Annihilation, Negation, and Revelation Deconstructive Trauma and the Mysterious/Unknown in the Works of Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor
Date of Award
2005
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Dimino, Andrea
Keywords
Trauma, Revelation, Negative Space, Dickinson, Emily, O'Connot, Flannery
Area of Concentration
British and American Literature
Abstract
In this study I note common themes of violence, destruction, and death in the works of Flannery O'Connor and Emily Dickinson. Paradoxically, traumatic experience--times when cognitive function, referential abilities, and spatiotemporal orientation disintegrate--often leads to revelation. The authors use of the sexual metaphor, and the positing of negatives spaces in the text, are two devices that link such disparate themes as destruction and creation, the annihilation of meaning and the birth of transcendent knowledge. In Chapter I, I argue that various binary oppositions such as agony and ecstasy, creation and destruction, death and life (sex) arise within Dickinson's poetry, representing the speaker's fluctuating psychic states and her perception of reality. They take on a life of their own, interacting with one another, pulling and pushing against their opposites, and tearing the speaker between them. As she faces situations or ideas that unite opposing themes--paradoxes and existential crises--the speaker is annihilated and enters a negative state of unknowability. She embraces unknown truths and mysterious paradoxes in order to achieve revelation. In Chapter II, I explore three of Flannery O'Connor's short stories in which the protagonists create their own personal symbolic orders consisting of metaphors of self, social positions, and possessions, that take form in material symbols or objects in their environment. Violence destroys the physical and ruptures the symbolic order. It shocks and disorients the characters' psyches, deconstructs the symbolic significance of their world, and causes them to realize the absence within their lives and their selves. In all that they are not, humans understand the necessity of God.
Recommended Citation
Pinckney, Megan Kathleen, "Annihilation, Negation, and Revelation Deconstructive Trauma and the Mysterious/Unknown in the Works of Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor" (2005). Theses & ETDs. 3566.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/3566