With "Two Throats and One Eye": Abject Female Friendships in Contemporary American Women's Novels Öffentlichkeit

Abstract

Abstract

With "Two Throats and One Eye": Abject Female Friendships in Contemporary American Women's Novels
By Sarah Prince

Although individual feminist analyses have underscored the importance of both friendship and the body to a distinctly female literary coming-of-age tradition, no study has yet examined how women's bodies inform these self-defining friendships. Drawing on feminist theories of abjection and embodiment, this dissertation adapts self-psychological concepts of mental and emotional bonding to illuminate different ways contemporary American female novelists write these bonds on the body-conceptualizing female self-development through embodied friendships with otherwomen.

Juxtaposing novels from Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, Sula), Ellen Douglas (Can't Quit You Baby), Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior), Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye), Paula Gunn Allen (The Woman Who Owned the Shadows), and Sefi Atta (Everything Good Will Come), a pattern of embodied friendship bonds becomes vividly clear across much contemporary women's literature, crossing bounds of race and region. This literary border crossing calls for new critical inquiries that do the same. Through an explication of the body's centrality in bonds of imitation, idealization, and adversarial violence-all of which construct the dynamics of contemporary literary friendships among women-this project aims to answer this call. By considering women's bodies, differently merged through friendship, as a fundamental site of feminist literary analysis, this dissertation provides a better understanding and more accurate reflection of literary and actual female comings-of-age.

With "Two Throats and One Eye": Abject Female Friendships in Contemporary American Women's Novels
By
Sarah Prince, B.A., Presbyterian College, 2004, M.A. Emory University, 2010
Advisor: Martine Watson Brownley, Ph.D.
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the
James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Women's Studies
2011

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction...1

With "Two Throats and One Eye": Depictions of Female Bonds of Abjection in
Contemporary American Women's Novels

Chapter 1...32

Body Doubles: Embodied Twinship Bonds in Toni Morrison's Sula, Paula Gunn Allen's
The Woman Who Owned The Shadows, and Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come

Chapter 2...103

You Be My Eyes and Ears: Idealization and Bodily Transference Across Race in The
Bluest Eye and Can't Quit You Baby

Chapter 3...170

Best Frenemies: (E)Merging Friendships and Horizontal Violence in Atwood's Cat's Eye
and Kingston's The Woman Warrior

Conclusion...236

Defiling the Body: Toward an Ethics of Embodied Empathy

Works Cited...245

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Women's Studies
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Women's Studies Literature, American
Stichwort	Douglas bildungsroman Morrison Gunn Allen Kingston Atwood Atta abject female friendship
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Brownley, Martine W, Emory University
Committee Members	Womack, Craig, Emory University Hall, Pamela M, Emory University

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