Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman

Masters Theses

A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight …

Amor Fati, Keavy Handley-Byrne

Masters Theses

I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. At age 26, I was lucky enough to meet the woman who would become my wife. We quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, Alice’s parents shared their names with my grandfather and his second wife (Walter and Joan). But what quickly became apparent to me were the links between Alice’s mother and my grandmother. Apart from photographs and memories …

Divorce As Liberation: Marital Expectations Among The Working-Class In The 1950s, Kristin M. Catrone

Theses and Dissertations

Divorce was a remedy employed by working-class Americans in the 1950s when their marital expectations went unmet. Spouses left emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive marriages. Expectations for marriage also centered around assumptions based on gender. Working-class women showed how divorce could be used as a tool of liberation and empowerment.

Playing To Win: The Marriage Market In Jane Austen’S Northanger Abbey, Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Caroline Elizabeth Nall

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to analyze the implications of the marriage market in Jane Austen’s novels Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Emma. In these books, the main focus will be on Isabella Thorpe, who is actively participating in the “game” of the marriage market, Charlotte Palmer, who has won the “game” of marriage, and Miss Bates, who has lost the “game” of marriage. The historical context of these situations, taking place in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, has been taken into account. Austen has created characters to demonstrate the many aspects of a female’s life and how it relates …

Harvest: Poems, Brittney Allen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Louise Glück wrote, “the actual making of art is a revenge on circumstance.” The risk, she goes on, is in the possibility of shame. Writing poetry then becomes an act of courage, purchased with sacrifice or loss. “Courage, in this usage, alludes to a capacity for facing down the dark forces.”

In Harvest, a poetry chapbook, the speaker takes revenge on the circumstances of her life by being blunt, bare, and brave on the page. She contends with a male-dominated society and abusive childhood as she moves into adulthood and the supposed saving grace of a marriage. The speaker confesses …

A New Model For Marriage And Motherhood In Postwar Britain, 1945-1960, Caroline Bland

Humanities and Cultural Studies | Senior Theses

Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, married women, who had been such a crucial part of the British workforce during the war, returned to domestic roles. British government policy focused on relieving poverty and promoting motherhood; pregnant women received maternity benefits and mothers received a family allowance. Although historians such as Martin Pugh argued that women were happy to leave the workplace and enjoy the stability and relative ease of domestic life, women's own stories illustrate the growing frustration with a lack of choice. By examining historical and sociological research, analyzing media influences on women's attitudes …

Love In South Korea: Transformations Of Intimacy And Gender Relations In Korean Romantic Relationships, Alex Joseph Nelson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Romantic love holds a central place in South Korean imaginaries, animating television dramas and pop ballads, but has been largely overlooked in Korea's ethnographic record. Drawing on data collected through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, survey research, interviews, and analysis of folklore, the present study investigates how South Koreans conceptualize romantic love, how those conceptions have changed over time, and the ways they are transforming with the Korean field of gender relations.

This study documents love's entwinement with marriage in South Korea. Koreans are developing companionate ideals of marriage that shift the focus of kinship from the parent-child relationship to …

Silence As Weakness Or Strength In Hurston And Morrison, Tanzania S. Browne

Dissertations and Theses

In literature, voice is a literary device authors use to empower their characters. In fact, both Zora Neale Hurston, in her renowned novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison, in her 1981 novel Tar Baby, exploit voice in different ways. This thesis will investigate and explore the ways in which both of these authors utilize and explore a character’s voice in their literary works.

One Man And One Wife? The Legal History Of Marriage In The Culture And Courts Of America, Tyler Speer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For my honors thesis I will be writing on the legality and shifting attitudes of marriage throughout United States history. This thesis will explore three Supreme Court cases: Davis v. Beason (1890), Loving v. Virginia (1967), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which explores polygamous, interracial, and homosexual marriages respectively. The full name of my thesis is "One Man and One Wife? The Legal History of Marriage in the Culture and Courts of America." The thesis will be upwards of fourty pages in length and will examine marriage from both historical and legal lenses and will be conducted through the History …