Power : women, privation and language in American narrative, 1861-1936

This dissertation addresses the issues of womanhood, deprivation and power in three American works -- Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Kate Chopin's The Awakening; and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. In analyzing these narratives, I use Freud, Lacan and Kristeva to suggest the ways in which the heroines of each work attempt to evade certain Southern cultural imperatives by constructing a language of power, a compensatory lexicon which would rescript the heroine as the imperious agent in a world which consigns her to a peripheral status--whether a slave, ignored wife, or a Southern spinster who claims she has not exited the "womb."