Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

To Better Serve And Sustain The South: How Nineteenth Century Domestic Novelists Supported Southern Patriarchy Using The "Cult Of True Womanhood" And The Written Word, Daphne V. Wyse

History Theses

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American women were subjected to restrictive societal expectations, providing them with a well-defined identity and role within the male-dominated culture. For elite southern women, more so than their northern sisters, this identity became integral to southern patriarchy and tradition. As the United States succumbed to sectional tension and eventually civil war, elite white southerners found their way of life threatened as the delicate web of gender, race, and class relations that the Old South was based upon began to crumble. Despite their repressed status in southern society, most elite southern women chose to support …

Performing Literacy: How Women Read The World In The Late Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Amy Hodges

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersection of sensibility, Social identity, and literacy practices among representations of women readers in four late eighteenth-century British novels. Through an analysis of the authors' use of identity constructs which shaped and were shaped by reading practices, this study documents the rise of Social identity formation as mutually constitutive with the history of reading. The first chapter reveals how Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote uses Arabella's follies as education for readers about the corresponding processes of reading their society and reading novels. The second chapter argues that Frances Burney's Evelina considers women's ability to read others …

Lost In Space No Longer: The Visionary Union Of 'The Wire', Brett Dupré

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In its serial space, David Simon’s The Wire season two relates the seemingly “disconnected” union men, foreign sex worker women, and African-American drug traders and crosses constructed boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and geography to evoke the possibility of a transnational working class. The Wire’s serialized narrative trespasses the limitations of money and numbers games and of individual characters to build, scene by scene, what Roderick Ferguson calls in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique “the location for new and emergent identifications and social relations” (108).

Modernist Women In Three Acts: The Stage For Political Protest, Jennifer B. Redmond

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this essay, I will draw upon Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand Sh011stories, "Bliss" (1918), "The Woman at the Store" (1912), "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais" (1918), George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), and Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One 's Own (1929), to defend Jeffreys's idea that "lesbianism" was, in many cases, nothing more than a bond of friendship between two women - a private experience that took on a different meaning in the public eye.

Additionally, I wish to support Gubar's notion that gender norms frequently existed secondarily to the importance of women gaining more …

Rape And The Feminine Response In Early Modern England And Several Shakespearean Works, David Alexander Bernard

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Emergence Of Feminism During The Late Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries By Female Artists And Authors, Tracy S. Koubek

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This thesis paper identifies the ways in which the painters Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Mary Cassatt and the writers Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning challenged the limitations of their sex by engaging in professions outside of the domestic sphere during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This essay first focuses on the negative effects that a separation between the private and public spheres had on women, how these changes came about, the expectations society imposed on women, and how many women learned to cope and step forward into the public sphere. The emphasis shifts to an examination of the lives …

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Resembling the mercurial, black beauty mark used as an ornamental concealment of syphilitic sores, Jane Austen’s comedy of manners likewise acted as a superficial cosmetic device that concealed the ubiquity of venereal disease and prostitution hidden within. Through her characters, Austen used veiled narrative to highlight the reality of venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century England. This thesis uncovers the hidden narrative in Jane Austen’s novels, as a means of better understanding the impact venereal disease and prostitution had on sexual issues with women and the female body during the eighteenth century. Beginning with an almost comic reference to venereal …

The Androgynous Tomboy: Adolescent Liminality In The Contemporary Southern Bildungsroman, Brooke Alexandra Shippee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Androgynous Tomboy: Adolescent Liminality in the Contemporary Southern Bildungsroman is an analysis of the adolescent, specifically, of the young tomboy characters central to three Bildungsroman texts set in the American South during the twentieth century: Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (1946), Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1993). I seek to challenge the very notion of the conventional tomboy within the coming of age literary genre by defining these youths as androgynous, rather than as young individuals who assume a singular gender opposite of their biological sex. Throughout my work, …

Paradox Of The Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother And Cristina García’S Dreaming In Cuban, Allison Nicole Harris

Masters Theses

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the seductive and destructive remainder of the process of entering the symbolic space of the father and leaving the pre-symbolic space of the mother, resulting in a desire to return to the jouissance of the pre-symbolic space. In this project, I read Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother as an attempt to link Xuela’s psychic abjection with the postcolonial identity. Xuela exists on the boundaries of the colonial dichotomy, embracing the space of the abject because she is haunted by her dead mother. She cannot return to her mother, …

Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …

Happily Ever After? Redefining Womanhood And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century Novels, Laura Elizabeth Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James challenged patriarchal conventions and assumptions by redefining womanhood and marriage in their novels, particularly by breaking from the traditional marriage ending. While Pride and Prejudice, North and South, and Jane Eyre end in marriage, these novels depict a freely chosen companionate marriage based on equality; Villette replaces the typical marriage ending with complete independence; and Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady both portray the decisive rejection of the marriage ideal for a life of renunciation. This thesis analyzes the ways in which these novels challenge nineteenth-century society, as well …

