Abstract:
This thesis examines the significance of the protagonist's voice in three texts of the twentieth century, a period in which how voices were produced and what they symbolised underwent considerable change. The voices studied are: Josephine's voice in Franz Kafka's 'Josephine the Signer, Or the Mouse Folk' (1924); Maria's voice in the film The Sound of Music (1965) directed by Robert Wise; and Fran Fine's voice in the 1990s television sitcom The Nanny (1993-1999) created by Fran Drescher and Peter Marc Jacobsen. Each of the texts this thesis analyses is 'driven' by the unusual voice of the central character, a voice to which other characters respond with forms of enjoyment that render coherent for them a new communal identity, and an otherwise impossible sense of belonging. In each text, the new sense of identity and belonging established for the group is initiated and maintained precisely because the protagonist's voice differs significantly from the voices of the group whose identity her voice causes and makes possible. In this way, each text shows a form of communal identity being centred on the group's incorporation of a voice whose actions and qualities exceed the normative vocal practices of that collective. In each text the protagonist's others are able to belong to their group because the protagonist never fully belongs with them, so that the outsider or vocally gifted 'star' finds a reason for being in the group, while the group enact an unconscious - and unexpected - kind of identification with her in return. By engaging the Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of the voice's function as l'objet petit a - an object cause of desire that sets the conditions for identity and belonging - this thesis traces the way in which the voice recurs as a site of constitutive alterity for differing forms of society found near the beginning, near the middle, and at the end of the twentieth-century.