Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
The uses of absence in selected novels by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison and Anne Tyler
Abstract
This dissemination is an examination of the manner in which absence is used by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Anne Tyler. The four novels I have chosen to examine, Sanctuary, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Beloved, and Saint Maybe, are morally educative tales that remind readers of our moral obligations to each other. The penalty for abdicating human responsibilities is, in each of these novels, haunting by absent presences. The only way in which characters can exorcise the present absences which torment them in the aftermath of injustice is to atone and to try to make reparations for having done wrong to another person or group. In Edith Wharton's Sanctuary, Kate Peyton devotes her life to protecting her son from his father's moral taint. When Dick is tempted to commit a dishonorable act, Kate sees in him his long-dead father's demeanor, pallor, and acts of rationalization. She places her deeds and her examples before him and waits to see if Denis Peyton will, in fact, claim his son. In both Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Toni Morrison's Beloved, absence, haunting, and alienation are the wages for complicity in the evil of slavery. In both novels, characters are explicitly indicted for not forcefully decrying the evil around them. According to Cather and Morrison's novels, when good people allow evil to occur they are implicated in it and will pay for it. Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe, like Wharton's Sanctuary, posits that one way of making a wrong right is by sacrificing one's autonomy for the protection of children. Ian Bedloe, the protagonist of Saint Maybe, raises three children whose parents died as a result of a hastily uttered slur. Ian makes his life his petition for forgiveness from God and the ghosts who haunt him. In all four novels, absent presences serve as morally instructive warnings about complacency in the face of injustice.
Subject Area
American literature|Literature|Religion|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Salas, Angela Marie, "The uses of absence in selected novels by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison and Anne Tyler" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9536624.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9536624