Concepts of marriage in the fiction of Virgina Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Dorothy Allison.

Abstract

This thesis examines concepts of marriage in one representational work each by Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Dorothy Allison. I explore gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and female sexuality as categories governed by ideological impositions that in turn influence subjectivity and thus marital arrangements. I demonstrate that the characters' choice to submit to or to resist ideological constraints on these categories provide for an either open or closed concept of marriage. While Woolf proposes a performativity, or open concept of marriage, Larsen and Allison warn against marital performance, or a death-like/closed concept of marriage. The three authors show that their female characters' choices are limited as their existence in a patriarchal, racist, sexist, and heterosexist society grants them Selfhood (only) through marriage and married motherhood. Woolf, Larsen, and Allison illustrate clearly that to allow for an open subject formation it is necessary to de-ideologize the afore-mentioned categories, and to challenge destructive/closed concepts of marriage.