Strategies of indirection in African American and Irish contemporary fiction: Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, and Mary Lavin to Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

This work compares methods of indirect discourse, as applied in the fiction of Toni Morrison and Irish writer Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. While research on African American women writers has seen a renaissance in the last thirty years, Irish women's writing has begun to receive attention only recently. To contribute to criticism on both bodies of literature, as well as to the continuation of African American literary studies, I compare some stylistic developments in African American women's fiction to similar developments in Irish women's fiction of the twentieth century. In the first section of the dissertation, I posit a line of descent from Mary Lavin to Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, particularly with regard to three strategies of indirection: "sly civility," folklore, and humor.;What Homi K. Bhabha calls "sly civility" represents a false submissiveness, used to maneuver discourse with an antagonistic audience. Borrowings from folklore bolster that strategy, as well as engage the audience more deeply in the discussion of volatile subjects. Humor, sly or bold, distracts the audience and frames subjects in unexpected, ambivalent ways. The basis for comparison of the main pair of authors, Morrison and Ni Dhuibhne, lies in the strategies of indirection each use in order to broach subjects that do not often appear in print, or to offer rarely seen interpretations of those subjects. Throughout, I refer to criticism that examines aspects of indirection, including Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of indirect discourse as found in heteroglossia: "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted," even "parodic-travestying," way (The Dialogic Imagination 324, 55). Indirect, folkloric fiction that demonstrates Bakhtin's "permanent corrective of laughter" include Hurston's Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on a Road, Lavin's Mary O'Grady, Morrison's Song of Solomon and Paradise, Ni Dhuibhne's The Bray House and two short works from both of the latter authors (Bakhtin 55). Strategies of indirection alter over time, so that by Ni Dhuibhne and Morrison's era, elements of oral tradition in their writing become elements of disclosure as well as disguise.