On The Construction Of Female Subjectivity In The Falls

Fascinated by the relations between man and woman,Joyce Carol Oates has written extensively on gender issues.Not only committed to the exploration of female experiences,Oates is also quite concerned with the self-development of men.Her writings have offered various new possibilities for gender discussion.The Falls(2004),a novel awarded the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger,has attracted lots of attention from critics.A number of critics have categorized Ariah,the female protagonist in The Falls,as a self-reliant woman with dignity and determination,promoting her as a female role model;some others say that upon further reflection,she is still a victim of the patriarchal society.However,what is often neglected is the complicatedness and fluidity of her female subjectivity.One of the most original thinkers of our time,Julia Kristeva has been a leading force in the fields of psychoanalysis,semiotics,feminist theory and philosophy.She is essentially preoccupied with the verbalization of subjectivity,which,according to her,is always a dynamic process never completed.In her Powers of Horror,Kristeva offers her theory of abjection and subject-in-process which opens up rich territory for exploring the eccentricity of subjectivity.Neither subject nor object,the abject has to procure subjectivity by discarding its archaic impulse,that is,an original drive towards the maternal body,while this impulse hauntingly returns to disturb the wholeness of subjectivity.Having applied her abjection theory to feminist thinking,Julia Kristeva refuses to see the sexed body as the fixed site of the inscriptions of masculine and feminine attributes.Instead,she argues that traditional accounts of binary sexes should be discarded and each individual has his own sexuality.Ariah in The Falls sets out to be a self-absorbed,impoverished woman eager to establish herself in a male-dominated and wealth-driven world.She intends to advance herself along the social ladder by marrying a rich lawyer.Afraid of being deprived of her hard-won authority,she builds up her own matriarchal realm.At last,due to the recurring abjection lurking at the periphery of her consciousness,she is disillusioned with the precariousness of her position in the symbolic order and realizes the significance of confronting abjection in procuring subjectivity.Drawing on the concept of "abjection" by Julia Kristeva,this thesis aims to unveil the evolving construction of subjectivity of the female protagonist Ariah in The Falls,to illuminate her internalization,transmission and demystification of gender ideology and thus to call into question the well-established gender forms.