The politics of in-difference: Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner

Analyzing the multiple marginalizations of Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) and William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939), this study argues that these novels are not aesthetically inferior to Hurston's and Faulkner's masterpieces. On the contrary, they are valuable because by resisting clear-cut gender, class, and race categorizations, they contest both traditional and revisionist canonizing efforts. Precisely these resisting novels then reveal the limits of essentialist canonization. The marginal status of these novels in both canons points to a neglect or repression of the complexities of a definition of identity that grounds canon formation. By forcing us to negotiate between "self" and "other," these novels postulate a "politics of in-difference" that dramatizes the constructed nature of identity and proves that subject construction is not and can never be one-dimensional.;My reading of Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee focuses on the power of this novel to revise, extend, and subvert the clear-cut differences between "white" and "black," "male" and "female" identities. Problematizing these classifications, Seraph on the Suwanee is situated in a space "inbetween" from which it questions both the African-American and the Western hierarchical cultural rules. Similarly positioned inbetween, Faulkner's The Wild Palms frustrates generic and regional classifications by oscillating between "serious" and "popular" art, "romance" and "modernism," "Yoknapatawpha" and "beyond." The critical impulse to press Faulkner's work into these familiar categories indicates a repression of textual and authorial identity best seen in the discussion of his alleged misogyny. As my reading of The Wild Palms proves, however, the difference between Faulkner's male and female characters which seems to endorse the traditional, Southern patricarchical model is undercut by a subversive "difference within" which is articulated in the novel's discourse about transvestism. By extending the metaphor of the masquerade to mean not merely a "disguise" for a sexed body but the actual "performance" of gendered identity, I argue that the female protagonist's performances reveal Faulkner's concern with the changing shape of "femininity" during the Depression.;Thus, my study moves from a discussion of essentialism in the literary and critical tests to the deconstruction of essentialist difference by foregrounding a "difference within" texts and authors, and from there to a historical understanding of "difference," ultimately arguing for a recognition of the complexities that ground identity. By capitalizing on the tension between two notions of difference--the "difference between" and the "difference within"--a politics of in-difference produces a new set of questions about authorial, critical, and textual identities.