One another: Women's friendship and the matrix of becoming in twentieth century American novels

Abstract

For many women friendship is, alongside the romantic and familial, one of the social pillars upon which their life is built. Women writers, culturally encouraged to promote the love plot and the domestic sphere, still integrate women's friendship into fiction throughout space and time. Due to its obscured position, women's friendship has been largely academically ignored, with some key exceptions. In contrast, men's friendship has been well-theorised since Aristotle. This thesis closely reads the ways in which women's friendship is depicted by American women writers of the first 75 years of twentieth century to answer the question, What is women's friendship to women in literature? I argue women's friendship is a space between two or more women which is produced by psychic (re)encounter and requires a play of closeness and distance in a way that is specific to women's friendship, and differentiates it from women's other relationships. Friendship between women is a shared space of self and other co-creation. The thesis' theory was produced through an engagement with feminist psychoanalysis and literary theory. In particular, I draw on Bracha Ettinger's theory of the matrixial, a feminist exploration of subjectivity, where the self and other is a relationship that can occur because it is a trace of being that begins with the first connection, that between fetus and mother, and repeats throughout a woman's life. Ettinger's primary engagement is with women and their art, most often painting, but I draw out the startling implications her work has for women's friendships. Namely, Ettinger's theory of the matrixial is used to understand women's friendship as a re-encounter with subjectivity first encountered in the womb. This thesis closely reads The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899), Passing by Nella Larsen (1929), Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937), The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) and Sula by Toni Morrison (1973). Although not emblematic, consideration of these novels alongside one another offers an engaging narrative of the first 75 years of the last century. The texts provide a range of perspectives, interpretations and genre approaches to the question of women's friendship, as well as other interrelated issues of women's personhood within time and place, especially in relation to sexuality, race and identity. I find that the texts construct women's friendship as a process in which the I connects with an other through shared but different matrixial origins, where the I and the other both have interior lives and are exterior beings. There is a special alchemy to women's friendship; in the novels examined in this thesis, that friendship is worldly and multi-directional, involving multiple participants. In this new theorisation of women's friendship, which is formed through the close reading of texts by American women writers in the twentieth century, women's friendship is a space of repeated encounter, a space formative of the self, the other, and the world.