Writing against the family: Family relations in Lawrence and Joyce and in recent literary theory

This dissertation compares family relations in the work of Lawrence and Joyce and discusses problems of interpreting family relations in literary texts. I reexamine Lawrence and Joyce from the viewpoint of feminist psychoanalysis, which I argue is not a set of beliefs or a single theory but a feminist practice that analyzes how systems of meaning construe gender and produce psychologies of gender.;In Chapter Two I analyze Lawrence's portrait of family relations in Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. These novels explore the construction of gender, conflicts caused by gender systems, and the limits within patriarchy of exploring gender boundaries.;In Chapter Three I turn to Joyce, examining gender roles and psychologies of gender in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. I conclude that Joyce's portrait does not embody resistances with the gender system as does Lawrence's, but expresses a male Family Romance. However, A Portrait begins a deconstruction of systems of meaning that increases in Joyce's later work. Ulysses implicitly deconstructs gender, since Ulysses validates no system. It portrays both typical and atypical family relations, the womanly man and the manly woman, as well as their opposites.;Chapter Four compares gender and family in two late works, Lawrence's The Man Who Died and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I read each text alongside two essays by Freud. All three writers are interested in relating family material to non-Western, Egyptian myth.;Chapter One discusses the assumptions about gender embedded in the Oedipus myth, in various theories of psychoanalysis, and in previous readings of Lawrence and Joyce. I end by considering how Lawrence and Joyce fit into a discussion of representation and gender.;Lawrence wraps Egyptian myth around Western, patriarchal psychology, preserving the ambivalent wish to reenact gender difference under patriarchy and yet to undo the consequences of devaluing the female. Joyce uses language experiment, a re-tailored Freudian unconscious, and Egyptian myth to portray infantile, polymorphously perverse creative sexuality, a root androgyny, beneath the gendered individual and an unfixed, evolutionary view of family form.