THE BODY POETIC: LANGUAGE AND MATERIALITY IN MODERN WOMEN'S NARRATIVE (CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, JEAN RHYS, DOMINICA, DORIS LESSING, ZIMBABWE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, ISAK DINESEN, DENMARK)

This dissertation considers modern experiments in narrative, mainly those of women writers, as manifestations of womens' shifting social and economic status in the early twentieth century. It argues that the representation of events after or outside of marriage necessitates a radical shift in the structures of storytelling, and that these new structures tend toward one of two forms: "interruptive" fiction displays the fragmentation of time and space, or syntax and setting, experienced by heroines cut off from other women (starting with mothers) and manipulated by men, while "syncretic" fiction presents bodily-rooted configurations of syntax and setting generated by heroines closely connected with women's bodies (particularly mothers) and relatively undominated by men. The dissertation focuses on "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, and The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen.;The conclusion briefly considers fiction by Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and Beckett, tentatively suggesting how the terms interruption and syncretism may also describe modern men's narrative.;The Introduction to the dissertation examines the limits of deconstructive and Lacanian theory for feminist criticism and draws instead on phenomenology and infant studies to delineate an alternative account of women and language which allows for an understanding of interruptive and syncretic fiction. Chapters on Gilman, Rhys, and Lessing suggest that their heroines' enclosure in rooms reflects their alienation from mothers' bodies and, in turn, structures the interruptions of the narrative syntax. Chapters on the syncretic narratives of Woolf and Dinesen, on the other hand, trace how the characters' bodily immersion in an outdoor world of places and things, originating in a dialogue with mothers' bodies, gives rise to a syntax in which temporality unfolds within a rhythm of spatiality--of proximity and distance. In both kinds of narrative, images of song represent what Helene Cixous calls "the first music from the first voice of love;" song carries the memory of a language first learned in the "in-between" of childhood intimacies and either lost or recovered by heroines of interruptive and syncretic fiction respectively.