Dreamtime fiction: The supernatural and the everyday in women's writing

"Dreamtime" alludes to "the times between the times" when things become their opposite, when alternate realities are evoked and the boundaries between civilization and the wilderness, self and other, mind and body, life and death are blurred. Thus the dissertation examines novels and short stories which depict rationally inexplicable events as part of everyday life. A variety of sources help formulate a set of concerns through which to read these fictions: the critique of dualistic frameworks by feminist theorists, the concept of storytelling as explored by Walter Benjamin, and the investigations of anthropologists and social historians such as Hans Duerr, Felicitas Goodman, and Carlos Ginzburg into cultures that consider the supernatural part of their natural cosmology. As a genre, dreamtime fiction results from a dialectic between the narrative conventions and philosophic assumptions of realism and those of fantasy. In dreamtime fictions we encounter incantatory language, lyrical language, rituals, and a figure--frequently an old woman--who offers a link to the past and its (now displaced) values and modes of knowledge.;Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Alice Brown, and Edith Wharton--known primarily as regionalist and realist writers--found in their supernatural fictions ways to honor the value of knowledge gained from scientifically suspect sources: intuition, spirituality, herbal medicine, messages from spirits and ghosts, and extrasensory perception. Through supernatural occurrences they explore lesbian relationships, the power of empathy, and the idea of a woman's sphere. Among contemporary texts, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, and Alice Hoffman's Seventh Heaven stress the implications and the importance of rituals (both everyday and formalized), the need for access to past traditions, the potency of alternate realities and ways of knowing, and the role of cultural heritage in the acceptance of the inexplicable in everyday life. Both the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century texts dramatize issues of epistemology. Thus they resonate with certain cultural concerns of each period: the end of a century (and a millennium) and, especially in contemporary texts, the impact of multiculturalism.