Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner, as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives. Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Recognizing the Dead 1. Dead Woman Wailing: Edgar Allan Poe's ""The Fall of the House of Usher"" 2. Dead Woman Dictating: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw 3. Dead Woman Rotting: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying 4. Dead Woman Cursing: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 5. Dead Woman Wanting: Toni Morrison's Beloved 6. Dead Woman Heckling: Tony Kushner's Angels in America 7. Dead Women Gossiping: Randall Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead 8. Dead Women Healing: Ana Castillo's So Far from God 9. Dead Woman Coming of Age: Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones 10. Dead Woman Singing: Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body 11. When Dead Women Don't Talk: Maxine Hong Kingston's ""No Name Woman"" Notes Bibliography Index
""Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions.""
