The politics of reproduction: Demystifying female gender in southern literature.

摘要

The reigning American myth regarding motherhood proclaims that all women innately wish to bear children and do not feel fulfilled as "real" women until they have done so. Despite its pervasiveness, however, this myth is opposed in the literature of the American South, where the desire not to be pregnant is a common, if hitherto unidentified, theme. Using Gramsci's theory of hegemony and Foucault's theories of the deployments of alliance and sexuality, this dissertation explores the effects upon women of having a socially prescribed asexual motherhood as their only culturally acceptable subject position. Examining mainly the works of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Walker, this dissertation examines the desire not to be pregnant as expressed in southern literature and the threat this "anti-desire" poses for southern culture. In the South, the figures of the belle, lady, matriarch, and mammy have a significant effect upon writers and their female characters who must contend with the rigid roles imposed upon them.; As mothers, southern women are supposed to sacrifice their identities, sublimating all their desires into child-rearing. However, in southern literature, mothers are conspicuously absent and those few who do exist maintain two incompatible and therefore self-destructive identities, poised on the ideological seam between sexuality and motherhood. The matriarchal women in southern literature gain much of their power through their repression of their sexual identities and through their complicity with the patriarchy, yet they remain vulnerable in their dual and self-contradictory roles as powerful southern women. Matriarchal spinsters are also culturally disruptive. They are threatening because southern male society has little control over them; their culture is unable to either silence or ignore them. Through a revision of motherhood and sexuality, southern literature threatens its entire social structure.