"Sadism Demands a Story": Oedipus, Feminism, and Sexuality in Gayl Jones's "Corregidora" and Dorothy Allison's "Bastard out of Carolina"

Abstract

nvestigating the imbrication of sexual and artistic passion developing within a matrix of violence and oppression, this essay looks at two first novels-Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)and wonders if it is possible to save memories and preserve stories of horrific brutality without repeating them. Relying upon the disciplines of literary studies, psychology, and, to a lesser extent, history, I focus on the complex, commingled relationships between sexual trauma, its repression, and its potential healing through narration/ narrative. Within these hysterical texts, in which trauma is forcibly and violently enacted upon a female body, cultural/political/ historical factors merge with personal/psychological ones to induce experiences so devastating that we wonder how, even if, they can be endured. In Corregidora and Bastard, culturally instituted and legally sanctioned sadomasochism-slavery in the first text, class prejudice resulting in poverty in the second-becomes inseparably entwined with individual and psychological sadomasochism-domestic violence and incest in both texts-which situates each trau-