Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Defining Heroinism: Heartthrobs Refining Heroines In 18th And 19th Century Women's Literature, Grace M. Gibson

Honors College Theses

This project will explore the emergence of “heroinism,” a uniquely feminine way in which early female authors approached the heroine’s journey. Barred by male expectations of female conduct both in society and literature, eighteenth and nineteenth century women daring to “attempt the pen” forged stories of heroines with conventions and tropes distinctly, though not entirely, separate from those told of centuries of heroes. I intend to track the ways in which these early tales of heroines told by women strayed from the traditional heroic plot, with unique motivations, mentors, trials, and rewards, but also how they were shaped and confined …

Heroine Of The Peripheral: An Exploration Of Feminism And Anti-Feminism In The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath, Devoney Looser

Augsburg Honors Review

Recognizing that there are many legitimate ways to view Plath's work, this study doesn't claim a definitive reading or even a glimpse into the 'real' Sylvia Plath. Instead, the following exploration will focus on feminist and anti-feminist renderings of motherhood in Plath's Crosstng the Water, Ariel, and Winter Trees. This study doesn't set out to prove or disprove these labels as they relate to Plath either. My intention is not to make value judgments about various aspects of the poetry but rather to highlight the contradictions and the co-existence of feminist and anti-feminist qualities in the text.

The Structures Of Intra-National Class Divisions In Neoliberalism: The Women Of “Light” And “Dark” In The White Tiger, Sneha Madimi

Theses and Dissertations

Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, represents gender hierarchies and the class struggle of India’s neoliberal present. Adiga uses elements of satire and allegory to teach us something about how women are differently positioned in the neoliberal system. David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). I will consider the novel, alongside Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” …

Frankenstein’S Creature: Monstrous Chicken Or Grotesque Egg?, Alexandria B. Acero

Gettysburg College Headquarters

Some scholars believe that due to the negligence of Victor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the creature became an attention-craving murderous monster. Other scholars believe that the unaffectionate and unnatural way Victor birthed the creature caused his monstrous form. The argument over “Nature versus Nurture” in relation to the creations is irrelevant, however. The creature is only pushed away by Victor due to his hideousness which stems from the environment in which the creature was born. Victor’s societal view on nature and its connection to womanly attributes creates a paradox of a loveless creation and an affection-craving creature within the novel.

Teaching The Lady’S Museum And Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, And Beyond, Karenza Sutton-Bennett, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay argues for the value of teaching Charlotte Lennox’s periodical The Lady’s Museum (1760-61) in undergraduate literature, history, media studies, postcolonial, and gender studies classrooms. Lennox’s magazine, which includes one of the first serialized novels “Harriot and Sophia” (later published as the stand-alone novel Sophia (1762)) encouraged debate of the proto-discipline topics of history, geography, literary criticism, astronomy, botany, and zoology. This essay offers a flexible teaching module, which can be taught in one to five days, that focuses on the themes of early female education and imperialism using full or excerpted portions of essays from the eidolon, “Of …

“The Un/Touchables:” Quest For Citizenship In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things And Indra Sinha’S Animal’S People, Mahreen Shahzadi

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper argues that Ammu and Velutha, in The God of Small Things and Animal in Animal’s People are not seen as productive citizens of the nation because of their marginalization, which results in their status as second-class citizens. However, Ammu, Velutha, and Animal resist second-class status by challenging the heteropatriarchal nation, rejecting its limited definition of gender, caste, sexuality, and citizenship.

Sisterhood And Survival: An Exploration Of Women's Relationships In Feminist Speculative Fiction, Madeleine Gernhard

Honors College

Writers have used the genre of feminist speculative fiction as a lens through which to view modern issues which effect women. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Margaret Atwood’ Handmaid’s Tale, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power each explore dystopian or transitory dystopian societies in which women are pitted against one another for the sake of their survival. In reviewing the relationships which the women in these novels have to each other we stand to gain insights into the ways in which sisterhood influences change in these societies. Each of these works, while centering around different understandings of dystopian society, also prominently feature the …

Accepting Or Opposing The Status Quo: A Look At The Women Characters In Mariama Bâ’S So Long A Letter (1981) And Chimamanda Adichie’S Purple Hibiscus (2003), Omolola Giwa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What exactly is the status quo of women in Africa? Women’s selfhood has been systematically subordinated or outright denied by law, customary practices, and cultural stereotypes. Scholars like Judith Bennet suggest that religious practices and colonial rule subjugate African women. Patriarchal ideologies guide the society’s discrimination against women and this has influenced the status of women, especially married women and the way they respond in times of affliction.

