Aftermath: The trope of the posthumous voice in women's writing.
Item
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Title
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Aftermath: The trope of the posthumous voice in women's writing.
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Identifier
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AAI3024826
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identifier
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3024826
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Creator
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Raymond, Sara Claire.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Meena Alexander
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Literature, English | Literature, American
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Abstract
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The dissertation considers a specific rhetorical gesture, a permutation of prosopopoeia, which I am calling the trope of the posthumous voice. I trace the appearance of this trope in the work of the following writers: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. By the phrase, "the trope of the posthumous voice," I indicate the gesture of a narrator speaking from the space of her imagined death, that is, from a position of posthumousness. The narrator states explicitly or suggests implicitly that she speaks entirely after her death has occurred. Her work is not found posthumously but rather, rhetorically speaking, produced posthumously. The trope of the posthumous voice is different from classical prosopopoeia in that, in the trope of the posthumous voice in women's writing, the dead body is the feminine narrator's own body, a corpse through which she presents her words. In this trope, the death mask is the mask of the self. It subverts prosopopoeia, making use of the classical rhetorical gesture to shape a specifically post-traumatic language that depends upon the stance of a split self. Exploring this trope, I expand de Man's notion of the fiction of address to mean the fiction of having an address, in the sense of having a home. Home is always a fiction for the dispossessed speaker, and the figured-dead speaker is radically dispossessed, having no body or home. The trope of the posthumous voice is a gesture of resistance. It trades the narrator's implied body for her voice, revealing the instability of the patriarchal assumption that woman's embodiedness is mute. This trope subversively gains power and sanctity for the abject speaker, the speaker figured dead. Here, death represents violation. The figured-dead body, a feigned death mask, separates the speaker's speech from her body. This separation serves the woman writer by deferring to a space beyond the text the act of speaking from a woman's body.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