Unbreakable Glass Slippers: Hegemony In Ella Enchanted, Tori Shereen Mirsadjadi

Scripps Senior Theses

The way Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted simultaneously conforms to its late-20^th-century American standards and rebels against its Cinderella origins is analyzed in this thesis. As an analysis of a piece of literature written for children, the thesis works to defend the notion that playful literature produces a serious dialogue with its readers, and that young female readers are a particularly apropos group for the dialogue about hegemony that Ella Enchanted allows.

Architectures Of The Veil: The Representation Of The Veil And Zenanas In Pakistani Feminists' Texts, Amber Fatima Riaz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, which works at the intersections of feminist theory, architectural theory and postcolonial literary theory, examines the spatiality of the zenana and the burqa as represented in Pakistani literary and cultural texts. I propose that the burqa creates a portable closet, an interstitial, liminal, “third space” that allows Pakistani (secluded and veiled) women to not only traverse the borders between the private (female, domestic) and public (male) spaces, but to also signal chastity and religiosity while in the public, and semi-public spaces of the cities and villages of Pakistan. I argue that the dupatta, the chador and the hijab …

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, And Postnational Identity In Four Novels By Irish Women, 1960-2000, Sarah Nestor

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines four novels that represent Irish women and girls confronting the typical narrative of Irish national identity in the twentieth century. The post-independence construction of Irish national identity depended upon prescriptive roles that aligned with its founders’ beliefs about the nation’s ethnic homogeneity and moral superiority. Irish women’s identity and roles as wives and mothers were imperative to upholding this idea of the nation, particularly its morality. Irish women were therefore charged with maintaining well-defined gender roles and the nuclear family in an effort to define a distinctive Irish identity. Thus, when women’s roles are challenged or changed …

El Choteo En Cien Botellas En Una Pared Y Raining Backwards: El Gracioso Disfraz De Las Circunstancias Trágicas Durante La Revolución Cubana Y El Período Especial, Kristin Nicole Lisenby

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to explore the idea that the combination of tragedy and humor in Cuban and Cuban-American literature is a form of “choteo” or “no tomar nada en serio,” which demonstrates a coping strategy used by Cubans during hard times. In the case of Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared, and Roberto Fernandez's Raining Backwards, I believe that the two authors use his and her own personal insight into a Cuban's life during the Cuban Revolution of the 60's and the Special Period of the 90's, and that those personal experiences are reflected throughout the novels …

A Feminist Critique Of Beowulf: Women As Peace-Weavers And Goaders In Beowulf's Courts, Charles Phipps

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis documents the relationship between “Goaders" and "Peace-Weavers" amongst the women of Beowulf. These roles have a large place to play within the framework of the Beowulf narrative and all of its female characters fall into one of these descriptors. Goaders are women who have the role of driving men to violence with words. They do not actually perform the violence themselves but instead induce it in others, souring relationships and compelling men to war. Peace-weavers, by contrast, urge men toward reconciliation with speech and encouragement. Examining the poem's context for these two roles and how they relate to …

Feminine Realism In Cornhill Magazine: Anne Thackeray Ritchie And Frances Parthenope Verney, Alexandra Virginia Scamahorn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the literature published by two lesser known women writers in Cornhill Magazine during the 1860s: Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Frances Parthenope Verney. By using the magazine as a context for their fiction, I examine the ways in which these writers both reflect Cornhill's brand of realism, which privileged masculine ideology, and diverge from it, inserting a feminine perspective. Because the magazine's representation of the multiple facets of its society is varied and complex, my thesis examines a particular aspect of societal representation: one that depicts mid-nineteenth-century society in transition from traditional to progressive values. Caught between …

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

"I Is An Other": An Exploration Of The Development Of Childhood And Adolescent Self-Concept, Jessica Lebovits

Senior Projects Spring 2012

A multidisciplinary project that combines original empirical research with an analysis of two Modernist novels, The Waves by Virginia Woolf and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of The Garden In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Anna Brovold

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Aemilia Lanyer used her collection of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to redefine the way that women should look at themselves in the eyes of God. She began her collection with poems dedicated to women that she had deemed virtuous and worthy of individual attention. Her dedicatees were then presented to her readers as the true Disciples of Christ; an honor due to women because of their empathy for Christ's situation. Lanyer rewrote the biblical Passion story in order to include a feminized version of Christ, the rightful female Disciples of Christ and an additional trial presented to Pontius Pilate …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …