| It is not uncommon for people to be treated like and thought of as garbage. My dissertation begins by exploring the metaphor of people-as-garbage as a specific discursive legacy which we have inherited from the Industrial Revolution, which I term "garbagization." Anthropologists Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson, and literary scholars Peter Stallybrass, Allon White, Nancy Armstrong, and Evan Watkins, all discuss garbagization as a strategy for the social control of value. Their social-scientific and theoretical interest in the dynamic of garbagization arose in the historical moment of a paradigm shift away from the exclusionist, frontier economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and toward alternative paradigms which respected the limits of the earth's carrying capacity, emphasized the hazards of industrial production both to workers and to the environment, and called for equal human rights for all people.;Many American novels published around the time of this paradigm shift use garbage and waste as metaphors for people. Early examples, such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), and Joyce Carol Oates' novel A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), tell the stories of garbagized people from the point of view of those characters and analyze, to a limited extent, the social dynamic of garbagization. This dissertation focuses on six later examples, which are more sophisticated in their social analyses, and more hopeful in their characters' recoveries from garbagization: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1971), Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991), and Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina (1992). These novels see garbagization as the effect of a dominant narrative which they counter with the stories of garbagized characters. Far more than the stories of victims, these narratives actually overcome the fear, denial, and will to control which underlie the dynamic of garbagization by using storytelling as a medium for composting the garbage of the past. |
