| dc.description.abstract | Using a postcolonial, feminist approach grounded in psychoanalysis, this dissertation focuses on novels that feature dismembered bodies of women. Some particularly profound twentieth and twenty-first century novels written by female authors portray dismemberment against the female body, and, through examining the role of the body in power structures, these female authors demonstrate how strong female characters resist oppressive structures through the terrible fragmentation of their bodies. Dismemberment is a horrifying, incomprehensible reality that marks and mars the body, leaving physical, mental, and emotional scars that many women bear as they face oppressors who are seeking to abuse their bodies, silence their voices, and rip them apart, limb from limb. Nevertheless, these stirring literary pieces demonstrate how women use the body as a means of resistance, however gruesome and graphic that resistance may be. Forms of physical dismemberment pervade neo-slave narratives, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). Also, dismemberment becomes an important theme in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) as women fight to the death for gender equality. Moreover, social and emotional dismemberment color the pages of Marie Elena-John’s novel Unburnable (2006) as racism and perception produce deathly consequences, while Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel (1994) depict the dismembering of the past and the re-membering of the future. A study of these novels elucidates an understanding of the conditions inhabited by women across a vast and varied landscape of experience and reveals their incredible strength. | en_US |
