Oates Tan and Welty Rewriting the Female Psyche

							 영미문화 제11권 3호(2011. 12. 31)
한국영미문화학회 205-222



                  Oates, Tan, and Welty:
                                           *
                Rewriting the Female Psyche
 1)




                                                            Gumhee Che



I. Discourses on Madness

      In the context of the human psyche, the discourse of madness greatly
concerns the critical approaches of such theorists as R. D. Laing, Michel
Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Questioning the credibility of the empire
of reason and sanity, Laing contends that it is sometimes impossible "to
make sharp distinctions between sanity and insanity, between the sane
schizoid individual and the psychotic" (138). Foucault has participated
in the debate over the politics of madness, writing, "the possibility of
madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion" (Madness
and Civilization 88). Lacan similarly observes, "it is only by an abuse
of the term that unconscious is confused with psychical, and that one
may thus designate as psychical what is in fact an effect of the unconscious,
as on the somatic for instance" (Ecrits 163), subsuming the operation
of the unconscious as fragmentation and taking it as something inherent
in every human psyche. Lacan also explores the unconscious in terms
of a discourse, legitimating such word as "discontinuity" in the phenomenon
of the unconscious, which may constantly react "against the background
of a totality" (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 25).


1) This work was supported by the research grant of the Chungbuk National
   University in 2011.
206                               Gumhee Che


Applying these unorthodox theories of human unconsciousness, three
female writers (Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Tan, and Eudora Welty) create
a dramatic revelation of the suppressed female psyche and treat disorder
as a dramatic presentation of human unconsciousness. Interestingly
enough, these female writers focus on female characters, probably because,
"for a woman, it also happens that the essential thing appears to be what
is shared with other women" (1), as Julia Kristeva writes in The Feminine
and the Sacred. Their literary texts introduce unreliable female characters
who relinquish the privilege of a reliable, coherent identity and fight against
the sane system of order. The female characters act like foreigners who
speak a totally different language, in terms that a foreigner "is distinguished
from someone who is not foreign" because he/she "speaks another
language" in Kristeva's words (Intimate Revolt 240). As these texts
register madness both as magic-realistic2) and as inherent, disorder is
to be construed as a natural procedure, that is, as a discourse of the
human psyche rather than a deranged force.
  The system around the female psyche is almost stuck in the dichotomy
of sanity and madness, often mistaking passion for disorder, the
unconscious for the evidence of insanity. To promote a post-structuralist
zone in which sanity and madness dramatically coexist, however, the
texts serve to bring out the underlying interdependence between instinct
and symptoms of mental disorders (neurosis and psychosis). As Lacan
points out, the symptoms of mental disorders should be treated as the
splits of the other, which seem to reside in the space of human
unconsciousness.3) Exploring the world of the unconscious, the female
psyche is continually in conflict with the observer, the sane world of

2) Maic Realist tendencies basically mean, Julio Rodriguez writes, no hesitation
   "between the conflicting codes of the rational and the unreal" (106).
3) The unconscious is "the discourse of the other" in every human psyche
   (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 31).