Sister hauntings and female hunger in contemporary American fiction by women

This study investigates the psychological, feminist and literary implications of “sister hauntings”—an explicit re-visionary narrative strategy, a literary theme, and an emotionally/politically charged image in woman-authored American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Applying the theories of Marxist and feminist critics on the topic of anorexia, I argue that fictional sister hauntings; arise from the same cultural pathologies that give rise to eating disorders. This connection is suggested by the continual references to hunger and appetite in all of the novels under discussion and by the depicted sister characters' polarized views on female appetite.; In Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's The Golden Rope, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, a sister denies her own and her sister's material and emotional hunger to become what I define as a “sister ghost,” a woman who lacks personal boundaries and purpose. Confusion over gender and class transitions informs the image of this haunting sister in much the same way that it often informs the anorexic body. As narrators, the self-denying sister characters display a controlling/controlled narrative strategy that resembles the rhetorical power of anorexia. I use Kristeva's work on melancholia to tease out the submerged anger at women that informs this narrative strategy. My analysis reveals the temptations and limitations of romanticizing the spectacle of a woman's self starvation as a form of feminist politics and in overestimating the ease with which women, even sisters, may hear and understand each other.; In Cristina Garcia's The Aguero Sisters, Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, the “sister haunting” functions as a contemporary, revisionary myth depicting the power of female hunger-both to inflict damage and to initiate positive change. Because of the “sister haunting,” at least one sister in these novels passes through the stages that according to Kim Chernin form the archetypal elements of a woman's successful confrontation with her previously denied hunger: initiation, descent into the underworld, acting disobediently, and rebirth.; The sister haunting novels, I argue, both complicate and refresh the feminist trope of “sisterhood.” My analysis of these novels urges that sisterhood may not necessarily or easily be a saving, progressive factor in the life of a woman who most needs her sister when that women's ideals of sisterhood have been constructed by a dysfunctional, patriarchal family or culture. At the same time, I see the value of articulating problems within sisterhoods. The sister haunting novels show how family inheritances, memories, and myths lose their power to overwhelm those women who have shared them with their sisters. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...