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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco
Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco
English Honors Theses
Set in the year 1980, "Good Girls Don't" is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy …
“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse
“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse
English Honors Theses
This thesis examines the traumatic experiences that consume characters’ lives and, in the absence of psychological healing efforts, manifest into violent actions in Toni Morrison’s three novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. I focus on the gendered experience of the female characters Pecola, Sula, Eva, and Sethe, except for the male character, Cholly in The Bluest Eye. Focusing on Morrison’s humanization of violent characters and her sharing of their full life stories, I establish the characters’ internal justifications for their violence to challenge the accepted depiction of all criminals as evil. The three chapters follow the manifestation of trauma …