Joyce Carol Oates’s 'The Gravedigger’s Daughter' and Martha Nussbaum’s Development Ethics

Joyce Carol Oates has often been charged with sensationalizing and commercializing issues of poverty and violence. The present paper seeks to prove that Oates’s powerful depictions of America’s disenfranchised and violence-ridden world is no mere ploy of sensationalism or catharsis but a leitmotif that enables her to expose the lack of dignity and the absence of basic human rights in the lives of the powerless. In her recent novel, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007), Oates forcefully articulates the problems of racial discrimination, economic deprivation and violence that characterized the status of immigrant Jews in post-World War II America. The despicable condition of the Schwart family in The Gravedigger’s Daughter is strikingly similar to what developmentalists like Martha Nussbaum call the absence of all ‘capabilities.' Nussbaum’s ‘capability approach,' which assesses human development not through crude measures such as Gross Domestic Profit (GDP), but by measuring an individual’s growth vis-a-vis the quality of life, can be seen as an appropriate tool in the analysis of literary texts such as Oates’s, which often deal with economic and cultural deprivations. By reading The Gravedigger’s Daughter in tandem with Nussbaum’s development ethics, the present paper seeks to establish how Oates’s radical social critique calls for reinstating the basic rights of the poor and an immediate revision in the field of human development.