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. Hie quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs inchided in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 THE EMPTY SUBJECT: THE NEW CANON AND THE POLITICS OF EXISTENCE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Todd R. McGowan, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1996 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Walter Davis, Adviser Professor Debra Moddelmog Adviser p -' Professor George Hartley English Graduate Program UMI Number: 9620044 UMI Microform 9620044 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT My dissertation begins with this historical coinci­ dence: recent changes in the canon of American literature and the emergence of global capitalism. This coincidence suggests that changes in the canon, through obviously not caused by economic developments, are not wholly divorced from them either, and it places, I argue, a particular burden on the relationship between readers and the new canon. Thus, the dissertation turns to the problem of interpretation, especially as it relates to recently recovered works. In the body of the dissertation, I focus on four of the most prominent of these recovered works: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watch­ ing God. It is my position that simply expanding the canon of American literature to include these works stands as a purely appropriative gesture, unless, through inter­ pretation, we address the traumatic possibilities which each work represents. Interpretation, here, must ii foreground the constitution of the individual subject, be­ cause it is on this level that these works bring them­ selves to bear on our experience. Through four successive chapters, the dissertation reveals four variations on a fundamental theme: substan­ tive political action comes only with the recognition that for the human subject loss is constitutive. Each work reveals the connection between existential awareness and political action, showing how the former can be the basis for the latter. The dissertation's ultimate claim is that it is only when we become a subject, when we recognize ourselves as pure being-towards-death, that we challenge the hold which ideology has over us. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I will never be able to thank Mac Davis enough for introducing me to a whole way of thinking. Without him, I might never have found the words for that which most troubled me. I thank Debra Moddelmog for her friendship, her con­ scientious reading of my work, and the many Mexican din­ ners at which she picked up the check. I also thank George Hartley for his suggestions and for our discussions of Hegel over lunch. The PLH provided both political and intellectual sup­ port for this project, and Nathan Moore's insights were especially helpful. This project would be unthinkable without the exist­ ence of Paul Eisenstein. His philosophic and rhetorical contributions proliferate throughout this work and make up its best moments. Finally, I would to thank Hilary Neroni, who has never been absent from this work. iv VITA September 10, 1967............. Born— Dayton, Ohio 1989........................... B.A. English, Earlham College 1991........................... M.A. English, The Ohio State University 1989-present................... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments........................................ iv Vita.................................................... v Chapters: Introduction: From the Canon Wars to Feminine Jouissance............................................... 1 1. Dismantling, Expanding, and Including: The Shared Logic of Canon Change and Global Capitalism.............17 2. Condemned to the Absolute: Interpretation After Canonization............................................ 72 3. Dispossessing the Self: "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the Renunciation of Property........................... 110 4. The Awakening of Subjectivity: Edna Pontellier's Singular Existence..................................... 147 5. Acting Without the Father: Charles Chesnutt's New Aristocrat............................................. 190 6. Liberation and Domination: Their Eves Were Watching God and the Evolution of Capitalism.................... 224 7. Agency at the End of the Line: The Politics of Authenticity After Poststructuralism................... 260 List of References..................................... 294 vi INTRODUCTION FROM THE CANON WARS TO FEMININE JOUISSANCE I. The canon debate has had a remarkable persistence. Despite years of polemics— from one Bloom in 1987 to another in 1994— both canon openers and their conservative opponents continue to argue the relative merits of multi- culturalism and the "Western Canon." This persistence, however, is perhaps all that is remarkable about the canon debate. This debate certainly does not lead the way in theoretical sophistication, despite its contemporaneous­ ness with the so-called theory explosion. This is some­ thing that John Guillory points out in Cultural Capital. Guillory notes that theoretical critiques of essential identity and authorial "presence" have surprisingly coexisted in the present debate with an otherwise incompatible rhetoric of canonical revision in which it is precisely the fit between the author's social identity and 1 his or her experience that is seen to determine canonical or noncanonical status. The typical valorization of the noncanonical author's ex­ perience as a marginalized social identity necessarily reasserts the transparency of the text to the experience it represents. (10) If the canon debate, as Guillory claims here, involves outmoded, essentialistic conceptions of authorship and representation, then theoretical fecundity certainly cannot explain why this debate endures. What is signifi­ cant, however, is its persistence despite this theoretical backwardness. The canon debate is important because it persists, and it persists because it is the site at which we debate about difference— about the encounter with otherness. And how we encounter the other is the founda­ tional question of ethics. Thus, perhaps the canon debate serves as the displaced site where questions of ethics get their hearing today. Canon openers have consistently argued for the moral imperative behind canon change: it allows difference to be respected. For example, in her address to the English Institute (one of the essays included in the collection English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, a collection at the fore of the canon opening movement), Leslie Marmon Silko states, "I come to ask you to see language from the 2 Pueblo perspective" (54), a plea for an awareness— rather than a contempt or an ignorance— of perspectival (and especially cultural) difference. Arguing for the canoni­ zation of important Native American writers, Arnold Krupat advocates a "refusal of imperial domination, and so of the West's claim legitimately to speak for all the Rest" (170). According to this position, canon-opening combats Western epistemic violence; the open canon lets those who have been silenced speak. However, this speech, according to conservatives, represents a lowering of standards and an alienation from the traditional canon, the bedrock of Western culture. Thus, the opening of the canon becomes, in this vision, responsible for— or a sign of— not only the increasing fragmentation of American society but also its degradation. Through isolating ourselves from dif­ ference, we keep ourselves— or can become again— whole. No less than the position of the canon openers, the con­ servative position also reflects a moral imperative: recapturing a cultural cohesiveness lost in a postmodern world of difference. In a sense, however, cohesiveness is the goal of most the parties in the canon debate. As Gerald Graff puts it in