Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist FictionUniversity of Delaware Press, 2004 - 187 էջ This study explores the vestiges of primitive sacrificial rituals that emerge in a group of canonical modernist novels, including The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse. It argues that these novels reenact a process that achieved its seminal expression in the Genesis story of The Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham, having been prevented from sacrificing Isaac, offers up a ram in his place. Modernist reenactments of this pattern present narrators who, although vigorously protesting the victimization of certain characters, unfailingly seize upon others as their surrogates. Each novel is designed in such a way, however, as to resist the reconstruction of a sacrificial ritual to which its narrator is prone. The resulting tension between the binding and unbinding of ritual persecution dramatizes the paradox that we can neither believe convincingly in the guilt of our scapegoats nor imagine a society that has dispensed with them entirely. Thomas Cousineau is Professor of English at Washington College in Maryland. |
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Acknowledgments | 11 |
From Ritual to Modernism | 15 |
Occulted Rivalry in The Turn of the Screw | 34 |
Heart of Darkness The Outsider Demystified | 61 |
Borrowed Desire in The Good Soldier | 86 |
The Great Gatsby Romance or Holocaust? | 109 |
Ending Rituals in To the Lighthouse | 138 |
Notes | 163 |
173 | |
185 | |
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Achebe achievement Africa alludes argues attributes become behavior Buchanan Carmichael characters Charles Tansley Conrad constructed create critics cultural Daisy demystifying desire Douglas Douglas's Dowell Dowell's dream example exclusion experience expulsion fact feelings figure Fitzgerald Florence Ford Madox Ford frame tale Gatsby Gatsby's death ghosts Girard governess governess's Grose guests Guy Domville Heart of Darkness Henry James holocaust human Ian Bell imagine interpretation James's Joseph Conrad Kurtz Leonora Lighthouse Likewise Lily Briscoe Lily's listeners main story male Marlow metaphor Miss Jessel Modern modernist modernist fiction moral mythic Nancy Rufford narrative narrator narrator's Nick Carraway Nick's novel novella painting passion Peter Quint portrayal Quint and Miss Ramsay Ramsay's readers reading recognize relationship René Girard resort rivalry role romantic sacrificial ritual scapegoat scapegoating scene Scott Fitzgerald Screw sexual social Soldier tion Tom Buchanan tragic Turn ultimately University Press victim Virginia Woolf woman women