Crosshatching: Postgendering structures in 'Absalom, Absalom!' and 'The Golden Bowl'

This dissertation addresses contemporary problems in resolving post-structural readings with feminist advocacy. It begins reading Absalom, Absalom! inductively for underlying "feminist" Psyche/Eros mythemes. Conversely, it ends by reading the structure of myth itself as it destabilizes the male/female hierarchy upon which both patriarchy and classic feminism depend. Proceeding oppositely, it then begins a comparative reading of The Golden Bowl by acceding to the continually self-differing structure of allegory as that which must be thought "before" rigid notions of sexual difference. This second reading ends, however, by showing sexual difference, in its cultural specificity as Psyche-derivative fairy tale and Judeo-Christian myth, as conditioning what is mobilized by "the differential." Barring perfect closure, these parallel readings of two American novels reach impasses deliberately left unmarked as neutralizations of sexual difference. Paradoxically, they do so in order to come to terms with the strategic phallocentrism that impasses in poststructural readings normally imply and effect. The resulting feminist reading attempts better to fulfill the poststructural method it ostensibly critiques. Consequently, it offers not only a particularly close interpretation of two canonized American novels but a chiastic model of feminist reading. Theoretically, while recognizing the limitations of formalism and the renewed responsibility to cultural determinants in recent years, this work argues for a return to close reading and an acknowledgment that metaphor informs culture as profoundly as culture informs metaphor.