Diana Loercher Pazicky - Cultural orphans in America
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American literature--History and criticism, Literature and society--United States, Orphans in literature.
publication date
:
1998
lcc
:
PS173.O75P39 1998eb
ddc
:
810.9/35206945
subject
:
American literature--History and criticism, Literature and society--United States, Orphans in literature.
Page iii
Cultural Orphans In America
Diana Loercher Pazicky
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPIJackson
Page iv
Copyright 1998 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
01 00 99 98 4 3 2 1
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pazicky, Diana Loercher. Cultural orphans in America / Diana Loercher Pazicky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-57806-089-3 (alk. paper) 1. American literature History and criticism. 2. Literature and society-United States. 3. Orphans in literature. I. Title. PS173.075P39 1998 810.9'35206945 dc21 98-15894 CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data available
Page v
To my mother and the memory of my father
Page vii
Contents
Introduction
xi
Chapter 1 The Puritans as Orphans
1
Chapter 2 The Puritans as Aggressors
25
Chapter 3 The Revolution
51
Chapter 4 Tales of Captivity and Adoption
86
Chapter 5 The Rise of the Republic
118
Chapter 6 Sentimental Strategies in "Orphan Tales"
149
Chapter 7 The Negro as Ultimate Orphan
178
Notes
203
Bibliography
211
Index
225
Page x
Orphans only live more intensely than others what is the fundamental human experience. ANDR HAYNAL
Page xi
Introduction
This book is about orphans, real and imaginary, in early America and what their actual treatment and textual representation signify about cultural values. This book is also about how the past is the present, how the legacy of early Americaof the Puritans, the revolutionaries, the Founding Fathers, and the leaders of the new republichas shaped the "family values" that are a social and political touchstone in our culture today.
Images of orphanhood have pervaded the American imagination ever since the colonial period. The orphan appears in varying degrees of intensitysometimes as palpable presence, other times as mere shadowin every manner of text: fictional and nonfictional, religious and secular, poetical and polemical. But whatever shape the orphan assumes, the figure signals identity formation, not only individual but cultural.
In retrospect, I think I found orphans because I was looking for them. I am not an orphan, but I have always been fascinated by orphanhood as an existential predicament. Orphanhood, the loss of parents who represent the moorings of a child's identity, is the ultimate metaphor for identity issues. If a child never knew his or her parents, the loss entails personal history as well. Even when the parents are known the child is faced with the challenge of forging a new identity, a project complicated by the circumstances under which the loss occurred.
Page xii
From a psychoanalytic point of view, Oedipus is the original orphan and the prototype of the orphan in search of a Self. Sigmund Freud considered Sophocles' tragedy OedipusRex to be the ur-narrative of our culture because it postulates the nature of identity as relational. One of Freud's most provocative hypotheses, which he outlines in "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," is that the infant's initial perception of union with the mother gradually shifts to an awareness of difference, and inherent in that awareness is a profound sense of loss of the earliest love object. This sets in motion the desire to replace that object through substitution. It is through identification with the father, the rival, that symbolic repossession becomes possible.
Building on Freudian theory, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan perceived the irony that the loss of the undifferentiated Other, the mother, entails the discovery of the differentiated Self. The awareness of the Self as separate and autonomous is implicated in a sense of loss and desire for reunion with the mother. As Lacan elaborates in his seminal essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," the resolution to the problem of fragmentation is identification with the father, the rival, who has the power to repossess the mother at will. Thus, fundamental to the Oedipus complex is the child's dependence on the father as an object of identification and a source of recognition, and this dependence transfers to the social Other.
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