Memory speaks: The revision of history and the subject in contemporary women's fiction.

Abstract

The dissertation argues, through readings of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood, that feminist fiction of the eighties distinguishes itself both from ahistorical elaborations of subjectivity in postmodern texts, and from the equally ahistorical psychoanalytic constructions of women's identities common to feminist fiction and theory of the seventies. I use each text, which represents the past through the figure of the mother, to develop the notion of the daughter as a theoretical category rather than a kinship term, looking at the way in which the daughter's memory challenges objective representations of history and subjectivity. Each text is simultaneously an account of an individual struggle with the past, and the rewriting of a larger historical narrative. I read Cat's Eye as a history of the women's movement, Lucy as the psychological history of colonialism and postcolonialism in the West Indies, Beloved as a rewriting of 19th-century slave narratives, feminist romanticizations of the mother-daughter relationship, and narratives of African-American history which ignore shameful aspects of the past, and Patterns of Childhood, most obviously a history of Germany during the period of National Socialism, as a critique of the postmodern celebration of the boundary-less, fluidly multiple subject. Each text uses memory to posit subjective agency and historical self-realization for women, developing symbologies of loss which serve as the means of both representing historical absences and redressing them. The position of the daughter in these texts in many ways mirrors the contemporary moment of feminism: whereas feminist fiction of the 1970's reframed psychoanalytic paradigms to reflect the powerful influence of the mother on women's identities, current feminist writing reflects the still-problematic intersection of the primarily psychologically inflected discourse, and a more historicist, or postmodern one. Memory, which in these texts serves as the point of connection between history and subjectivity, serves as the means of confronting the past to see what it conceals.