SEPARATION ANXIETIES

268 Pages·2007·0.68 MB·English

SEPARATION ANXIETIES: REPRESENTATIONS
OF SEPARATIST COMMUNITIES IN LATE
TWENTIETH CENTURY FICTION AND FILM

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of English

by
Brett Alan Riley
B.A., University of Arkansas at Monticello, 1994
M.A., Northeast Louisiana University, 1997
May 2006
©Copyright 2006
Brett Alan Riley
All Rights Reserved

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This project is dedicated to
Kalene, Shauna, Brendan, and Maya.
The world would be gray without you.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Rick Moreland for his invaluable guidance and insight. Rick,
without you, this project might have been twice as long and half as good. I would also like to
thank my dissertation committee—Dr. Jack May, Dr. John Lowe, Dr. James Catano, and Dr.
Gregory Schufreider—for all the suggestions and encouragement. Your efforts have made me a
better scholar.
I would also like to acknowledge every teacher and librarian who ever directed, cajoled,
and threatened me over the years; I have truly benefited from your perseverance. Special thanks
go to Drs. Clark Davis, Betty Matthews, LaRue Sloan, and Kate Stewart. To my many students,
thanks for helping me learn how to be a good teacher and for all the encouraging words during
my work on this project.
I pledge my eternal thanks and friendship to my fellow graduate students who supported
me during my time in the program, especially Bill Scalia, Kris Ross, and Wolfgang Lepschy.
Friends like you are rare, and our Thursday night sessions at the Chimes will be missed.
To my parents, Donna and Jesse—thanks for all the love and support over the years. You
have been constants in an often tumultuous world, and that is more valuable than you could
possibly know.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the countless contributions of the four most
important people in the world—Kalene, Shauna, Brendan, and Maya. Any success I have
belongs to you as well.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..…iii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv

Abstract…….……………………………………………………………………………………..vi

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter
1 Girl Gangs, Female Outlaws, Lesbian Subtexts……………………………...…………26

2 Religious Separatist Communities, the Invading Other, and the Sexual Self…………...81

3 The Separatism of Vietnam Veterans: Reality vs. Representation, Narrative vs.
Memory, History vs. Myth, and the Return to ‘The World’……………………124

4 Intersections of Race, Gender, Experience, and Ideology: Representations
of Separatism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise………………………………….…179

Conclusion……..……………………………………………………………………………….232

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………254

Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………...261

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ABSTRACT
In the late 20th century and beyond, American social movements advocating equality
have increased national attention to issues of exclusion, inclusion, and multiculturalism within
communities. As a result, studying the nature of communities—how the term “community”
might be defined, who belongs to a given group or social structure, who does not belong, and
why—has become increasingly important. American artists have responded by exploring these
sites of social, political, and personal change in their works. Separation Anxieties:
Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth Century Fiction and Film analyzes
seven fictional works in which some group is philosophically and/or geographically isolated—
sometimes by choice, sometimes not—from mainstream America. Each chapter in this study
focuses on works that represent and explore a different separatist iteration.
Each work utilizes a different representation of America’s dominant community. Their
respective separatist characters distance themselves from dominant American society and create
a new community defined by a limited set of characteristics—gender and sexuality, religious
beliefs, experience, race. Yet the complexities of American life continually creep into their
separatist spheres, complicating the characters’ attempts to belong; these complications often
lead to conflicts within, or even to the dissolution of, the separatist communities. In these works,
accepting complexities and individual voices is represented as more conducive to communal
survival than suppressing alternate ideas and/or dissent. Studying these texts leads to a
reconsideration of traditional American myth—the “Union,” equality, inalienable rights, the
various freedoms that America is supposed to embody—and to a reexamination of why those
myths might be rejected, of what kinds of communities might be formed, and of how those
communities might succeed and fail. Separation Anxieties is an attempt to engage with and
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understand narrative constructions and, through them, the real-life ideals, communities, and
people recognizable in the representation.
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INTRODUCTION
Borders have a way of insisting on separation at the same time as
they acknowledge connection . . . Borders between individuals,
genders, groups, and nations erect categorical and material walls
between identities. Identity is in fact unthinkable without some sort
of imagined or literal boundary. But borders also specify the
liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction,
interconnection, and exchange. Borders enforce silence,
miscommunication, misrecognition. They also invite transgression,
dissolution, reconciliation, and mixing. Borders protect, but they
also confine.—Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings

