The grief taboo in American literature.

摘要

This study is about the repression of grief, the denial of emotional vulnerability, and the inability to mourn openly in the fiction and ideology of the American male author. It endeavors to dismantle the myth of an American male canon by exposing the critical influence of "feminine" impulses and the female herself (primarily, the figure of the mother) in works of fiction hitherto addressed through an emphasis upon the masculine imagination. Using the lives and fiction of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway as controlling examples, Boker proposes that the apparent stoicism in these figures represents not just a heroic capacity in the struggling artist, in the way that critics, in the past, have chosen to believe; it also illustrates an inability to mourn, and a psychological incapacity to assimilate and work through problematic and fractured object relations. The study argues that, despite the relatively successful efforts of a masculine American culture to control and displace female power, many male authors continue to struggle internally with the maternal/feminine in their conflicting desires for separation from, and fusion with, the intrapsychic and symbolically depicted image of the mother. More generally, The Grief Taboo in American Literature participates in a current trend in American literary criticism, one that exposes the ways in which the American myth of optimism and re-birth has clouded recognition of the tragic and subversive elements in the American Dream. One of the larger implications of the book is that the works of Melville, Twain, and Hemingway attained their status as representative American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century in part because they reflect the repressions and common defenses of an entire adolescent patriarchal culture. As articulations of the psychological conflicts inherent in the male adolescent's struggle both to attain and to retreat from masculine maturity--a contest that Boker suggests is left perpetually unresolved in the literature of America--their fiction strikes a deeply meaningful and psychologically powerful chord in a narcissistic and fundamentally adolescent male culture.