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Sarah Piatt and the politics of mourning
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Frank, Lucy Elizabeth (2003) Sarah Piatt and the politics of mourning. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b1667482~S1
Abstract
The American poet Sarah Piatt (1836-1919) addresses crucial dilemmas of modem
identity, in particular the traumatic effects of war, the complexities of racial
relationships and the unsettling dynamics of urban life. Although a respected poet
in her day, Piatt's work disappeared after her death from the canon of American
literature, and it is only in the last five years that scholars have begun to realise the
importance of her poetry and to assess its depth and scope. This thesis contributes
to the process of assessing the significance of Piatt's work, and contextualises her
in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century American writers, including
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Chestnut and
Frederick Douglass.
I focus on the rift between Piatt's Southern plantation childhood and her married
life in the industrial North, and upon how the Civil War created irreconcilable
conflicts and divided loyalties in her life, which are played out in her writing. I
emphasise the Civil War as a moment of personal and cultural trauma, which
inaugurates what I term Piatfs 'politics of mourning'. I explore her politics of
mourning in relation to psychoanalytic theory. While Freud sought to rid mourning
of its ambivalence and interminability, and to displace these onto melancholia,
Piatt's writing blurs the boundary between them. Instead of dispensing with
mourning too quickly, too easily, Piatt recognises that one cannot avoid being
haunted by the past and by the dead. She engages in a dialogue with the past and
explores how the desire of the dead continues to be played out by the living.
In contrast to Northern writers like Phelps, Stowe and Whitman, who seek to heal
the nation by appealing to the idea of sacrifice, and the pastoral, in order to console
the bereaved and envisage a redeemed body politic, Piatt turns away from
consolation. Instead, she takes mourning in a direction that leads towards an
exploration of the uncanny, the ghost-like and the hallucinatory. She explores the
stifling effects of mourning in the South, and the way in which the North buried the
unpleasant realities of the war, in the process of memorialising it.
Piatt remained deeply emotionally invested in the South, yet she was also very
critical of the Confederate Cause, and in her work she repeatedly interrogates her
own investment in an idealised version of the antebellum South. I examine the
ways in which Piatt scrutinises Southern discourses of race and slavery. I focus in
particular on how she seeks to articulate a language of mourning for the South
while also repeatedly exposing, and destabilising Southern fictions of mastery.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PS American literature | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Piatt, Sarah M. B. (Sarah Morgan Bryan), 1836-1919 -- Criticism and interpretation | ||||
Official Date: | January 2003 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | O'Brien, Karen, Dr.; Steele, Jeffrey, 1947- | ||||
Extent: | iv, 269 leaves | ||||
Language: | eng |
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