ABSTRACT

This essay first details a critical methodology which is derived from Mikhail Bakhtin's work. The following sections are readings or demonstrations of the thesis that there is an American tradition of dialogic novel which celebrates the struggle between social and ideological voices. I have chosen The Blithedale Romance, The Golden Bowl, and The House of Mirth as examples of polyphonic novels and, in addition, as novels which illuminate the resistance of the female heroines to the monologism of patriarchal norms and conventions. These novels present dialogic situations in which these women misinterpret their social texts and, therefore, fail to understand their own social power; my argument is that Hawthorne, James, and Wharton represent the relation between the private (the sphere of resistance) and the social arena, between the self and the others who would appropriate the self. The most important insight these novels offer is that they make intelligible the forms of women's oppression and silence within the discursive strategies proposed as normative in each novel.