English Language and Literature Commons^™

Her Voice On Air: How Irish Radio Made Strides For Women's Rights, Emilie R. Hines

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Radio is the voice of the people; this is no less true in Ireland, a nation that prefers talk radio and phone-ins. These formats were popular from 1970-2000, formative years for the feminist movement. Scholarship suggests a correlation between radio and women’s issues in Ireland but does not answer what elements create this. Here, I analyze 10 archival radio clips from Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, RTÉ, looking at how women’s issues are framed. After analyzing these clips, I found that Irish identity embedded in the shows allows for the discussion of controversial ideas. Radio promotes an inclusive environment, by …

"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain

Honors Theses

This thesis explores themes of monstrosity in Maria Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife in connection with issues of women's bodies and feminism. It analyzes prominent female characters in the novel and the relationships of their bodies to patriarchal authority, showing how and why bodies are deemed monstrous. It discusses the role that motherhood plays in patriarchal society, as well as explores alternatives that the novel offers to this system.

Iron Manicures: Sex, Power, And Sedition In Margaret Atwood's Writing, Anna Zarra Aldrich

Honors Scholar Theses

Margaret Atwood has often been criticized as a bad feminist writer for featuring villainous, cruel women. Atwood has combatted this criticism by pointing out that evil women exist in life, so they should in literature as well. Every story requires a villain and a victim, for Atwood these roles are both usually played by women. This thesis will explore the idea of the woman as spectacle in both behavior and body. Women are controlled by the idea that they must care. When they stop caring, they become a threat. At the heart of Atwood’s writing are the relationships between women …

Honoré De Balzac’S Portrayal Of The Feminine Condition In The Wild Ass’S Skin, Père Goriot, And The Lily Of The Valley, Brooke V. Musmeci

Honors Theses

In 19th century France, women appeared to be second class citizens. They were often limited in their abilities to have independence and secure their own wealth. This perception of women perhaps justifies why, as Honoré de Balzac’s novels illustrated the realities of French society, he attempted to characterize women’s struggles to obtain control and power in their lives. In his novels The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), The Lily of the Valley (1835), and Le Père Goriot (1835), Balzac sought to prove how women could improve their lot.

Firstly, in studying how women had been relegated to second-class citizens under their …

“Part Of That (Man’S) World”: Analyzing “Cinderella” And “The Little Mermaid” Fairy Tale Variants Through A Feminist Lens, K. Morgan Mitchell

Honors Theses

Fairy tales are often reduced to nothing more than the moral lesson that can be taught to children. However, when we move past the impulse to search for the simplified moral of the story, we can begin to ascertain the impact of fairy tales on different audiences. This thesis uses both impact theory, which yields a close reading of the textual and cinematic evidence, and reception research, which provides an opportunity to discuss the significance of the material by speculating about the message that readers receive. Under consideration are four variants each of the “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid” fairy …

Pioneering Feminism: How Early American Female Authors' Heroines Defy Gender Norms, Julie Short

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

As I began to make decisions about what I wanted to write on, I started to consider the novels that have impacted me. After realizing that many of my favorite novels featured female protagonists from the early twentieth century, I came to the conclusion that I could use these novels to discuss feminism, a topic I am passionate about. I selected O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Each of these authors use their protagonists to represent women who …

Othello As A Domestic Tragedy: Marriage And Moral Extremism, Sophie A. Miller

Global Tides

The dehumanization of female characters in Othello by viewing them through antiquated and dichotomous views of women and female morality is a major factor in the play's tragic ending. These women exist in the context of changing marriage customs that came along with changes in government and religious structures of authority. Through Iago's influence, Othello comes to shift from the more modern companionate view of marriage into an outdated patriarchal model. The play is one of many Early Modern Dramas examining marriage but does not fit in with Patient Griselda plays or with domestic tragedies in which unfaithful wives are …

Building Student Agency Through Contract Grading In Technical Communication, Jennifer C. Mallette, Amanda Hawks

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The scholarship on contract grading has focused on the impacts in first-year writing, but little work explores how contract grading is used in other writing contexts, specifically technical communication. In fact, a focus on contract grading can align with the social justice turn in technical communication if viewed as a way to enact feminist and antiracist pedagogies. In this reflection, we--an instructor of an introductory technical communication service course and a student who took that class--share our experiences around contract grading. After providing an overview of the course and institutional context, we reflect together on our experiences around student perceptions …

A Transnational Look At The Modern Women, Isabella Hardesty

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Spanning forty years apart, the short story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (1926) by Ding Ling and The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath can speak to one another in revealing the position of women in a revolutionary new era. The two stories may be generationally and geographically distant, yet both hold a collective female consciousness in the context of the emerging modernist epoch. By examining these two pieces of literature in relation to one another, similar attitudes and stylistic trends emerge regarding the treatment of women. The common archetypes, for each respective time and country, imprinted onto women are at some …

Filming Reconciliation: Indigenous Screen Cultures In An Age Of Redress, Kyle L. Killebrew

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines Indigenous cinematic cultures in the United States and Canada since 1998 in the context of international reconciliation movements between settler and Indigenous states. This project examines the contested intersections of twenty-first century Indigenism and multiculturalism, exploring the ways in which Native voices in media navigate international cultural marketplaces. I focus on Georgina Lightning’s Older than America, Igloolik Isuma’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ A Red Girl’s Reasoning. Specifically, I am concerned with Indigenous cinemas and media that envision and enact models of reconciliation, healing, and social justice using …

Where Virtue Goes: Stories, Radhika Vu Thanh Vy

Honors Theses

This story is a parallel narrative featuring the life in a fictional remote village in Vietnam some time during the 1800s, as well as the present-day life of a Vietnamese immigrant family in the US. The first narrative explores the efforts of a feminist duo, a matchmaker and a midwife, to help a young pregnant woman get out of an unhappy marriage. In doing so, the duo attempt to unravel traditional gender roles and oppressive social customs, and reweave the village social fabric. The other narrative explores a present-day marriage, one that is as much a disintegrating relationship as one …

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

The Grizzled Wolf And The Mauled Lamb: An Interpretation Of Animal Language In Melville’S Translation Of Ovid's "Tereus, Procne, And Philomela", Dylan Rossin

Capstone Showcase

An analysis of animal language in Ovids's "Tereus, Procne, and Philomela" shows that the women have power in this story despite what an initial reading might show.

Humayun Ahmed And Archival Hauntings: The Subaltern Experience Of The 1971 Liberation War Of Bangladesh As Portrayed In Debi, Nilima Islam

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I argue how Humayun Ahmed's Debi offers insight into the function that archives play in creating radical nationalism in a country like Bangladesh; how these archives work to consolidate political power for a select few, and how they further subjugate and silence the country’s subalterns.

"Don't Look At Her, She's Mad": Mama And Frankenstein Reveal Modern-Day Preoccupations, Caitlin Gamble

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Viewing the film Mama (2013) through the lens of a certain Gothic text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, reveals similar fears of the feminine alongside the focus of the nature of the in-between. These commonalities between the texts reveal an emerging trend in modern monster-horror films—the narrative-driven analysis of the role of the other and multiculturalism in the social consciousness. In this paper, I examine how Mama as an Imperial Gothic film builds on the tradition of indigenous stories, like La Llorona, and the Gothic. By referencing and combining these histories in the genre markers, it uses motherhood and the other to …

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …

How Do You Stage A Problem Like Kevin Spacey? Reflections On Performance And Consent, With Help From Ellie Moon And Adam Lazarus, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

How can theatre and performance open avenues for a nuanced exploration of consent in the wake of #MeToo? What aesthetic, generic, and dramaturgical choices may best contribute to this kind of exploration? As audience members, do we need to be made properly uncomfortable in our seats in order to think deeply about consent at the theatre? What are the ethical boundaries of such discomfort? Kim Solga investigates these questions and more as she revisits her experiences seeing Ellie Moon’s Asking for It and Adam Lazarus’s Daughter shortly after the Weinstein allegations broke in late 2017.

The Position Of A Woman: A Poetics Of Grace Paley’S Political Storytelling, Jamie Zabinsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While literary critics have long shown modest interest in writer-activist Grace Paley’s short fiction, no scholarship has yet focused on her extensive record of nonfiction writing. This thesis concentrates on Just As I Thought, an anthology of Paley’s essays, articles and speeches organized by Paley herself in lieu of any memoir or autobiography. Hannah Arendt’s theorizations of time, thought and standpoint serve as frameworks to establish the essay collection, arranged according to Paley’s political life along a timeline of feminist history, as a political storytelling project. Political storytelling, in the Arendtian sense and in context of this thesis, aims …

Once Upon A Time On Mango Street, Drake Deornellis

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

This paper examines how the use of fairytale allusions in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street critiques and recreates standard constructions of female identity. Narrated by the young main character Esperanza, the novel explores the experiences of a variety of Latina women living on Mango Street. As Esperanza retells these stories, she frequently compares these women to fairytale characters, such as Cinderella and Rapunzel. These fairytales often define women as either “angels” or “monsters”: either they are perfect, or they are evil. Furthermore, this perfection for women is associated with dependence and passivity. As the women in the novel …

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

The Maternal Body Of James Joyce's Ulysses: The Subversive Molly Bloom, Arthur Moore

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper provides a feminist criticism of Ulysses in an attempt to understand the relevance of Joyce and this novel today, as academia is experiencing a welcome pressure to move away from the study of ‘old white men.’ The interest of this paper is an interest in the alterity of the bodies of Ulysses. While once these bodies challenged the common discourse because they were ruled obscene, the bodies of the text continue to challenge both critics and a male literary tradition. As Joyce said about Ulysses, “my book is the epic of the human body.” Ulysses itself …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Mansfield Park By Kate Hamill (And Jane Austen), Christopher Nagle

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

This article reviews the world premiere of Kate Hamill's Mansfield Park directed by Stuart Carden and produced for the Northlight Theatre in Chicago in November and December 2018. Hamill’s bold new adaptation is notable for foregrounding the contexts of empire and the slave trade undergirding the novel, and in ultimately offering a feminist fairy-tale of radical self-assertion and self-determination for its heroine.

Jane Austen Camp, Devoney Looser

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

Austen camp has become prevalent, even omnipresent, today, in visions and versions of her and her fiction, using them as a canvas for zombies, porn, or roller derby. Some of it may be kitsch, but it’s arguably camp. Investigating Austen as camp is a valuable way to understand her humor and her social criticism, as we now understand camp as a positive literary and social practice. But rather than asking if and when camp is “there,” for Austen or for her past readers, we might instead investigate what aspects or elements of her reputation or her writing we notice differently …

Eighteenth-Century Camp Introduction, Ula Lukszo Klein, Emily Mn Kugler

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

A blend of the silly and the extravagant that puts the serious into conversation with the ridiculous, camp today is often signified by elements of eighteenth-century Europe with its elaborate hairstyles, exaggerated silhouettes, affected courtiers, and a rise in the consumption of exotic goods, candelabras, masks, and other markers of elite excess (often with a nod to the era’s demise in the form of either the French Revolution or subsequent Victorian strictures). Camp’s relation to queer modes of performance and its prioritization of style over (or in conjunction with) substance offers a queer aesthetic lens to re-evaluate the eighteenth century …

Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs

English

Julia Alvarez’s portrayal of the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies centers the novel around the sisters’ speech and humanity. This decenters the dictator, a figure who was often central to Latin American dictator novels. The first chapter will provide background on the dictator’s characteristics to demonstrate how the Mirabal sisters’ speech draws attention away from his power. The four times the sisters encounter the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the novel, their speech decenters him because Alvarez emphasizes their experience. In the second chapter, I examine the gaps between each encounter, focusing on Minerva’s speech development towards …

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …

From Terrorism To Feminism: Live-Action Superhero Films As Reflections Of American Social Problems Post 9/11, Lindsey Poe

English MA Theses

Superheroes have always been used as tools of escapism. From their insurgence into popular culture in the 1930s, to their animation in television programs, and appearance in films in the late 1970s until now, superheroes have allowed audiences an avenue through which they could imagine an alternate, utopian reality. Through the analyses of modern superhero films, audiences are able to connect how the genre reflects larger social and political fears in the wake of such unexpected realities: fear of annihilation after the 9/11 attacks and existing in a potentially unsafe America following the election of Donald Trump. The superhero film …

Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, And Other Airborne Females By Serinity Young, Felicity Gilbert

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Monsters, Marines, And Feminism In The 1980s: A Look At Ellen Ripley From Aliens, Summer Reardon

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

The battle between Ripley and the alien mother symbolizes how women of the 1980s were grappling with their changing roles of motherhood brought about in part by their increased power over their own reproductive health, as well as broadening career options for women. During this time, more women began to take on non-traditional gender roles in the workplace, the family, and in society. Ripley's character reflects this the growing wave of feminism, and presaged a more assertive and adaptable woman, while still demonstrating devotion to her adoptive offspring.