The study of communities is increasingly important in the late 20th century and beyond.
Historical and social movements in the United States advocating equality have increased national
attention to issues of exclusion, inclusion, and negotiation with the nation’s multicultural
makeup. Concurrently, dramatic leaps in communications and travel technologies—as well as
increasingly complex international business relationships—have contributed to globalization.
Three consequences of globalization are the destabilization of international borders, the creation
of new communities, and increased attention to relationships among different groups. These
changes have raised increasingly complicated questions about the nature of nations, of
communities, of individuals’ places in these kinds of social structures, and of how different
aspects of identity relate to issues of belonging. American artists have responded by representing
these changes and exploring such questions in their works. Critical examinations of these artistic
representations are crucial to understanding global and cultural changes, as well as these new
iterations of American culture and art. Such a critical examination of literary and filmic art is the
purpose of this project.
To begin, I should examine the key terms of this project’s focus. The word “community”
traditionally refers to a group of people who share a geographic space and some aspect of
identity that is often related to that geography. For instance, an American may also classify
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him- or herself as a Texan or New Yorker, citizen of Chicago or New Orleans, resident of a
certain neighborhood or building. Though communal identity may be defined in terms of other
characteristics, particularly at the level of the neighborhood wherein economic standing may
help determine the limits of a community, the main marker remains a shared geographic space.
Benedict Anderson revises traditional conceptions of community in his book Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson argues that even
nations are in some respects imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will
never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion” (6). He applies this idea in other, more abstract ways,
arguing, for instance, that speakers of a common language form an imagined community
regardless of their national origins or identity politics. Due to the increasing ubiquity of the term
“community”—applied in diverse ways, including to online discussion boards and to widespread
identity-based groups—critics studying different iterations of community in the late twentieth
and twenty-first centuries should find Anderson’s idea useful.
Keeping in mind both traditional definitions and Anderson’s extensions of the terms, I
should begin with a description of how this study adapts and revises these ideas. The term
“dominant community” has a slightly different meaning for each of the texts I examine herein. In
general, the “dominant communities” represented in these texts reflect bell hooks’s concept of
“white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” hooks’s term accounts for racial, gendered, and
economic facets of dominance and oppression, though some works I consider also focus on other
aspects, such as sexuality and uncommon experiences, specifically combat experience in the
Vietnam war. When I use the term “dominant community” in the chapters that follow, I am
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discussing what a particular work represents as the central and oppressive power structure in its
version of America.
Likewise, the terms “separatism,” “separatist,” and “separatist community” will herein
refer to some fictional community or its members, who are isolated—often geographically, at
least philosophically—from that work’s dominant community. Each chapter examines certain
kinds of dominance as they are represented by an American artist or artists, what kind of
separatist community these writers and filmmakers imagine as responses to a given form of
dominance, and when and how these communities succeed and fail. Through this study, I hope to
demonstrate how some American writers and filmmakers reveal the increasing complexities of
traditionally simple concepts. By doing so, I hope to enhance existing scholarship on fictional
communities, on these particular works, and on the general concept of separatism. Examining
fictional conceptions of these real-world concerns is an important step in understanding the
changes sweeping through American literary and filmic art in the late 20th century and beyond.
This task is important because these texts could function as attempts to understand certain kinds
of communities, to celebrate alternative forms of empowerment, and to explore the difficulties
inherent in achieving and maintaining new power structures.
Several projects in various academic and scientific fields have focused on different kinds
of communities, either actual or literary. Many of the ideas disseminated in these works are
useful when studying fictional separatist communities. One might wonder, for instance, why
artists might be interested in representing separatist communities in the first place. One possible
answer is that they are interested in the sweeping and global changes referenced above. Another
possibility is suggested by the make-up of the United States itself—a single country consisting of
individual states, with each state broken down into counties or parishes, cities, towns, and
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