The Postdomestic Woman: Divorce and the Ex-Wife in American Literature, Film, and Culture

This project establishes and analyzes a new character type, which I have termed the "postdomestic woman." The postdomestic woman is a female character who has been divorced or alienated from a marriage. Frequently this character has purposefully severed her marital relationship and thus deliberately operates as an independent agent based on her own desire to do so. Regardless of intention, the postdomestic woman must renegotiate her identity within society. Issues of freedom, femininity, family, and love are central to the postdomestic woman, as she must re-signify these once (seemingly) stable concepts according to her new postdomestic identity.I begin my research in chapter one by investigating the history of divorce in the Unites States and examining the factors that have shaped the cultural life of this phenomenon. Chapter two is concerned with the politics of representation and the ways in which women and divorce are depicted in film. This chapter explains the relationship between custody law reform, feminism, and antifeminism in Hollywood film over the last fifty years. In chapter three I shift to literary analysis and examine the postdomestic women characters in twentieth century novels featuring African American families. Chapter three centers on black literary matriarchs and interprets Toni Morrison's Beloved, Percival Everett's Erasure, and Andrew Winer's The Color Midnight Made through the lens of contemporary rhetoric regarding single black motherhood, such as the Moynihan Report's argument regarding "pathological" family structures and Reaganite claims about black "welfare queens." In chapter four I demonstrate that the postdomestic woman is vital to the postmodern literary project of de-centering master narratives by performing close textual readings of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays, John Hawkes' Death, Sleep, and the Traveler and Don Delillo's Mao II. Throughout this project I specifically focus on the representation of divorced female characters and, through an examination of such characters in film and literature, I establish a theoretical framework for defining and understanding the postdomestic woman within American culture