Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South
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A01=Claire Raymond
American South
American women's literature
Author_Claire Raymond
Big Sweet
Candy Darling
Category=AJ
Category=DSBH
De Blainville
Dickinson's Poem
Dickinson's Poetics
Dickinson's Poetry
Dickinson’s Poem
Dickinson’s Poetics
Dickinson’s Poetry
Enslaved Body
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eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Feminine Speaker
Feminine Witness
feminist literary criticism
gendered spectatorship
Harvard's Peabody Museum
Harvard’s Peabody Museum
Hidden Witness
Intersex Person
Jack Shainman Gallery
Jesuit Meditations
Jim Crow South
Mary Fortune
Morrison's Beloved
Morrison’s Beloved
Peabody Museum
queer theory southern studies
racialised violence analysis
Sacrificed Daughter
Sadistic System
Sadistic Violence
Southern Agrarian critics
southern gothic literature
Southern Women's Writing
Southern Women’s Writing
visual culture studies
Weems's Work
Weems’s Work
Witness Figure
witnessing violence in southern literature
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781409451051
- Weight: 566g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2014
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dickinson's poetry is read through its relationship to the Southern Agrarian critics who championed her work. While the representations of violence found in Carrie Mae Weems's installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Morrison's Beloved, Dickinson’s poetry, O'Connor's 'A View of the Woods' and 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café, and Hurston's Mules and Men are diverse in terms of artistic presentation, all allude to or are set in the antebellum and Jim Crow South. In addition, all involve feminine characters whose subjectivity is shaped by the practice of seeing acts of violence inflicted where there can be no effective resistance. While not proposing an equivalence between representing violence in visual images and written text, Raymond does suggest that visual images of violence can be interpreted in context with written evocations of violent imagery. Invoking sadism in its ethical sense of violence enacted on a victim for whom self-defense and recourse of any kind are impossible, Raymond's study is ultimately an exploration of the idea that a femininity constructed by the positioning of feminine characters as witnesses to sadistic acts is a phenomenon distinctly of the American South that is linked to the culture's history of racism.
Claire Raymond is a Lecturer in Art History and Sociology at the University of Virginia, USA. She is the author of Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime (Ashgate, 2010).
