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"Fowler, Doreen"
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Death, Denial, and the Black Double
Flannery O'Connor once said that death has always been brother to my imagination. Her words are a poignant reminder that death shadowed both her life and her art. As a child, she watched her father die of lupus; in 1950, at twenty-five, when she was writing her first novel, she was diagnosed with this same autoimmune disease; and she died a short fourteen years later at the age of thirty-nine. O'Connor lived and wrote with the threat of death always trailing her, and her fiction is littered with dead bodies. I propose that these death-haunted characters are authorial avatars and that when O'Connor writes that death is the brother to my imagination, she means that a desire to deny death drives her art and that, denied, the fear of death returns in her fiction in the form of the double. In fact, O'Connor's choice of the word brother for the connection between her imagination and death invokes doubling since a brother is often a literary figuration of the double.
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\Nobody Could Make It Alone\: Fathers and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's \Beloved\
In the traditional psychoanalytic model of development, the father, always male, introduces the child to a social hierarchy constituted by excluding others, beginning with the mother. Because feminist revisionists of psychoanalytic theory have sought to redress a male bias in this theory, they have focused intensely on the importance of the mother's role in subjectivity formation, and, for the most part, have not revised the traditional description of the father's function.2 Two feminists who focus on the paternal function, Julia Kristeva and Benjamin, suggest theories that align with Beloved's reconceptualization of the father's role in the socialization process.
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Flannery O’Connor’s Productive Violence
The operative word here is strangely, and scholars have found very strange, even inexplicable, the redemptive properties of murder, rape, and mutilation.1 Claire Katz writes that O'Connor unleashes a whirlwind of destructive forces more profound than her Christian theme would seem to justify (55); and Preston Browning observes that O'Connor's enigmatic fiction calls for interpretations that go beyond religious orthodoxy: If it was Christian orthodoxy to which she subscribed, her work is manifest proof that it was orthodoxy with a difference. According to Freud, entry into a cultural order organized by polarities begins with a fear of castration, and, for Lacan, \"symbolic castration\" introduces socialization.2 Seizing on this notion of symbolic castration, these critics have cited figurative castrations in O'Connor's stories, like the sodomizing of Tarwater, the theft of Joy/Hulga's prosthetic leg, or the goring of Mrs. May by a bull, and have suggested that violence functions in O'Connor's texts according to a Freudian Oedipal formula; that is, it works to stabilize social hierarchy and positions of dominance.
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BEYOND OEDIPUS: LUCAS BEAUCHAMP, NED BARNETT, AND FAULKNER'S \INTRUDER IN THE DUST\
Disguised by doubling and distanced by undeveloped characters and a convoluted plot, the novel's project is to mount an inquiry into the fundamental problem at the crux of the psychoanalytic and psycholinguistic master narrative of identity, namely, that difference, in particular, white, male difference (what Lacan calls \"the phallic distinction\"), appears to be insecurely secured by repression. If we read the events of Intruder in the Dust for a symbolic meaning, then, the text's improbable insistence that Chick must dig up a buried corpse to stop a lynching seems to suggest that this lynching and, by implication, all similar racially repressive violence, can only be averted when we retrieve the buried term; that is, when we stop socially enforcing exclusive either/or oppositions, which with one term's ascendancy guaranteed by the marginalization of another.
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Racial Scapegoating and White Redemption: Reconsidering Race in Flannery O'Connor
[...]she says to the Polish farm worker, Mr. Guizac, \"I say who will come here and who won't\" (223). [...]when she says to Mr. Guizac, \"You'll excite him\" (CS 222), she means that Mr. Guizac's treatment might suggest to Sulk the possibility of self-determination. According to Kahane, while O'Connor, in her early fiction, uses the stereotype of the Negro as \"a passive long-suffering figure\" (184), in her later stories, \". . . the Negro turns into a symbol of rage, yet still a stereotype serving O'Connor's satiric purposes\" (192). While it is true that both the black mother and the black actor are full of anger that moves them to violence, critics have failed, I think, to understand that these African Americans are responding to a violence that is being done to them; that is, the whites threaten them with an assumption, supported by their culture, of innate white superiority.
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