| This dissertation explores how personal identity is constructed and marked through distinctive bodily and linguistic features, as well as the cultural and philosophical problems posed when such "signs" are blurred through replication. Personal identity is most often "read" in the concrete facts of the human body--in faces, gestures, shapes, voices, even disfigurements. Names, too, acting as the body's linguistic equivalent--categorize and reflect essence through language.; If personal identity is thus defined, what are both the threats and the attractions of figures who appropriate those marks through replication? I use the term "replication" deliberately; its etymology reveals that over the centuries its meaning has evolved from notions of "answering" and "folding back" to more contemporary uses of the term to connote mechanical and asexual reproduction.; My study analyzes characters and relationships which parallel this process--striving towards dialogue yet ending with solitude and incompleteness. Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers depict a bizarre array of replicative forms: twins (both physically conjoined and separate), townspeople with (mutations of) the same name, would-be lovers mimicking each others' gestures, parents shaping children into "copies" of themselves, even characters who share the same bodily aberrations. In a way that is startlingly concrete, these figures duplicate the "signs" which usually have marked a singular identity, thus complicating cultural beliefs about the possibility (and necessity) that persons are distinct entities.; Paradoxically, these figures of replication both invoke and unravel certain ideologies in which identifiability is most important--individual agency and domesticity, in particular. The ensuing confusions emerge, then, not because these replications pose a diametrical opposite to an ideal, but because they embody it all too tangibly.; These paradoxical processes are deeply intertwined with the context from which these authors write. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture teems with energies and anxieties that make identifiability both more difficult and more crucial: increased racial tensions in the wake of the Civil War and vast amounts of immigrations, technological advances that made it more possible to enact replicative processes, and growing urban population which increasingly erased individual identity into masses. |
