Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature

by Brian Norman

Overview

Dead women speak as agents of social justice in work by some of the best-known writers of American literature.

Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives.

Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421415727
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brian Norman is an associate professor of English and director of African and African American studies at Loyola University Maryland. He is author of Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post–Civil Rights American Literature and The American Protest Essay and National Belonging.

Read an Excerpt

These dead women, at least the more literary ones, constitute a tradition in which writers address pressing social issues that refuse to stay dead. When they talk, they speak not only to their own lives, but also to matters of justice, history, and dearly held national ideals—whether the community welcomes it or not. Thus, writers stage encounters with that which should be past but has not passed. For instance, an American narrator encounters atrophied lines of aristocratic privilege in Poe’s 1839 tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Or, in Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, a mother confronts slavery’s legacy a generation after its demise. And in Kushner’s Angels in America, Ethel Rosenberg sits at the deathbed of Roy Cohn in Reagan-era America, taunting the man who orchestrated her notorious McCarthy-era execution.
—From the Introduction

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Recognizing the Dead
1. Dead Woman Wailing: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"
2. Dead Woman Dictating: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
3. Dead Woman Rotting: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
4. Dead Woman Cursing: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
5. Dead Woman Wanting: Toni Morrison's Beloved
6. Dead Woman Heckling: Tony Kushner's Angels in America
7. Dead Women Gossiping: Randall Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
8. Dead Women Healing: Ana Castillo's So Far from God
9. Dead Woman Coming of Age: Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones
10. Dead Woman Singing: Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body
11. When Dead Women Don't Talk: Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman"
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This book succeeds splendidly in identifying a meaningful tradition in American letters and demonstrating its value to the understanding of national cultural (and multicultural) membership and memory, literary and otherwise.
—Leonard Cassuto, author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories

Leonard Cassuto

This book succeeds splendidly in identifying a meaningful tradition in American letters and demonstrating its value to the understanding of national cultural (and multicultural) membership and memory, literary and otherwise.

Editorial Reviews

Insightful and powerfully affecting, Dead Women Talking deepens our understanding of how the dead remain a vital presence and social force in American life and literature.
—Kristin Hutchins, Women's Studies

Norman examines an original, intriguing phenomenon in American literature—stories with deceased female characters . . . The study is well researched and offers an array of critical approaches. This important contribution to the study of American fiction should endure for some time.
—Choice

Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions.
—Dana Benge, Rocky Mountain Review

From the Publisher

Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions.

Rocky Mountain Review - Dana Benge

Norman examines an original, intriguing phenomenon in American literature—stories with deceased female characters . . . The study is well researched and offers an array of critical approaches. This important contribution to the study of American fiction should endure for some time.

Choice

Insightful and powerfully affecting, Dead Women Talking deepens our understanding of how the dead remain a vital presence and social force in American life and literature.

Women's Studies - Kristin Hutchins

An interesting take on how the past affects the present and the future.

Reading Room Book Reviews