Bastard claims: The agency of illegitimacy in twentieth-century American literature

This dissertation explores how images of bastardy have been deployed in twentieth-century American literary, legal, and political writings as markers of social contest and transgressive reproductive creativity. By examining a series of texts that focus on non-normative biological and ideological reproduction, I argue that dominant American society deploys bastard tropes to maintain the reproduction of the social status quo and to pathologize suspect social transformation. In turn, I reveal how citizens alienated by hegemonic definitions of illegitimacy use transgressive genealogies and tropes of bastardy to challenge traditional paradigms of inheritance. I explore representations of single mothers, disenfranchised fathers and sons, and bastard daughters to trace the cultural effects of “illegitimate” American citizenship and the political potency of non-normative, perverse generation. The dissertation begins with an introductory discussion of social and legal definitions of illegitimacy in twentieth-century American culture, and examines two Supreme Court cases pertaining to the rights of “bastards,” Jones v. Jones (1914) and Levy v. Louisiana (1968), to demonstrate how racial, gender, and class histories determine hegemonic definitions of legitimate citizenship. In section one, I examine early twentieth-century eugenics literature, such as Henry Goddard\u27s The Kallikak Family (1912), and argue that eugenicists deployed a rhetoric of racial passing and reproductive degeneration in order to represent impoverished white single mothers as sexual predators of the white middle and upper classes. In section two, I focus on Richard Wright\u27s Native Son (1940) and The Long Dream (1958) and argue that Wright positions his African-American protagonists as the bastard sons of America\u27s racist history. According to Wright\u27s literary vision, political insurrection lies in the capacity of these bastard sons to appropriate the literary, legal, and economic written documents that inscribe social power. In the third section I examine Gayl Jones\u27s Corregidora (1975), Dorothy Allison\u27s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Toni Morrison\u27s Paradise (1998), and I argue that these authors depict the dissident consciousness of bastard daughters in order to explore and expose the effects of matrilineal loss engendered by patriarchal assignations of illegitimacy