This essay examines the subject-object dichotomy between men and women in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the thesis of the essay is that this dichotomy develops into subject-object harmony. Through Simone de Beauvoir’s theory regarding the subject-object dichotomy and a close reading of the novel, this essay concludes that Jazz shows the possibility of reciprocal relationships built on friendship. In other words, the dichotomy changes into harmony, which makes it possible for both men and women to reach freedom and fulfilment in transcendence.

This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

Em pleno século XXI, assistimos ao surgimento do romance A Mercy (2008), da norte-americana Toni Morrison, que invoca o passado de povos que estiveram historicamente às margens da cultura nacional norte-americana. A Mercy retorna a história da colonização anglo-saxõnica do século XVII, para contar, a partir dos viés do trauma, a história de Florens, que ainda menina é oferecida pela mãe, no lugar de seu irmão menor, para pagamento de dívidas do dono da plantação. O romance marca o envolvimento por parte de Toni Morrison em um projeto estético-político que visa resgatar a história das relações raciais nos Estados Unidos pelo viés do trauma. Este estudo apontacomo, a partir do redirecionamento do foco para a interioridade da experiência histórica - a história como trauma -, Morrison possibilita um encontro diferenciado com um passado historicamente silenciado, através de estratégias textuais que mobilizam não apenas a razão, a percepção crítica do leitor, mas que transformam o ato da leitura numa experiência vivida revelando o potencial da literatura para transformar as relações humanas. / Toni Morrison’s latest novel A Mercy (2008), evokes the past of peoples that were historically confined to the margins of the American culture. Morrison goes back to the period of the Anglo-Saxon colonization in the 17th century to tell the story of Florens, who is offered by her mother as the payment of a debt by the plantation owner. Florens’ story is narrated from the point of view of trauma, an aspect that highliths Toni Morrison’s commitment to a political-aesthetical project to recover the history of racial relations in the United States from an inner perspective. This thesis shows how Morrison’s text allows for a different encounter with a historically silenced past, focusing on the interiority of historical experience – i.e., on history as a trauma. Through multiple textual strategies, Morrison’s novel mobilize not only the reader’s critical perception but transform the act of reading into a living experience, one that can reveal the power of literature to change human relations.

Em pleno século XXI, assistimos ao surgimento do romance A Mercy (2008), da norte-americana Toni Morrison, que invoca o passado de povos que estiveram historicamente às margens da cultura nacional norte-americana. A Mercy retorna a história da colonização anglo-saxõnica do século XVII, para contar, a partir dos viés do trauma, a história de Florens, que ainda menina é oferecida pela mãe, no lugar de seu irmão menor, para pagamento de dívidas do dono da plantação. O romance marca o envolvimento por parte de Toni Morrison em um projeto estético-político que visa resgatar a história das relações raciais nos Estados Unidos pelo viés do trauma. Este estudo apontacomo, a partir do redirecionamento do foco para a interioridade da experiência histórica - a história como trauma -, Morrison possibilita um encontro diferenciado com um passado historicamente silenciado, através de estratégias textuais que mobilizam não apenas a razão, a percepção crítica do leitor, mas que transformam o ato da leitura numa experiência vivida revelando o potencial da literatura para transformar as relações humanas. / Toni Morrison’s latest novel A Mercy (2008), evokes the past of peoples that were historically confined to the margins of the American culture. Morrison goes back to the period of the Anglo-Saxon colonization in the 17th century to tell the story of Florens, who is offered by her mother as the payment of a debt by the plantation owner. Florens’ story is narrated from the point of view of trauma, an aspect that highliths Toni Morrison’s commitment to a political-aesthetical project to recover the history of racial relations in the United States from an inner perspective. This thesis shows how Morrison’s text allows for a different encounter with a historically silenced past, focusing on the interiority of historical experience – i.e., on history as a trauma. Through multiple textual strategies, Morrison’s novel mobilize not only the reader’s critical perception but transform the act of reading into a living experience, one that can reveal the power of literature to change human relations.

Em pleno século XXI, assistimos ao surgimento do romance A Mercy (2008), da norte-americana Toni Morrison, que invoca o passado de povos que estiveram historicamente às margens da cultura nacional norte-americana. A Mercy retorna a história da colonização anglo-saxõnica do século XVII, para contar, a partir dos viés do trauma, a história de Florens, que ainda menina é oferecida pela mãe, no lugar de seu irmão menor, para pagamento de dívidas do dono da plantação. O romance marca o envolvimento por parte de Toni Morrison em um projeto estético-político que visa resgatar a história das relações raciais nos Estados Unidos pelo viés do trauma. Este estudo apontacomo, a partir do redirecionamento do foco para a interioridade da experiência histórica - a história como trauma -, Morrison possibilita um encontro diferenciado com um passado historicamente silenciado, através de estratégias textuais que mobilizam não apenas a razão, a percepção crítica do leitor, mas que transformam o ato da leitura numa experiência vivida revelando o potencial da literatura para transformar as relações humanas. / Toni Morrison’s latest novel A Mercy (2008), evokes the past of peoples that were historically confined to the margins of the American culture. Morrison goes back to the period of the Anglo-Saxon colonization in the 17th century to tell the story of Florens, who is offered by her mother as the payment of a debt by the plantation owner. Florens’ story is narrated from the point of view of trauma, an aspect that highliths Toni Morrison’s commitment to a political-aesthetical project to recover the history of racial relations in the United States from an inner perspective. This thesis shows how Morrison’s text allows for a different encounter with a historically silenced past, focusing on the interiority of historical experience – i.e., on history as a trauma. Through multiple textual strategies, Morrison’s novel mobilize not only the reader’s critical perception but transform the act of reading into a living experience, one that can reveal the power of literature to change human relations.

This thesis argues that a prominent concern among contemporary writers of fiction is the recuperation of lost or occluded histories. Increasingly, contemporary writers, especially postcolonial writers, are using the medium of fiction to explore those areas of political and cultural history that have been written over or unwritten by the dominant narrative of “official” History. The act of excavating these past histories is simultaneously both traumatic and liberating – which is not to suggest that liberation itself is without pain and trauma. The retelling of traumatic pasts can lead, as is portrayed in The God of Small Things (1997), to further trauma and pain. Postcolonial writers (and much of the world today can be construed as postcolonial in one way or another) are seeking to bring to the fore stories of the past which break down the rigid binaries upon which colonialism built its various empires, literal and ideological. Such writing has in a sense been enabled by the collapse, in postcolonial and postmodernist discourse, of the Grand Narrative of History, and its fragmentation into a plurality of competing discourses and histories. The associated collapse of the boundary between history and fiction is recognized in the useful generic marker “historiographic metafiction,” coined by Linda Hutcheon. The texts examined in this study are all variants of this emerging contemporary genre. What they also have in common is a concern with the consequences of exile or diaspora. This study thus explores some of the representations of how the exilic experience impinges on the development of identity in the postcolonial world. The identities of “displaced” people must undergo constant change in order to adjust to the new spaces into which they move, both literal and metaphorical, and yet critical to this adjustment is the cultural continuity provided by psychologically satisfying stories about the past. The study shows that what the chosen texts share at bottom is their mutual need to retell the lost pasts of their characters, the trauma that such retelling evokes and the new histories to which they give birth. These texts generate new histories which subvert, enrich, and pre-empt formal closure for the narratives of history which determine the identities of nations.

This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

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