Crowded Lives: A Bakhtinian Analysis Of The Novels Of Hurston, Arnow, Morrison, And Kingston.

Abstract

Novels from different American sub-cultures and minority groups are rarely placed beside one another for discussion. This dissertation takes four novels from three sub-cultures, analyzes them individually, and then sets up a conversation between them. That analysis, Bakhtinian-based, emphasizes the ways that language and culture interact in the external world of American society and in the internal world of the novel. The four novels--Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior--have female protagonists who are caught in the intersection of conflicting cultures. They also make decisions based on their lives as women, not just in relation to the dominant white male-oriented society, but also in relation to their internally stratified sub-culture--black, hillbilly, or Asian American. None of these women finds an ultimate answer about how to live with integrity and in harmony with the multiple cultures of her heritage. Rather, even when the novel ends optimistically, the heroine has only achieved a balance between self and community which needs continual renewal as circumstances shift. Bakhtin's theory addresses many of the issues these four characters face. For both Bakhtin and the authors of these novels, as well as their characters, voice--the way people define themselves by their words, their interaction with others most readily perceived through dialogue, and the intermingling of their language with fragments of the narrator's and the other characters' speech--is the essential element. Bakhtin's discussion of the heteroglot language community with its concomitant social languages opens up an analysis of these dialogic, open-ended novels. His emphasis on the inseparability of content and style sets forth a means of penetrating the social/cultural aspects of the novels through an examination of stylistics. Through a close examination of style and form, these novels reveal their cultural richness and engage the reader in their internal dialogue.