ABSTRACT
Binarisms permeate the foundations of our western cultural and intellectual frameworknative/foreign, black/white, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual-but are the fixed essentialisms implicit in such models truly reflective of the reality of human experience (actual and literary)? It is my goal to join the ongoing scholarly complication of binaries by offering a more fluid conception of boundaries. In place of essentializing categories of identity, I explore the ramifications of using multiple subject positioning as a means of conceptualizing and representing identity. By examining the literature of three women modernists, I show how the dispersal of fixed identity is facilitated through language. In other words, I focus on the ways in which fiction unhinges identity, along with the consequences of such a process-both liberating and dislocating. Such a process does not take place in a vacuum. The transnational atmosphere of the interwar period in the United States facilitated a loosening of identity categories which was both created by and reflected in the literature of the period. Writers who had a complicated relationship to identity categories and who created characters whose lives could not be neatly compartmentalized found in this cultural climate the psychological space prerequisite to writing and the possibility of communicating with an audience. In my quest for a fuller, more useful paradigm of identity formation and perpetuation, I examine issues of ethnicity and race, nationality and geography, and gender and sexuality in the fiction of Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen.
