Women's fight for the franchise in both America and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by scrutiny of women's relationship to the State by those with varying perspectives on the suffrage battle. In the industrial, post-agricultural age, motherhood defined a woman's place in western society, as well as her rights under and service to the State; if the normative role of the male citizen was the soldier, the normative role for women was the mother. Yet for all of the ways an embrace of maternalism limited women's access to the public realm, it also laid the groundwork for the women's movement, and motherhood was often seen as a route to citizenship by those on both sides of the suffrage battle. As women began to re-imagine themselves as enfranchised citizens, many social theorists, politicians, and novelists continued to debate the rights and roles of women across the body of the mother; thinkers as varied as Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, and Emma Goldman all wrote tracts about motherhood and the future of the nation. Rather than entering the old debates on the value or liability of maternalism for feminism, my dissertation will argue that the modernist period introduced a new and still-overlooked figure: the anarchic mother. In their essays and novels, Goldman, Rebecca West, John Galsworthy, and Virginia Woolf turned away from the emblem of the Republican Mother and toward a radical new figure. Rather than sacrificing her individual needs to the Republic, the anarchic mother's individual pursuit of liberty challenged the authority of the State and its cultural institutions. An important group of modernist novels and essays employs the figure of the mother to represent not tradition and unity but rebellion, separatism, abstention, or statelessness. This undertheorized figure in modernist and feminist thought clarifies Virginia Woolf's call, in Three Guineas, for allegiance to no country. If Woolf and many other artists were ambivalent as they linked motherhood and anarchy, contemporary feminists inherited both the possibilities and contradictions of the anarchic mother as they reexamine women's relationship to citizenship in the 21st century.

This thesis approaches Thomas Pynchon's novel, Mason & Dixon, in terms of its narrative structure and sentimental content. Pynchon is generally regarded as a challenging and innovative writer, so narrative is an unsurprising subject for a study of his most recent work; sentimentalism, on the other hand, is a far cry from traditional approaches to his writing. Despite this, however, as I outline in my introduction, sentimentalism has long hovered around the edges of Pynchon's work. In Mason & Dixon it takes a privileged role as the dominating mood of the novel's final section, "Last Transit." This sentimentalism, far from being the retrogressive move that the term might imply, is bound up in a radically reconceived approach to the narrating voice of novelistic discourse, whence comes the unifying feature of my study. In Mason & Dixon, I identify this unity in the novel's referencing of film, long-established as one of Pynchon's major cultural influences. In my first chapter, I outline my approach to sentimentalism and narrative-in the modern and, specifically, modernist novel, as well as in contemporary film. In chapter two I outline my conception of Mason & Dixon's narrator as emulating film's visual representations; in chapter three, I explore this narrator as a "radically underdetermined" identity, who represents, not a linguistically embodied subjectivity, but rather representation as its own agent, as representation itself. In my fourth and final chapter, I examine how this narrator manages the sentimental content of the novel, concentrating on the character of Mason.

La difficulté de lecture de Una meditación a été soulignée tant par la critique que par Juan Benet lui-même. Ce travail essaie de caractériser cette difficulté et, par ce biais, la spécificité de l’expérience de lecture du roman de Benet. Notre étude s’appuie sur la psycholinguistique de la compréhension des textes, qui nous permet de définir la norme de lisibilité implicite par rapport à laquelle Una meditación est jugé « difficile ». Nous étudions les deux aspects qui, par rapport à cette norme, constituent les principales sources de difficulté du texte bénétien : la disposition de la matière romanesque (au niveau du récit et de la phrase) et le système de référenciation des personnages. Sur le plan de la disposition, le récit et – à son échelle – la phrase se caractérisent par une forte discontinuité pourtant dissimulée, par un développement temporel de forme spirale, et par le brouillage des relations hiérarchiques entre les événements. Sur le plan de la référenciation, la notion de nom du personnage perd son sens traditionnel, car les noms sont peu employés, ambigus, multiples, ou inexistants ; mais c’est surtout l’omniprésence de la référenciation pronominale qui déroute le lecteur en lui exigeant implicitement de ne pas oublier un seul détail du texte. Nous analysons aussi la figure du narrateur et nuançons une lecture courante selon laquelle le texte serait le produit d’une remémoration. Nous concluons que la « difficulté » de Una meditación semble être au service d’une écriture qui, à travers l’indifférenciation des personnages et des histoires, dépasse la fiction et vise un portait générique de la nature humaine. / The difficult nature of Una meditación has been highlighted by both scholars and Juan Benet himself. This dissertation characterizes such a text complexity and thereby the singularity of the reading experience of Benet’s novel. Our work relies on the psycholinguistics of reading comprehension. This framework allows us to achieve a definition of standard readability to which Una meditación is implicitly compared when judged as “difficult”. We study the two features that revealed to be the main sources of reading difficulty in Benet’s text: the narrative and sentence structures, and the particular system of reference to the characters. At the level of the text structure, the narration and—at its own scale—the sentence are characterized by a strong discontinuity, however concealed; by a spiral temporal development; and by the scrambling of the hierarchy of the fictional events. At the level of character reference, the notion of name of the character loses its traditional meaning. Names are barely used or these are ambiguous, multiple, or inexistent. However it is above all the omnipresence of the pronominal reference that disconcerts the reader, implicitly imposing memorizing every detail of the text. We also analyze the figure of the narrator, and criticize a common reading of Benet’s novel in which the text is the produce of a recollection. We conclude that the “difficulty” of Una meditación is the result of a writing that, by means of the indiscernibility of the characters and their stories, goes beyond literary fiction and aims at a generic portrait of human nature.

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