Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, and Morrison by Doreen Fowler (review)

Abstract

FOWLER, DOREEN. Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2013. x + 173 pp. $35.00. Cloth. In contrast to dominant Oedipal interpretations of the father as a divisive figure who introduces opposition and exclusion, Doreen Fowler, drawing on the work of Jessica Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, renders a more complex, paradoxical portrait of the father's role in establishing identity. Through readings of work by William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison, Fowler traces the father's acculturating role as a figure who intervenes and connects, enabling an interfacing of and other (20). Deeply engaged with the nuances of psychoanalytic theory, Drawing the Line thus sophisticatedly unpacks the father's function in creating a play of identification and interrelation that allows for cultural exchange and cultural specificity (6). Though the authors Fowler analyzes write from distinct raced and gendered subject positions, their work is collectively forged in and against the racial crucible of the American South, and her re-readings of the father figure provide a way of thinking beyond familiar explications of white paternalism. Drawing the Line begins by examining Faulkner's 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust. In this standout chapter, Fowler inventively illustrates how Lucas Beauchamp dismantles the notion that the father's authority rests on an exclusionary, oppositional violence, instead seeing in him an alternative to a Western exclusionary model of paternal authorization (16). Intruder's dynamic of burial and disinterment, repression and revival, are symbolic, she argues, of a buried interrogation of exclusionary, binary meanings, including that of black-white difference (47). Fowler next follows issues of identification, interrelation, difference, and domination by examining Wright's Native Son (1940). Drawing on Kristeva's theory of abjection, she argues that, in a white culture than denies him belonging, Bigger Thomas's conflicting desires for individuation and integration lead to both his drive for solidarity and his tragic impulse for violence. Wright, she argues, strives to find a way to reconcile and ameliorate Bigger's competing drives in the figure of Max, his lawyer and father figure, who bequeaths the necessary boundaries for his individuation. In the following chapter, Fowler continues to trace the father's role in enabling individuation in the work of O'Connor. Her fiction is, as Fowler reads it, filled with fatherly border figures who straddle a liminal, prophetic space between self and other and between human and Divine (18). …