Oedipus' Wake: The (Neo-)Masculinization of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century American Women's Memoir

<p>Without pretensions to exhaustiveness, this study briefly examines the mid- to late-twentieth-century flowering of western theory and criticism built around autobiographical writing and follows the feminist branch(es) of that theory and criticism through a reading of the following four memoirs: <em>Autobiography of a Face </em>by Lucy Grealy, <em>All the Lost Girls </em>by Patricia Foster, <em>Lying </em>by Lauren Slater, and <em>Prozac Nation </em>by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Using both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as they relate to literature, I argue that the selves these four women write in their memoirs are not selves built around the model historically set for women by feminist criticism of autobiography. Instead, Grealy, Foster, Slater, and Wurtzel, each raised by a relatively ineffectual or absent father and a strong-willed mother, fashion autonomous Lacanian 'I's for themselves out of relationships with their mothers that more closely resemble the adversarial relationship Freud posited between fathers and sons than they do the communal and less autonomy-engendering mother-daughter relationships many feminist critics predict.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of English

Year

2006

Author dc:creator

• Johnson, Thomas

• Cultural History
• English Language and Literature
• Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Women's History
• Women's Studies

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/283

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.wku.edu:theses-1286