Publication Date
5-3-2006
Degree Program
Department of English
Degree Type
Master of Arts
Abstract
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: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, All the Lost Girls by Patricia Foster, Lying by Lauren Slater, and Prozac Nation 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.
Disciplines
Cultural History | English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Women's History | Women's Studies
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Thomas, "Oedipus' Wake: The (Neo-)Masculinization of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century American Women's Memoir" (2006). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 283.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/283
Included in
Cultural History Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Women's History Commons, Women's Studies Commons