Challenging Borderlines of Color, Gender, and Class: Josepha and Désirée
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This paper examines the color or unknown racial origin issue that people with mixed blood or women with no family history experienced as addressed by two 19th century women writers, from a post-modern perspective. I try to find some evidences that the seemingly perfect idea, especially white-male dominated systems are nothing but a manipulated apparatus in order to maintain their power and privilege in the two selected texts—Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Sister Josepha”(1899) and Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby”(1892). The above texts have the same backdrop of the Creole society of New Orleans in southern America. Creole women or women of mixed color were basically in a much more vulnerable and complicated situation than white women. The main characters of the two texts lie on the ambiguous borderline between white and black, and they are easily endangered and victimized by racial repression and violence, often escaping only through disguises or deception. However, both women writers try to reveal how a person’s destiny depends on their skin color and reveal the deep-rooted double standard, prejudice and discrimination and how the idea of race, gender, and class is an absurd and hypocritical throughout their characters’ new challenge and tragic lives. According to Lacan’s idea of subject, the subject is not a complete being and can be circulated as the Other. Therefore, it seems that the seemingly perfect white male supremacy can be collapsed; moreover, the typically sub-cultural people, colored orphan girls, can have their own rights and voices. To sum up, the characters on the borderline of color in the two texts suggest some possibilities that the artificial lines by color, gender, and class can not last forever because the lines can not be perfect and absolute ones.
Abstract
This paper examines the color or unknown racial origin issue that people with mixed blood or women with no family history experienced as addressed by two 19th century women writers, from a post-modern perspective. I try to find some evidences that the seemingly perfect idea, especially white-male dominated systems are nothing but a manipulated apparatus in order to maintain their power and privilege in the two selected texts—Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Sister Josepha”(1899) and Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby”(1892). The above texts have the same backdrop of the Creole society of New Orleans in southern America. Creole women or women of mixed color were basically in a much more vulnerable and complicated situation than white women. The main characters of the two texts lie on the ambiguous borderline between white and black, and they are easily endangered and victimized by racial repression and violence, often escaping only through disguises or deception. However, both women writers try to reveal how a person’s destiny depends on their skin color and reveal the deep-rooted double standard, prejudice and discrimination and how the idea of race, gender, and class is an absurd and hypocritical throughout their characters’ new challenge and tragic lives. According to Lacan’s idea of subject, the subject is not a complete being and can be circulated as the Other. Therefore, it seems that the seemingly perfect white male supremacy can be collapsed; moreover, the typically sub-cultural people, colored orphan girls, can have their own rights and voices. To sum up, the characters on the borderline of color in the two texts suggest some possibilities that the artificial lines by color, gender, and class can not last forever because the lines can not be perfect and absolute ones.
참고문헌 (21)
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