"Corrections" In Vain

Born in 1959,Jonathan Franzen is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the contemporary American literary pantheon and hailed as the “Great American Novelist” by Time.His semi-autobiographical masterpiece The Corrections is the 2001 National Book Award winner and a family saga,which has captured the zeitgeist of late modernity by engaging in some significant issues of public concern,such as technoconsumerism,medical science,and gender(in)equality.Concurrent with the writing of the female empowerment and agency,this novel,as a work of “tragic realism”,sketches out the decline of manhood as represented by ageing,domestic,and emasculating masculinities,thereby making itself pass off as a pro-feminist text at first sight.A closer textual analysis,however,will illuminate the unresolved conflicts latent in the novel,thereby revealing that The Corrections is,as a matter of fact,a misogynist novel.Drawing upon an eclectic combination of ideas from Kate Manne,Chizuko Ueno,as well as David D.Gilmore on “misogyny”,this thesis offers a more integrated and inclusive approach to the masked misogyny in a dialectical three-stage sequence,namely,thesis,antithesis,and synthesis,so as to better translate and decode misogyny encrypted in the text.Chapter One centres on Franzen’s self-conscious efforts to redress misogyny by emasculating men and empowering women in the novel,which serves as the thesis as well as point of departure of this study.The tension between the male and the female characters,as shown in this chapter,is highly intense and central to the study of misogyny.Chapter Two,as the antithesis,develops a counterargument to Chapter One through a revelation of the veiled misogyny,claiming that the “re-dressing” of misogyny in the novel as argued previously in Chapter One turns out to be a red herring– it is nothing but Franzen’s way of putting a blinding gloss and garment on misogyny and thereby paying lip service to the feminist agenda – and accordingly,Franzen’s intended “corrections” of misogyny in The Corrections are,as a matter of fact,being a hypocritical act,in vain and to no avail.Based on the preceding two chapters,Chapter Three,the synthesis,offers a sociopsychological reasoning of the authorial misogyny to resolve the contradictions between Chapter One and Two,which,to some extent,“vindicates” Franzen by pointing out Franzen himself is a victim as well as victimizer of masculinity.This chapter mainly expounds on the formation and the reason of Franzen’s misogyny from a psychological perspective – substantiated by memoirs and interviews – followed by a social standpoint to shed light on how Franzen’s unconscious,viz.misogyny,operates in the text.It continues to argue that the misogyny in disguise derives from the operation of Franzen’s repression – by means of displacing and projecting his misogynistic desire onto the male characters,and of taking his bottled-up masculine anxiety out on the stand-in female characters – and is further fuelled by the descent of man in a modern feminizing American society.Overall,the thesis seeks to illustrate a clearer gender landscape depicted in the novel and reasons that The Corrections is a metonymy of Franzen’s misogynistic desire in his literary career,which,in terms of misogyny,can be read as a diachronic movement from one signifier of misogynist novel to another along the signifying chain.