English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Feminist Icon Or A Homicidal Coward: Medea’S Revenge On Patriarchy, Beyza Ertugrul

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Medea, the alleged epitome of sophistication, does not deserve her title of the flawless feminist icon as she is praised to be. For context, Euripides’ Medea, first performed in 431 BC, portrays a young sorceress whose abusive husband abandons her for another woman and who takes revenge by murdering her own children to spite him. Throughout the tragedy, Medea speaks out on gender inequality, and by definition, such uncommon and advanced statements can be described by the modern term of feminism as the “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam-Webster). Especially …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Vs. The Hours (2002): How Does The Patriarchy Infringe On The Autonomy Of Marginalized Characters?, Mary E. Belton

2023 Symposium

Fans of Virginia Woolf know that her literature, such as A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway, cover feminist themes. In adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s work, the same feminist themes are present. For example, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, based on three women whose lives are connected through Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, carries similar feminist themes. In the 2002 adaptation of The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, the relationships between men and women in the film illustrate how the patriarchy operates socially.

To those who don’t know Virginia Woolf’s work well or are unaware of how …

Fragments Of A Writer’S Mind: Virginia Woolf In Her Own Words, Baheya Zeitoun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a thematic reading of select autobiographical and theoretical works by Virginia Woolf. It utilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the rhizome as a methodological framework. The rhizome does not have a hierarchal structure but is rather interconnected. In the same way, the chapters interweave the multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches to connect the disparate factions of the modernist writer’s mind and life.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of post-suffrage writers with narratives that diverged from male-centric values. Woolf is one of the writers who makes a clear distinction between male and female values by championing women’s experiences …

Dinesen’S Diana: The Transformative Power Of Symbols In Ehrengard, Aishwarya A. Marathe

Anthós

This analysis of Dinesen's Ehrengard aims to illuminate the subversive transformation of the titular character of the novel, using the literal and symbolic application of artistic power.

Envisioning A World Without Rape In Late Fifteenth-Century Dream Narratives, Boyda J. Johnstone

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Recent scholarship has been preoccupied with questions of rape and consent in late medieval literature, partly influenced by the Me Too movement while we continue to grapple with Geoffrey Chaucer’s allegation of raptus. In such a climate, medieval texts that likewise challenge the normalization of rape in literature and society require renewed attention and critical interest. The three fifteenth-century poems I examine in this article, The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and The Isle of Ladies, push Chaucer’s dream vision tradition in a new direction, presenting us with female-centered models of cooperation, care, and governance. …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

Queer Mother, Hybrid Monster: Serpentine Hybridity And Monstrous Motherhood In D’Arras And Spenser, Farah R. Paterson-Cisco

Theses and Dissertations

Disparate, deformed, and hybridized bodies of women have appeared in mythology and literature in myriad allegorical incarnations as representations of monstrosity. The monstrous serpent-woman hybrid form can be traced back quite far, though at the point when one reaches antiquity, literary examples meld into the religious, mythological, and folkloric. These hybrid beings also embodied meanings particular to their time and culture that work to distinguish them as literary characters, presenting a compelling case for the consideration of the hybridized and deformed figure as a threat to patriarchal systems. Contemporary readings through the lens of feminist, gender, and disability frameworks offer …

Gender And Colonialism: An Intergenerational Conversation In African Literature, Khadizatul Kubra

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is thought that African literature tends to be dominated by the masculine-oriented politics that also characterizes African public political life. In some cases, this is true, but there is a feminist movement in Africa, and many African women writers are using global feminist principles and global anti-colonial principles to write a different kind of literature. As a consequence, recent novels such as Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993), set in Zimbabwe, and Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019), revise past, often male, African writers’ approaches to depicting the genders, even as they also criticize, implicitly or explicitly, still-widespread colonialist …

Heurodis's Body: Reading "Sir Orfeo" With Three Significant Losses, Grace J. Bromage

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

Owning The Body: Bodily Autonomy And Consent In The Works Of Octavia Butler, Korryn Plantenberg

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

During the 1980’s the Second Wave feminist movement provided more interest in interdisciplinary movements towards equity in the case of gender. One movement that slowly grew was Womanism, which included the intersection between race and gender. Specifically, the experiences of black women in the United States. Inspired by this movement authors such as Octavia Butler was a black science fiction author who wrote literature focused on black women. Alongside her preoccupation, with race in science fiction, Butler explores the nature of consent and bodily autonomy in utopian and dystopian futures. Within her novels, she uses Womanism to engage with futuristic …

An Unfaithful Feminist : Neoliberal Feminism, Identity, And Postmodernism In Jenny Offill’S Dept. Of Speculation, Anne Bobis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jenny Offill’s novel Dept of Speculation explores the life of a female college professor who looks back on her marriage after her husband has an affair. Events are told through brief fragments. Much of the critical discourse surrounding the novel is concerned with its fragmentary form or postfeminism. In this essay, I assert that Dept. of Speculation is a reaction to neoliberal feminism because of the narrator’s multiple challenges throughout the novel. Some vocal figures within neoliberal feminism assume a woman can balance upward mobility in a career and life as a mother. The ability to maintain this work-life balance …

