Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Connected Spirits: Adolescent Females And Animal Agents, Elizabeth A. Parrish

English Department Theses

The novels The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers and The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies create a unique opportunity to investigate human and animal relationships given the similarity of their time frames and main characters. Both novels feature adolescent females struggling to resolve their identities against the backdrop of WWII. Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding and Esther Evans in The Welsh Girl share the additional characteristics of deceased mothers, distant fathers, and contacts with animals. Because these books are bildungsromans, they permit a comparative analysis as separate experiments in feminine growth with attention …