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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Inheritance Of The Past: Patriarchy, Race And Gender In Faulkner's And Chopin's South, Therese D. Osborne Aug 2013

Inheritance Of The Past: Patriarchy, Race And Gender In Faulkner's And Chopin's South, Therese D. Osborne

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The death of the Confederacy sealed in white southern memory a lost world of beauty that denied the cruelty of its “peculiar institution.” Southern writers have seemed haunted by this conflict between the cherished past of their ancestors and the reality of the devastated region, with its legacy in slavery. Through the commentary of women diarists who mourn their crumbling society, and selected works of William Faulkner and Kate Chopin, this paper examines the myth and reality of the southern past. It reveals the enduring impact of the all-powerful white patriarchy that gave order to the antebellum South, destroyed it, …


Bones, Frogs, And Killers: The Corporeal Oppression Of Women In The Patriarchal, Christian South, Shawna F. Felkins May 2013

Bones, Frogs, And Killers: The Corporeal Oppression Of Women In The Patriarchal, Christian South, Shawna F. Felkins

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Both Alice Walker and Dorothy Allison create female protagonists who face corporeal oppression in their works The Color Purple and Bastard out of Carolina, respectively. It these protagonist’s feminine gender that allows the men in their lives to control them. Connecting these two authors and validating there assertions of the power of patriarchy to oppress women through the physical body, is author Lillian Smith and her work Killers of the Dream. There is a connecting thread running through these works that explains the reign of patriarchal oppression in the South: Christianity. Women, especially those in the Christian culture of the …


Women As Victims In Tennessee Williams' First Three Major Plays, Ruth Foley May 2013

Women As Victims In Tennessee Williams' First Three Major Plays, Ruth Foley

Masters Theses

Although Tennessee Williams does not openly champion the rights of women in his plays, he presents strong cases against their social alienation in a harsh and brutal world governed by men. Williams' emotional leanings, sensitivity, and intuition enable him to see life through women's eyes. In The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke, Williams astutely sounds the battle cry for women to fight against male oppression. He shows how Amanda Wingfield, Laura Wingfield, Blanche Dubois, Stella Kowalski, and Alma Winemiller are held hostage to the rules governing patriarchal society and become unhappy marginalized victims. The self-contained …


Re-Masculating The Vampire: Conceptions Of Sexuality And The Undead From Rossetti's Proserpine To Meyer's Cullen, Emily Schuck Mar 2013

Re-Masculating The Vampire: Conceptions Of Sexuality And The Undead From Rossetti's Proserpine To Meyer's Cullen, Emily Schuck

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

This paper explores the relationship between sexuality and the undead from Victorian England to present day vampire narratives. Specifically, I examine the shift in the vampire narrative from the frightening Dracula to the extremely sexualized nature of vampires in the early twenty-first century. My results are concerned with the nature and exchange of fluids between vampire bodies and their victims (or lovers) and the power associated with that exchange. My conclusion implies that re-masculating the vampire is a return to a patriarchal dominant discourse promulgates the heteronormative status quo, unlike their early predecessors, which tend to undermine heteronormative sexuality.


The Scarlet Letter: A Façade For Subversion Of Patriarchy, Tessa Arnold Jan 2013

The Scarlet Letter: A Façade For Subversion Of Patriarchy, Tessa Arnold

The Corinthian

This essay will work in two parts. First, it will examine The Scarlet Letter as representing a dystopian society created by political and religious leaders’ thirst for power and control above the needs and desires of the people whom they are supposed to protect. The second part of this essay will examine the effects of the dystopian Puritan society specifically as it relates to Hester Prynne.


Gertrude's Role In Hamlet, Emily Graf Jan 2013

Gertrude's Role In Hamlet, Emily Graf

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Typically, Gertrude's character in productions of Hamlet has been limited by her guilt and sexuality. However, lacking the social and political conventions that confined Elizabethan England, it would seem that there is another possible interpretation of Hamlet's mother.