A Beautiful Corpse In The Wilderness

This dissertation intends to explore the complicity of political unconscious embedded in the consistency of cultural narratives within specific context.Fredric Jameson believed that reality was an ideological construct that can be accessed only through “prior textualization” of historic referent.In this way,any surviving literary works can be considered as a mode of knowing to convey specific ideological messages.The process of literary production becomes an act of aesthetic sublimation with the purpose of not only sustaining and further reinforcing these messages,but assimilating heterogeneities incongruent with social reality.The past rationalizes the present and keeps it informed of its binding force as well as the necessity of its continuation.Then the above-mentioned theoretical hypothesis postulates the possibility to view literary works as a looking glass for both the hidden master narratives themselves along with their functions at the time.Therefore,it is feasible that the Cold War culture projected its containment logic into the conception of the American way of life accentuated in NSC 68.An irreconcilable conflict remains inevitably parasitic to it,between the enforced conformity it entails and the diversified individual narratives it acknowledged in the first place,since,to coerce the global hierarchal order based on an American superiority implies the mandate of hegemonic impetus in the conception of democratic freedom.In a context where the Soviet ideological challenge constantly set the American way of life in jeopardy,the conflict was legitimized and contained in very much the same way the Southern pastoral order kept the intrusion of Northern industrialist values in check.In other words,the Cold War containment logic subsumed the conflict that it continuously sustained by invariably appropriating the Southern experience.Based on this assumption,an allegorical reading of Southern writings at ideological level would reveal a powerful insight into the very act of containment itself.Through literary analysis,this act could be scrutinized in order to identify the containment strategy in fictional imagination as the symbolic solution to unresolvable contradictions in reality.Given the centrality of ideal white womanhood within Southern code of honor that was persistently constructing the pastoral order,or the Arcadian order,this dissertation aims to analyze works of three selected white female writers in the South with the focus on the domestic containment in Southern community.Each of their works is to be examined from one specific perspective of the containment synergy.Therefore,the works of Eudora Welty offered an insight into the private space of Southern domesticity under the universal surveillance in public domain where conformity was rationalized to legitimize betrayal;that of Flannery O’Connor,Catholicism that circumscribed conformity in spiritual terms;that of Carson Mc Cullers,American imperialism that projected into the domestic sphere for tempering to render itself benevolent.In all three cases,the containment of Southern white ladyhood was reified in rather personal narratives of white female writers from the South,which were further coerced or intimidated in conformity with the containment rhetoric,just as what the Cold War containment culture entailed at both personal and national level.