Envisioning the Self in Relation: Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

• Main Authors: Tsao Yu-jia, 曹予珈
• Other Authors: Huang, Hsin-ya
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/55609532413695165805

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 93 === This thesis intends to read Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir not as a mere personal/ individual Memoir, but as a collective Native Memoir encircling Native American worldviews, which demonstrate a way of looking at the world that is new and different to Western culture. Hogan exemplifies her viewing through the fabrication of this Memoir in eleven chapters intermingled her personal stories with natural elements shared in the earthly community. At center of the study is the base of Jace Weaver’s “communitism” beginning with Natives’ commitment to their community and extending to a “wider community” which embraces all the natural elements coexistent in the ecological community. Therefore, the Native sense of “community” is read in an enlarged sense to include the human and non-human coexistence while centering on familiar, tribal relationships and natural, ecological interrelatedness. The thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter one is Introduction. Chapter two intends to study Natives’ frame of viewing the world, their vision of life, and their worldviews. Native American worldviews fundamentally discriminate Natives as a people that hold strong tie to tribe, community, and the earth. Among the multiplicity of the coexistence of diversified worldviews, there is a common declaration of the celebration of their sense of community. Through interrogating Jace Weaver’s “communitism,” generated by a fulcrum on community, this chapter interrogates Natives’ values of the interrelationships, interdependence, reciprocity, and reverence. Also, I will elaborate on Native sense of self, “self in society,” and “greater self,” which view the Native self as communal, relational, and integral. Chapter three endeavors to interrogate Hogan’s recreating a self by reinventing a context of interrelationships, inclusive her familiar and tribal relationships. Thus, through Hogan’s search for her connections to family, especially on the matrilineal relationships with her mother and her adopted daughters, this chapter examines the matrilineal continuity and the power of storytelling contributing to Hogan’s integrated sense of self and identity. Chapter four probes for interpreting Hogan’s tendency to invite water, land, fire, light, stones, bones, animals, and gems in her Memoir to join this earthly community as a manifestation of not merely a boundary transgression but also a ceremonial transformation. Broadening the limited human scope, Hogan’s perspectives take us beyond the boundaries of human sight and sounds and exemplify a Native self in relation to the earthly ecological community. Chapter five is Conclusion. The thesis concludes with Hogan’s employment of writing as not merely a ritual to retrieve the Native self and also as a strategy to resist Western hegemony.