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Myers, Deauwand Kelvin

English

2005

MA

What of otherness? What does one do to reclaim what's lost in being called the other? What are the ontogenetical conditions that allow for such a thing, with all the malefaction that accompanies it? Human design? Avarice? If Marx is right, that we are all about getting, acquiring, things, things, things, and that the getting allows for injustice, that dehumanization is demanded by the getting, what does material collection mean, what does it satisfy? What does it fill? Lacan would tell us it fills nothing, but deceptively takes on the quality of fulfillment, which is the point, the quilting point, the stupid signifier, the 'it' we'll kill for. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, my thesis explores three famous 20th century novels of American literature and the lack that black females, in particular, represent and satisfy in the social landscape, because it is this same otherring that allowed for Hiroshima ash to eat over, eat under, eat in. My introduction discusses Lacanian theory as I relate to it to the question of race and social otherring, what I call the "filling factors" that oversignify black subjectivity. The first chapter looks at "double lack" as it relates to black Americans, especially women, in Nella Larsen's Quicksand. Helga, the protagonist, is exemplary of the "peculiar lack" within all humans doubled by racial modes of identity. The second chapter explores Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and furthers this question of race as it relates to beauty and the aftermath of imperialism, especially on the female subject. In all three fairly short works, I want to argue that the authors attempt, in giving us these characters, to expose the fatal results of otherring and the double lack that burdens what Morrison calls "Africanist" peoples. My conclusion questions the results of such an inquiry and its meaning for the reader of such texts.