Authors like Chimamanda Adichie and Mariama Ba in their fictional novels The Purple Hibiscus and So Long a Letter focus on capturing the struggles and conditions of women in the Western African …

Women And Supposition: The Chronicles Of Narnia And Biblical Womanhood, Carolyn Dailey

Honors Projects

Supplemented by C.S. Lewis' works in theology, predominately Mere Christianity, and 'Priestesses in the Church?" as well as sources from other theologians, and historians, this paper explores the relationship between Christian tradition and Biblical womanhood that is expressed in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. This paper finds that C.S. Lewis drew more from the core tenets of love and equality that exist at the heart of Christianity rather than from traditional Christian beliefs, including some he held himself. In doing this, he crafted an imaginative fiction that affirms Biblical womanhood.

Margaret Atwood: Amplifying The Voices Of Abused Women, Kimberly Hood

Student Writing

Margaret Atwood addresses the oppressive societal rules placed on women in her poetry. The stories of the abused are often left out of the mainstream. Her works of poetry and prose bring these silenced voices from the background and amplify them for the world to hear.

To Put Her In Her Place: An Interrogation Of Death And Gender In Shakespearean Tragedy, Isabella A. Zentner

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This analysis investigates the gendered implications of Shakespearean heroines' deaths. Using Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus as case studies, evidence is drawn from the text. This evidence is then supported by extensive historical research and reference to external critical studies of these tragedies. By identifying the gendered aspects of these heroines’ deaths, one can gain a greater understanding of Shakespeare’s view of female autonomy and power. The deaths Shakespeare inflicts often act as a punishment for the heroines' betrayal of traditional gender roles and forcibly return the heroines to the feminine sphere.

Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee

Honors Theses

The goal of this senior project was to analyze the underlying cause for why certain female characters in popular culture were villainized for their behavior and generally deemed to be “nasty woman.” After reading numerous books and viewing films that contained “nasty woman”, there was a common denominator that linked their behavior and influenced their decision to enact their often-bloody retribution: the patriarchy. These women were a victim of some aspect of the patriarchy, commonly sexual assault, and could not receive the support they needed, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The “nasty women” analyzed in …

Sound Minds: Women’S Novels, Vibrational Experience, And The Listening Imagination In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Elizabeth Weybright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sound Minds: Women’s Novels, Vibrational Experience, and the Listening Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain traces nineteenth-century evolutions of the concept of auditory subjecthood and brings narrative representations of audition and utterance in novels written by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot to bear on sound studies, acoustic research, and adjacent philosophies of musical aesthetics. Between Ernst Chladni’s groundbreaking publications on acoustic science in 1787 and 1802 and Hermann von Helmholtz’s enormously influential study of sound waves and musical theory, On the Sensations of Tone: As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1862), continental Europe and Britain saw proliferating …

Confined In (Patri)Architecture: How Gothic And Horror Literature Exposes Ongoing Violence And Oppression Against Women, Clara A. Macilravie Cañas

Dissertations and Theses

This project focuses on the intersections of space, power, gender, religion, and the architecture of institutions that confine and repress women. I argue that these texts focus on how patriarchal and domestic ideologies lock women into gendered expectations through oppressive gender politics. Chapter one demonstrates how early gothic female writers used representations of physical structures, such as abbeys and castles, to expose the eighteenth-century woman’s experiences of abuse and confinement by repressive patriarchal and monarchal rule. This chapter connects themes and arguments within Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) to reveal the metaphors that …

Pedagogies Of The “Irresistible”: Imaginative Elsewheres Of Black Feminist Learning., Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In her foreword to the groundbreaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Toni Cade Bambara (1983) famously argues that the great work of feminist writing is “to make revolution irresistible.” This statement is often read as a founding call of women-of-color feminism, and of feminist literary expression in particular. Yet Bambara’s notion of the “irresistible” extends beyond the page; throughout her works, she also uses the term as a key descriptor of her pedagogy, and her vision of the classroom. Bambara joins Audre Lorde and other Black feminist writer/teachers in insisting on a …

Into The Roach’S Mouth: Beyond The Postmodern Discourse On Silence In Clarice Lispector’S The Passion According To G.H., Eman Halimeh

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. the protagonist experiences a complete break from reality when she enters her maid’s room and encounters a cockroach. The entire plot is predicated on this encounter, but the existential crisis is filtered through a quest for a resounding silence – one that will liberate G.H. from the shackles of a preorganized existence. This thesis will explore Clarice Lispector’s use of silence as it functions in relation to a repurposed posthuman theory. By investigating Lispector’s preoccupation with the “thingness” of being, I expose the limitations of postmodern feminism and offer a way …

Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor

The Criterion

For a woman to succeed in an academic sphere, it is never enough for her to be clever-- she must be brilliant. “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales explores the metaphorical brilliance (in sexual purity, intelligence, and faith) of St. Cecilia. The tale is also a mechanism for the Second Nun to advocate for her own vocation of “holy work,” for the sake of the learned religious women who preserved such writings. The themes of her tale are quite different from those espoused by the Wife of Bath, but the Wife also argues to have her voice …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …