"A Story in an Obscure Corner of the Front Page": Patricia Highsmith, Pamela Moore, Joyce Johnson and the Negotiatory Politics of Sexual and Gender Insubordination in Post-War America

Even as critics continue to re-examine male-written post-war American novels from new perspectives, a curious lacuna persists in the criticism of the novels written by women in that era. As a result of such scanty inquiry, they are largely absent from literary-critical anthologies on post-war American literature. My research fills this gap by analysing Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 The Price of Salt (Carol), Pamela Moore’s 1956 Chocolates for Breakfast and Joyce Johnson’s 1962 Come and Join the Dance. What is at stake in my problematisation of these novels’ marginalised status is their potential for being taken as examples of social problem novels that advocate evolutionary rather than revolutionary change of post-war heteronormative precepts. To assess the novels’ circumscribed challenge of the heteropatriarchal principles of that era, I adopt the concept of “subversive repetition” from American feminist and philosopher Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, which was first published in 1990. “Subversive repetition” is a performative tactic that explores possibilities of oppositional sexual and gender agency in the variable repetition of heterosexist norms. I argue that The Price of Salt (Carol), Chocolates for Breakfast and Come and Join the Dance defied Cold War heteronormative binarisms and their idealisation of feminine propriety by employing lesbian and premarital sexualities. However, due to the gendered Cold War culture that perceived sexually radical women as highly suspect figures, these women-centred novels also endorsed some of the sexist clichés of their time as a means of navigating potential censorship, hence their oscillation between the subversion and repetition of hegemonic sexual and gender polarities. To realise their defiance in the absence of a recognised body of feminist protest literature, the novels critically accommodated highly gendered literary-cultural models, namely the lesbian pulp subgenre (The Price of Salt (Carol)), the Freudian interpretation of female juvenile delinquency (Chocolates for Breakfast) and the Beat phenomenon (Come and Join the Dance). To probe into the novels’ oppositional appropriation of these sexist paradigms, I deploy Cultural Materialist Jonathan Dollimore’s concept of “transgressive reinscription”, a strategy that seeks dissidence within rather than outside dominant structures of power. I demonstrate that Highsmith’s, Moore’s and Johnson’s novels violated the sexism of those literary-cultural discourses by adopting them to stage the sexual and gender dissent of their female protagonists. Nevertheless, the novels also inevitably repeated those patterns’ sexism given that they were too male-oriented to be thoroughly re-adjusted to a defiant feminine perspective. Thus, the novels transgressively re-inscribed those literary-critical modes’ masculine prerogatives. To investigate the mobilisation processes of the politics of “subversive repetition” and “transgressive reinscription” in the novels, I propose Cultural Materialism, a methodology that explores the interactions of hegemonic power structures with the production, circulation and reception of cultural artefacts, literature included. Dollimore and Alan Sinfield are the Cultural Materialists upon whose ideas I draw.

Author dc:creator

• Feridoun Pour, Azadeh

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• McEntee, Joy
• Castro, Brian
• Rutherford, Jennifer
• Flanery, Patrick

• Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (Carol), Pamela Moore, Chocolates for Breakfast, Joyce Johnson, Come and Join the Dance, post-war American women novelists, negotiatory politics, gender and sexual insubordination, transgressive reinscription, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Cultural Materialism, subversive repetition, Judith Butler

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2440/138184

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digital.library.adelaide.edu.au:2440/138184