More than metaphor: fictional incest as implicated in African-American subjectivity

This work examines how fictional incest can create a new platform on which African American subjectivity can reform by exploring the specific function of incest in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie. It recognizes the validity of Mikhail Bakhtin's contention that the novel is uniquely situated to effect societal change, and suggests that Ellison, Morrison and Herron are fully cognizant of the potential of their fiction both to reflect and to change contemporary attitudes towards subjectivity. Each uses incest as a metaphor for societal corruption and as a catalyst for change. To further understanding of the potency of incest as a metaphor for societal corruption, this project uses the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud to examine the exact nature of incest and its significance with regard to social structures. And to further understanding of incest's power as a catalyst for change, it identifies facets of these novels that provoke interracial and intraracial consideration of African American subjectivity. Chapter One focuses on Invisible Man, in which the incest between Jim Trueblood and Matty Lou is the catalyst that sets the narrator on his road to self-discovery. Theorists such as Freud, Levi-Strauss, Frantz Fanon, and D. W. Winnicott allow an interpretation of the incest, (as Ellison's audience, in the 1950s, might have understood it), in terms of the relationship between the individual and the society of which he is part, which, for African Americans, must acknowledge the history of slavery. Chapter Two identifies the patriarchal subjugation of African American women in social structures and in language, as well as the corruption of African American subjectivity, as a whole, by popular white-dominated culture. Julia Kristeva's theories turn the incest between Cholly Breedlove and Pecola in The Bluest Eye into an act of redemption through which societal corruption is purged. Furthermore, Kristevan theory facilitates analysis of the problems that Morrison faces as a woman writing in the 1970s, in which incest allows a new African American female subjectivity to emerge through a subversive mode of writing that counters the masculine domination of the symbolic with a semiotics of the flesh that finds its origin in the womb. Chapter Three recognizes the debts that Herron owes to Morrison, for pioneering forms of writing that resist the patriarchal domination of language, and to Ellison, for pointing towards the establishment of new societal structures as a means of liberation. By examining the incest between John Christopher Snowdon and his daughter, Patricia, it identifies Thereafter Johnnie as an appropriation and retelling of Western literary themes from a feminist perspective, and as a means of politicizing incest, sexuality and gender in the 1990s. Furthermore, it recognizes the significance of Freud and Levi-Strauss to feminist theorists such as Rosaria Champagne, Jane Gallop and Melba Wilson