Session 5B: Undesirable Women and Social Outcasts
1st Global Conference
Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Sometimes the Mystery [is] Simply how to Tell the Story At All.” The Phenomenon of the Contemporary Southern “White Trash” Womanhood as Presented in Trash by Dorothy Allison
Beata Zawadka
The Szczecin University, Poland
With the history of being “neither lady, nor slave,” as Michele Gillespie sees her, and so, outside white elite man’s “family, black and white,” the poor white womanhood has always seemed to be the most “trashy” category of all that the American South has bred. While the elite white femininity capitalized on its privileged race and class status so that it also hallmarked a gender ideal; and while the slave femininity, identified with backbreaking toil (productive and reproductive), could nevertheless forge it into a springboard to representing a gender model in its own right; the poor white womanhood, as a hybrid of both these “pure” models, cropped up as a cultural pattern that hardly deserved social visibility and recognition. As a result, due to its “mixed” status, the poor white femininity also came to be identified – and as early as the antebellum times – with the old southern society’s chief villain that therefore could hardly contribute substantially to its “family’s” welfare.
So victimized throughout centuries, the “white trash” femininity could not count on fair literary treatment, either. Throughout the entire southern literary history, there occurred few – if any at all – portrayals of the poor white womanhood that would not be either caricatured, or sentimentalized pictures of representatives of this category. Dorothy Allison’s short stories from the Trash collection (1988) are therefore unique in this respect for, as portrayals of “trashy” southern women, not only do they allow these women to finally speak in their own voice so as to reveal hard truths of their lives, but, in so doing, they also set in place their possibility of moving beyond their “family” history and hence, to rewrite it. As such, these stories can speak to a number of people considered their cultures’ “others.”
Born in 1949 in South Carolina, Dorothy Allison – a declared lesbian and feminist – is at present affiliated to the Columbia College. She published two novels (Bastard Out of Carolina 1992 and Cavedweller 1998), one short story collection (Trash 1988) and nonfiction work (Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature 1995 and the autobiography Two or Three Things I Know for Sure 1995). She is working on her third novel She Who now.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Sayena Robot, Brain Mother
Judy Lattas
Macquarie University, Australia
In this paper I analyse the material sent to me over a period of 5 years by an Indian woman, born to a Muslim family but educated by Catholic missionaries, in whose madness (probably schizophrenia, if diagnosed by psychiatrists) can be perceived the internalisation of a Western moral cosmos and racist beliefs about the superiority of white people. It is a rich and voluminous collection of outpourings on sexuality, corporeality, race, religion and the glorious self. In turn abject and exalted, paranoid and perceptive, the texts invoke a fantastic world of erratic dreams, stories from the Bible, Hindu mythology, American movies, popular technology, conspiracy beliefs and contemporary Indian social life. As psychic texts – and a diary of the body in deep alienation – the collection provides a rare opportunity to consider the experience of ordinary people caught up in the post-colonial dynamics of gender and culture, on a level of consciousness that is usually kept properly hidden or under control. A traditional association of the feminine with evil is at once taken in and turned around in the processing work of a self-aggrandising rather than self-abnegating subject.
This study is part of a project on the seizure of high-One symbolic positions by people of low-Other status, to which I have given the title Supreme Beings (of Lower Earth).
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Infanticide and Mother-Daughter Relationship in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Monika Gupta
Department of English, H.N.B.Garhwal University, Srinagar, Garhwal, Uttarakhand, India
First African-American women Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, projects Beloved (1987) as a story based upon a real and true incident in which Margaret Garner, a fugitive from Kentucky, attempts to kill her children rather than have them re-enslaved. The novel is dedicated to ‘ Sixty Million and more’ and set in the post-civil period. The protagonist of the story, Sethe, is a slave-mother who commits the act of infanticide because she wants to provide freedom to her children from the institution of slavery. Having no other choice, a creator i.e. a mother becomes a destroyer i.e. a murderer of her own child. After eighteen years, her sense of guilt for killing her child comes out in form of a sensuous girl of flesh, Beloved, the embodiment of the daughter she had murdered. Beloved’s major aim to appear in a form of a sensuous woman can be considered as a reminder of Sethe’s previous act. One can discern that Beloved’s ghost is a manifestation of Sethe’s guilty-consciousness. Beloved’s return disturbs Sethe’s relationship with her daughter Denver also. This mother daughter relationship has been described on a large canvas. Sethe’s haunting past and guilt overshadow the mother-daughter relationship. Toni Morrison has presented two different dimensions of motherhood through Sethe’s relationship with her two daughters, Beloved and Denver.
In the novel, Beloved appears as a ghost for the community people but for Sethe she is her dead daughter. Sethe accepts the truth that death is nothing but the continuation of life in a different form and therefore accepts the monstrous form of Beloved. It reveals the failure of Sethe as a mother. Morrison’s saga of slavery is easy to read but difficult to understand in terms of motherhood and womanhood.
In Beloved readers find a multiplicity of meanings and understanding. So, it is a big task to come to the conclusion whether it is a story of a ghost or how and why nurturing instinct leads to infanticide. Sethe’s act of infanticide is a manifestation of her external life which disturbs her internal world and psyche. So, Sethe’s act is also debatable on moral, social and psychological grounds.
Morrison presents a fresh approach of treating the plight of a woman as a mother. She points the two contradictory states of a mother- one as nurture and other as a killer. The present paper aims to discuss Sethe’s act of infanticide and her limitations as a mother of two daughters in the era of slavery.
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