(Mis)representations of violent women (Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates)

My dissertation reexamines the issue of women's violence from a feminist perspective that is open to the idea of such aggression redefining “femininity” in helpful ways. Rejecting the positions of both conservative forces and those feminists who believe that a woman is naturally non-violent, I undertake a more nuanced reading of the violent woman. I argue that opening and continuing discussions of women's violence allows scholars to critique fully the ideals of womanhood and to explore all options for women's equality. This study focuses on works by contemporary North American women writers Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates. In the first chapter, I examine the ways that the threat of women writing violence leads contemporary reviewers to represent the authors themselves as violent or as victims of violence. Cultural attitudes, especially the prevalent myth that woman are naturally nonviolent, as offered by the book reviewers, often prevents serious engagement with these authors' works. Beginning a more complex reading of the works, chapter two examines the connections between sisterhood and violence. As represented in the fiction examined here, groups of women sometimes form to combat oppressive social forces but these women do not always act in the interest of feminism, nor are they always successful. In chapter three, my focus turns to Morrison's mothers who kill, especially Sethe in Beloved and Eva Peace in Sula. Using psychologist Roszika Parker's theory of maternal ambivalence, this chapter considers the ways in which these stories of maternal violence are liberating for both the novel's characters and readers alike. Finally, I turn my attention to the representation of real mothers who kill focusing on the case of Susan Smith who drowned her sons in 1994. Legal and media portrayals of this and similar cases seek to explain the problem of filicide by treating them as instances of individual pathologies, but until we can read women's stories of violence as connected to social circumstances and thus challenge the gender stereotypes at work in our culture we will not move forward in changing women's lives.