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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
“Fetch M’Dear”: Healers, Midwives, Witches, And Conjuring Women In Select Ya And Toni Morrison Novels, Diane Mallett-Birkitt
“Fetch M’Dear”: Healers, Midwives, Witches, And Conjuring Women In Select Ya And Toni Morrison Novels, Diane Mallett-Birkitt
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Accusations and persecution of witchcraft have been embedded in global culture for centuries. For as long as these persecutions have occurred, women have found themselves accused most frequently. Older women with herbal knowledge were often called on to assist with childbirth or termination of pregnancies and this “secret knowledge” often led them to be suspected of supernatural abilities, often of a satanic nature. Intrigued by these wise women who appeared to have mysterious powers and a penchant for arousing the ire of men in the legal, medical, and religious communities, I began to notice their frequent appearance in novels. Does …
Monstrous Dolls: The Abject Body In Rosario Ferré’S Works, Mackenzie Fraser
Monstrous Dolls: The Abject Body In Rosario Ferré’S Works, Mackenzie Fraser
Senior Theses
In this Honors Thesis project, I examine two literary texts, “The Youngest Doll” (1991) and The House on the Lagoon (1995), by Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) with attention to her depiction of the abject female body as a figure analyzed by both theories of gender and the subaltern. Using these critical frameworks as well as my own textual analysis, I argue that Ferré offers a postcolonial feminist critique of the double oppression—patriarchal and colonial— operating upon her female Puerto Rican characters. Yet these women also turn this abjection into transgression, allowing Ferré to expose the paradoxes of female …