| The works I examine embody “postmodern sentimentality.” They focus on heroines' search for “self,” but they do so paradoxically. They take poststructuralist “metaphors” (Richard Rorty's word for language which challenges a culture's dominant ways of explaining itself) and use them in the context of the popular, incorporating them into the sentimental tradition via the established genres of melodrama and gothic. I use Rorty's notion of poststructural theorists as “liberal ironists” combined with Nancy Fraser's vision of collective political change. Amy Tan, in The Joy Luck Club, and Alice Walker, in The Temple of My Familiar, use icons, postmodern emblems with multiple and potential meanings, to stand for a notion of self which is creative and ever-changing. These icons reconfigure the sentimental object and tableau. Comparison with Wayne Wang's cinematic version of Tan's novel and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust helps to highlight the authors' poststructuralist use of sentimental conventions. Lee Smith, in Family Linen, uses the variations on the Female Gothic genre to expose the constructed nature of the categories of female identity prescribed by the genre and to undermine the establishment of Self and Other as oppositions created by evaluating women's conformity and resistance to patriarchy's demands. This maneuver, which requires a poststructualist notion of identity as construction, Smith shows, frees women from positioning one another as Other. Jane Campion, in The Portrait of a Lady, and Jane Smiley, in A Thousand Acres , use the Gothic as a means to a radically liberal vision, one which brings the heroines to the threshold of freedom from identities inscribed by the tragedy, gothic, and melodrama, genres which undergird their narratives. Asserting that the meaning of the gothic story inheres in its surface, rather than its depth, and that horror registered in women's bodily reactions calls attention to their embodiment, their surface, Campion and Smiley emphasize the constructed and contingent nature of identity and community. In their formation of “postmodern sentimentality,” Smiley's and Campion's deconstructive acts create in their works a paradoxically terrifying and satisfying open-ending, leaving their heroines and contemporary culture with creative imperatives. |
