Abandoned Being: The Aesthetic of Inhabiting in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl
Document Type
Peer-Reviewed Article
Publication Date
9-2021
Abstract
This article reads the vocabulary of "being" scattered throughout Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl as exposing the ontological dispossession underlying the economic and political abandonment of the poor. The Girl's search for a way "to be," however, also disrupts the economy of representation by which the state monitors and assesses, through a rhetoric of uplifted subjectivity, the behaviors of the women who depend on state relief programs. In The Girl, homeless women's discovery of forms of being within precarious living conditions constitutes an ontological repossession through which Le Sueur imagines alternative feminist socioeconomic structures and, by extension, alternative forms of subjectivity that emerge within subrepresentational spaces.
DOI
10.1215/0041462X-9373746
Recommended Citation
Callahan, C. (2021). Abandoned being: The aesthetic of inhabiting in Meridel le Sueur's The girl. Twentieth-Century Literature, 67(3), 317-344. Doi: 10.1215/0041462X-9373746
