Diana Blaine (University of Southern California)
dbla@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Whether Poe was correct in asserting that “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” he certainly was correct in associating her demise, mythical or otherwise, with the generation of art. This special session invites papers that consider the significance of representations of dead women in modern popular culture. How does the gendered and raced association of death with femininity produce normative masculinity? In what ways does the overdetermined association between women and mortality stabilize concepts of geography, including nation? Can we even imagine “America” without the quotidian yet fantastic symbol of the sentimental dead white girl? In short, was Poe right after all?

In “A Walk to Remember,” Mandy Moore portrays a beautiful preacher’s daughter, unique enough to tame Landon Carter, the school’s bad boy. Their subsequent love affair—chaste, of course—culminates in early marriage because she is dying, beautifully, of leukemia. Due to his association with her impossible goodness, Landon turns his life around, moving from petty criminal to successful medical school matriculant. This motif, of the saintly white woman teaching a man how to love, and preparing him for successful entrance into the capitalist economy, only for her to die in time to avoid the messy entanglements that inevitably come with adult relationships, reveals a gendered aspect of the American metanarrative that valorizes sacrifice as the purview of white femininity and independence as fundamental to white masculinity.

Because these stories occur so frequently—in fact, Moore is again dying beautifully of leukemia in the current popular television series “This is Us”—their significance tends to pass unnoticed. Yet the commonplace association between white women and mortality carries powerful ideological messages regarding the purity of whiteness; the purported transcendence of white masculinity over the body; and the insignificance of all people of color to this heteronormative American family romance. Thus, this panel seeks to draw much-needed attention to the centrality of the structural conflation between white women and sentimental death as its racist and sexist impact extend far beyond the world of fantasy.