With "Two Throats and One Eye": Abject Female Friendships in Contemporary American Women's Novels Open Access
Prince, Sarah Elizabeth (2011)
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
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