Book dossier

Sons and daughters of self-made men

by Mary Paniccia Carden

"At a moment in which America seems simultaneously more closed and more open to change than ever before, Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Improvising Gender, Place, Nation in American Literature re-examines a defining national discourse. Exploring the dilemmas of U.S. subjects positioned as inheritors--and thus as children--of the archetypal self-made Founder/Father, the author offers a critical re-evaluation of the trope of self-making as it is expressed in modern and contemporary American literature. She views "selfmaking" as a mode of simultaneous constriction and possibility, where the compulsion to perform to the national script leads to critical and creative forms of improvisation. In texts by Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Edgar Wideman, and others, she finds self-making re-articulated with improvisational differences that suggest possibilities for an improvisational nation. This study tracks U.S.^ authors' representations of gendered American identities both formed in conformity and forced into mutation by a self-made ideology based in patriarchal authority. Dr. Carden suggests that although the notion of self-making shifts in response to historical contingencies, it also maintains a relatively stable association with patriarchy. The historical vision of self-made fathers creating the U.S. in their image genders the nation male, creating America as a fatherland in a process that echoes heterosexual arrangements based in the dominance of (white) men, materializing raced and gendered bodies and the spaces those bodies occupy in national locales. Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men approaches the gendered national narrative spatially.^ Each chapter considers the question of what kinds of relationships to American spaces and places, what gendered spatial practices, emerge from the geographies organized by the mythos of male self-making and from alternative geographies created by alternative forms of performance. The author argues that while the trope of the self-made father puts aside the desires of effaced mothers and ignores the yearnings of inadequate sons and invisible daughters, it is precisely these energies that animate and invigorate much of American literature. The suppressed energies of the secondary players in the national script frequently open into alternative forms and expressions of identity that she describes as self-improvisational. The ideology of self-making is underwritten by scenarios that provide for their own alternatives. American literature exploits them in creative, subversive, and promising ways.^ This book focuses on a tradition of American fiction writing that makes improvisation visible in novels that invoke the ideology of the self-made father as origin while simultaneously contesting the foundational status and defining authority of his narrative."--Jacket.