Mother's burial, the daughter's burden : disintegrated and dismembered bodies in William Faulkner's As I lay dying and Richard Wright's Native son.

Abstract

The female body has been eulogized, idealized, and sanctified throughout history, while being preserved in a state of comfortable muteness, bearing the stigma of materiality. The roles commonly attributed to women, as Luce Irigaray has demonstrated, were those of "virgin, mother, and prostitute" (186). The woman's body has been scribbled for her by patriarchy, constructed and manufactured in accordance with dominant cultural standards. This paper attempts to re-read the subversive and transgressive bodily manifestations of the "woman as body of the woman" (Wright, The Outsider 393), and to demonstrate how the corpse -"the utmost of abjection" (Kristeva 4), "the grotesque body" (Bakhtin 3(6) -becomes the only signifier of the female body and voice, both black and white. By discussing the works of two male American authors, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Richard Wright's Native Son, I demonstrate that the writing of woman's body becomes possible after the body has entered the realm of abjection and has become a meaningful corpse, rather than an idealized body. Both Faulkner and Wright exhibit a similar propensity towards the representation of the female body as dead, mute, and powerless, in order to revive it through meaningful deaths that trigger the beginning of female body writing. As feminist critics have repeatedly underlined, the woman's body is not only a text of culture, but also a direct locus of social control. However, no longer a "docile body" (Foucault, Discipline 135), the female body is re-written -ironically -in death, and the female discourse emerges after the sacrificial cultural death has been performed.