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Abstract
This dissertation identifies and explores a recent evolution within first-person narratives of father-daughter incest: the emergence of startlingly agential representations of victimhood. Breaking with the feminist conventions adopted by a wide range of incest testimonies published in the U.S. and Canada in the 1970s and '80s, these new texts upset politically strategic models of incest that insist upon the binary allocation of helplessness and power. My analysis focuses on the representational aspects of these memoirs and novels; while other scholars have mined them for information about the experience of incest, I concentrate on the textual dynamics of narrative authority to illuminate the efforts of these self-consciously political texts to intervene in the cultural workings of incest. Constructing a politically inflected literary history to clarify the stakes of the recent textual rebellion, I argue that the new focus on disquieting complexities marks not a simple disregard of earlier, more cautious political positioning, but a radical interrogation of the possibilities of danger itself which disrupts the dominant feminist presumption that identity and agency are only ever compromised by violence.
Foregrounding the relations among social movements, texts, and readers, the Introduction argues that these transgressive incest narratives disrupt familiar reading practices by which politically savvy readers once easily distinguished between “good” and “bad” representations of incest. Taking Atom Egoyan's film The Sweet Hereafter heuristically as a text that patently fails to meet feminist standards, I mark the precision with which “bad” representations can open space for victim agency. Chapter One considers the conventionalized memoirs of the '70s and '80s, arguing that they develop a politicized recovery narrative in which the narrator's ability to heal from incest hinges on her ability to tell the story of her own childhood helplessness. In the remaining chapters, I take up paradigmatic examples of recent transgressive texts. Chapter Two investigates the disquieting willingness of Dorothy Allison's “Private Rituals” and Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie to make use of the girl's sexual pleasure. Chapter Three analyzes the representation of the daughter's longing for maternal salvation in Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Liza Potvin's White Lies (For My Mother) , narratives that defiantly address themselves to unhearing mothers. Chapter Four turns to the question of damage, focusing on a range of texts including Sapphire's Push and Kathryn Harris' The Kiss that explore the unsettling possibility that agency can be formed through the experience of incest.
