| This dissertation reads William Carlos Williams's poems, prose, and theories as autobiographical negotiations of culturally induced family pain. It details his childhood trauma, primarily centered in his relationship with his mother, Elena, a Puerto Rican immigrant whose transplantation to the U.S. during a time of extreme racialized anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in severe acculturative shock. It argues for historicized understanding of the psychosocial dynamics evident in the writing and develops a theoretical account of the ways In which the poetics may formalize these dynamics in the body of the poem. Chapter One focuses primarily on the male family relationships, identifying key psychodynamics affecting Williams's sense of poetic vocation and his oeuvre. Using an object-relations framework from Heinz Kohut and Alice Miller, it examines The Autobiography , letters, and lyrics addressed to his parents, juxtaposing them to Mariani's accounts of the same events to show how literary history has elided these aspects of his story.;Chapter Two employs Stephen Mitchell's notion of the family as a dynamic "relational matrix" and Jessica Benjamin's theory of the mother as a sovereign subject in the parent-child dyad. Using Mariani, selected lyrics and letters, and Yes, Mrs. Williams, it examines the Williams/Elena nexus, beginning with Elena's perspective. Her pain engendered her son's, who perpetuated those patterns in adulthood, to the detriment of both. As a corrective to Kerry Driscoll's, sanguine view of Elena's contribution to Williams's work, I show how Williams's tribute to Elena, Yes, Mrs. Williams is a failed attempt to textualize her subjectivity to free mother and son from their mutual relational snares, since the son's ambivalence ultimately constructs the mother in the text.;Chapter Three applies the racial identity development theories of Robert T. Carter, and a variety of other recent theorists on race, culture, and ethnicity in psychoanalysis, to consider the psychological effects of Williams's racial/cultural status as the son of a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican immigrant. I draw on Julio Marzan's The Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams , and John Higham's classic study of the rise of American nativism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Strangers In the Land. I show how literary history has colluded with Williams's need to downplay his Hispanic roots. But where Marzan sees Williams as encoding those roots into the poetics to valorize Elena as source, I see Williams's ambivalence about his racial status as integral to and indivisible from his powerful ambivalence towards her.;Chapter Four brings the central insights of the first three chapters to bear on Williams's poetics. It employs Stephen Cushman's view that Williams's prosody of line-sentence counterpointing was a prosody of the self, reads the poet's psychology in his poetic forms. It focuses on enjambment, juxtapositions, and triads, with close readings of poems related to Paterson, the poem that Mariani has called his "true autobiography." Paterson is the chapter's central focus, with Williams's conflicts over his origins as a central subtext of the poem. The first two-thirds of the chapter explores the poetics as evocations of and structures of the family pain, and the final segment explores the triadic stanza form in the poems of the fifties as articulations of resolution. |
