Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Critical Study Of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life Of Bees, Joy A. Hebert Ms.

English Theses

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) tells the story of a motherless fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, raised by a cruel father, who desperately searches for clues to unlock her mother’s past. Kidd’s bildungsroman reveals the incredible power of black women, particularly a group of beekeeping sisters and a black Mary, to create a safe haven where Lily can examine her fragmented life and develop psychologically, finally becoming a self-actualized young lady. Lily’s matriarchal world of influence both compares and contrasts with the patriarchal world represented in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exposing the matriarchy’s aptly structured ways …

Imagining Haiti: Representations Of Haiti In The American Press During The U.S. Occupation, 1915-1934, Molly M. Baroco

History Theses

Throughout the United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, the U.S. government and its supporters were forced to defend the legitimacy of American action. In order to justify it to the American public, officials and journalists created a dichotomy of capacity between an inferior Haiti and a superior U.S., and they presented the occupation as a charitable civilizing mission. This vision of Haiti and Haitians was elaborated in a racialized discourse wherein Haitians were assigned various negative traits that rendered them incapable of self-government. In examining how the New York Times, the National Geographic Magazine, and the Crisis …

Sensory Coding In William Faulkner's Novels: Investigating Class, Gender, Queerness, And Race Through A Non-Visual Paradigm, Laura R. Davis

English Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Although the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner’s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner’s characters employ their senses is to miss subtle but important clues regarding societal codes that structure hierarchies of class, gender, queerness, and race in his novels. Thus, a more complete examination of the sensory world in Faulkner’s fiction across multiple texts …

You're Wearing The Orange Shorts? African American Hooters Girls And The All American Girl Next Door, Rachel E. Cook

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Hooters restaurants are typically staffed by Caucasian women that resemble the company’s idea of an “All American Girl, Surfer Girl, Girl Next Door” image, promoted in employee training materials. However, my experience working for this company has been in a predominantly African American-staffed Hooters, atypical for the corporation. Through a mixed methods approach encompassing content analysis, participant observation, autoethnography, and interviews, this research seeks to understand the ideal Hooters Girl image promoted by the corporation, and the performance of that ideal in an atypical Hooters location.