Browsing by Subject "Sexuality in literature"

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    Elaine's Field Theory of Femininity: A Study of Gravity and Shame in Margaret Atwood's ​Cat's Eye
    (2020) Richie, Rebecca; Stadler, Gustavus
    The Edenic trope of the fallen woman structures the original Fall as Eve's punishment for her embodied desire, for breaking the rules, and has thus permeated literature with feminine characters who are met with repeated punishment when they break social rules: death, sickness, social exclusion, and the like. Through the concept of falling women, Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye confronts the Edenic structure of the fallen woman. Atwood's falling women are punished because the reality of feminine embodiment necessarily breaks the rules of Western social order. I argue that this principle of falling emerges as a result of the shame-incurring social landscape in which Western femininity is experienced. Cat's Eye's protagonist, Elaine, marks herself in relation to femininity by a feeling of "wrongness," a feeling of shame that permeates her relationships with other women, as well as with her own body. In approaching Western femininity, the essay turns to Denise Riley's deconstruction of the concept of "woman." Elaine both literally and figuratively falls from girlhood into womanhood, a fall that marks the beginning of her disillusioned relationship with her body that is reinforced by her social landscape. The novel's structural analepsis flashes between Elaine's girlhood and her womanhood, recounting the formative experiences that structure her sense of gendered embodiment around the guiding principle of shame. This thesis identifies feminine shame as a symptom of a shaming society, thus reconceptualizing the Edenic trope that locates shame as the punishment for feminine desire. In Cat's Eye, embodied femininity itself is the original sin.
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    "This Intolerable Incubus": The Melancholia of Bartleby, the Scrivener
    (2020) Cunningham, Drew; Stadler, Gustavus
    Herman Melville's Bartleby begins in a very strange way. The narrator—the lawyer in the narrative's law office setting—grieves that Bartleby, a scrivener who he had employed some years ago, presents an "irreparable loss to literature," to the extent that his biography cannot be told given the paucity of records detailing his life. Despite this, the lawyer assures that an "adequate understanding" of the scrivener's life is possible so long as the reader allows that this understanding must necessarily be formed in connection with the lawyer's life. This, I suggest, intimates that the understanding is a melancholic one: neither Bartleby nor the lawyer can be adequately known without taking account of the other, just as Freud argues the melancholic patient cannot be understood without considering whom the patient has lost. I use the structure of the melancholic introjection—of self-formation founded on mimetic relations—to fashion an "adequate understanding" out of the "irreparable loss" by thinking through the ways the lawyer and Bartleby "mimic" each other in the text and by paying close attention to how the lawyer, to whose thoughts and feelings alone we are privy, is affected by the mimetic symmetry of the relationship. I find that his sense of identity—especially his sexuality—grounded on the presumption of a wholly self-determining interiority, is implicated by Bartleby's "intrusion" and that this accounts for the lawyer's seemingly inexplicable handling of the scrivener.