Imagining relation: Otherness in American women's experimental fiction.

Abstract

This dissertation describes the experimental point of view strategies of three modern novels written by American women and argues that these strategies work to share with cultural others--with women, lesbians, African-Americans, workers--the power and authority conventional point of view strategies as well as high modernist fictional experiments consolidate and reserve only for authors and their narrators. Reading Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha," Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the project understands point of view as the power and knowledge relationships constructed between the verbal-ideological worlds of authors, narrators, characters and readers and argues that in these women's experimental novels point of view grows out of and models relational rather than isolate subjectivity. The plots, themes, and structures of all three narratives articulate, enact, and invite human relational interaction where "we" rather than "I" is the unmarked case, the subjectivity-generating pronoun. In "Melanctha" the fictional experiment coalesces around the "we" of character and narrator, a lesbian couple who tell Melanctha's story together. In Yonnondio the text enacts the "we" of author and characters, especially Mazie, but also the "we" of collective working-class consciousness. In Their Eyes Were Watching God the experimentally inscribed relational "we" includes a particular rural black folk culture, a fully articulated and functional chorus of voices that come together to tell Janie's story and to provide a space for the novelist in the oral tradition. In modeling and enacting relational subjectivity inside the novel these narratives necessarily engage conflict, even on the deepest of structural levels. These conflicts come into circular and fertile relation with the novels' narrative experiments, each responding to and initiating the other. The interactive patterns between multi-leveled conflict and point of view experiment locate and characterize a female literary modernism that works to foreground relational subjectivity.