boundary dissolution of colonization. Chapter two considers Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks in which the decimation of the Anishinabe people is the context for the three primary characters who have , experienced personal and collective loss and respond by resisting or adapting to colonization. Chapter three examines Erna Brodber's Myal and the impact of the manichean colonial ideology on a Jamaican woman who is literally half-black and half­ white. Chapter four addresses Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, a novel about two women, one who lived through the early twentieth century movemen,t for Irish independence and the other who is her great niece, that have both been silenced and sexually controlled by colonialism and Irish Catholicism. The fifth and final chapter examines Lucha Corpi's Delia's Song about a young Chicana activist who has suffered 6 losses on several levels and recovers by writing an autobiographical novel that weaves the personal and political issues of her life. All four novels are concerned with the liminal states of consciousness in these women characters and their efforts to both find love and tell their stories, thus counteracting the colonizer's version of history. 7 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION "Theorizing always needs a Savage'. The Savage in the West has always been the Woman ...She is needed so that her difference can act as a confirmation of man's 'natural superiority' and of his 'birthright' to be the best. ..Master and slave, conqueror and savage, such are the reductive dichotomies through which the relationships of difference have always been perceived in our Aristotelian West (Feral quoted in Braidotti 214) When those whose difference has been constructed by others dare to re-member the fragments of their repressed stories, the return of the repressed may be announced by a storm like the one produced by Ella's healing in Myal. Whether they have been dislocated and dispossessed of their culture and history through the intervention of colonialism or erased through being restricted to domestic spaces where their sexuality and reproductive capacity can be controlled by patriarchies, colonized people and women in most societies have either been denied the right to speak as subjects or not understood because their discourse fell outside the dominant linguistic and symbolic order. The strategic use of difference can be useful in uncovering the repressed relations of reproduction, erased pre-colonial cultures and the often forgotten story of colonialism's horrors -rape, conquest and slavery. In this strategic role, difference is not an argument for essentialism but for the uncovering of socio-cultural and historical differences based on race and class oppression as referred to in the following quote by Saldivar or the experiential differences of women's oppression related to the patriarchal uses of female anatomy to construct "woman" and obstruct women referred to in the McClintock quote. This something else is the difference of contemporary Chicano narrative, a difference not of kind, but of dialectical position; a difference that allows it to retain its special relation to its Mexican and American contexts, while also letting it be marked by a relation to its own still-unconditioned future (Sald(var 8). 8 The category of "woman" is a social construction and the ruptures in women's narratives are expressive of ruptures in social experience. Narrative differences speak not of anatomical destiny and design, but of the daily difficulties women