“Too Good To Kill”: Literary Gerontology And Late Style In Margaret Atwood’S Gilead Novels, Serina Item

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, and her 2019 sequel, The Testaments, illuminate the author’s continued interest in the connection between a woman’s age and the notion of her usefulness and complicity within a hegemonically masculine society. Focusing on literary gerontology and the author’s late style, this essay highlights Atwood’s persistent rejection of patriarchal representations of older women in literature. I analyze the ways in which Atwood’s “ustopian” (Atwood’s literary genre invention, combining “dystopia” and “utopia”) novels develop older women characters beyond “old age as motif and metaphor” by removing age and gender as significant barriers to …

Giving Voice To The Body: Slam Poetry In The Poet X, Stefanny Leung Yu

Student Theses

When the world silences her, can slam poetry become her voice? Elizabeth Acevedo, an author and poet, uses her beautiful piece of slam poetry to explore how language can empower marginalized voices, speaking on behalf of those who are usually silenced. The Poet X is a verse novel that narrates the powerful story of a young Afro-Latina girl, Xiomara Batista, who navigates the intersecting pressures of school bullies, family issues, religious conservatism, patriarchal rules, and racialized body politics in her Harlem community. This research engages with Acevedo’s work to focus on how slam poetry serves as a powerful outlet and …

Strategies Of Liberation And Empowerment In Maya Angelou's And Audre Lorde's Black Feminist Literature, Lydia Jernigan

Student Works

The progression of second-wave feminism in America saw Black feminist writers such as Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde utilizing literature, and notably poetry, to resist against their oppression, due not only to their gender but also to their race. Lorde states in her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” that poetry, for women, “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” One of the aims of Lorde’s explicitly political poems—as …

Kurt Vonnegut, A Difficult Feminist: Investigating Female Characters In Bluebeard, Matthew Steven Medl

Theses and Dissertations

After a brief contextualization of Vonnegut’s work, this essay close-reads his 1987 novel, Bluebeard, and locates the feminism within. I argue that Vonnegut establishes women as agents of generative change, breakers of marital conventions, artistic sages, authors, expressionists, interlopers, and nonviolent activists. I primarily examine Circe Berman and Marilee Kemp, supplementing with evidence from Edith Taft and Dorothy, as well as wider scholarship.

The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin

Munn Scholars Awards

Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.

Neither Meek Nor Docile: An Analysis Of Margaret Hale And Jane Eyre In Elizabeth Gaskell’S North And South And Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Mckell Ferguson

English Department Theses

The Victorian period was an era of societal change in Great Britain. Viewing gender in hetero- and CIS- normative terms, the “woman question” – what to do with unmarried women – became a topic that was widely debated. Activists such as Barbara Leigh Smith, Francis Power Cobbe and Josephine Butler advocated for better education and employment opportunities for women emphasizing the need for women to find dignity and fulfilment outside of the private sphere to which they were relegated. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell reflect the issues facing middle-class women during this period, …

Communicative Kissing With Alien Poetry: New Muses In Neil Gaiman’S “How To Talk To Girls At Parties”, Leanna Ashley Herbert

Theses and Dissertations

The representation of women in the fiction of Neil Gaiman is a topic that seems to obsess scholars, critics, fans, and (likely) the author himself. It is imperative that closer scholarly attention be paid to the figure of the muse, a figure defined in contemporary culture by her representability, as she appears across Gaiman’s works. This thesis traces the evolution of m/Muses or muse-like figures in the fiction of Neil Gaiman, arguing that the short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” imagines an empowering evolution for those who are objectified or silenced by the assumption that they are …

Terry Pratchett’S Witches Novels And The Consensus Fantasy Universe: A Feminist Perspective, Clair J. Hutchings-Budd Ms

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

Abstract

Between 1987 and 2015, Terry Pratchett published eleven novels and one short story within his Discworld universe that came to be known as his “Witches” sub-series. In these texts he engaged with the narrative imperatives, preoccupations, and tropes which together make up the consensus fantasy universe, and those deeper mythologies and legendarium with which the author necessarily has an intertextual relationship. This paper focuses upon one aspect of that consensus universe, which is the difference between male and female magical practitioners—witches and wizards—in the fantasy canon, and how Pratchett sought to challenge and subvert the stereotypes of the genre …

To Be Necessary: The Remarkable Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Although overshadowed by her daughter, Mary Shelley, in the public imagination, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) stands as a significant figure in her time who left a significant legacy. Her writings advocating for women’s education, equal rights, and career opportunities established her as the progenitor of the modern women’s rights movement. Wollstonecraft’s ideas resonated in the era of the Atlantic world revolutions and laid the foundation for later advances of women in the Western world; therefore, it is important to study her contributions in the present.

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Critical Reading Of Nawal El Saadawi’S Woman At Point Zero, Sawsan Al-Darayseh

Association of Arab Universities Journal for Arts مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للآداب

Women all over the world, and Egypt specifically, have been looked upon as second-class citizens for a long time in comparison to men. However, this paper argues that it is unethical for feminists, specifically here Nawal El Saadawi, to discuss this issue in an extreme way where the truth is lost. Hating men and holding them wholly at fault for the plight of women while giving alibis to and even praising women for their selfdestructive decisions is not a solution. The paper critically reads El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, discussing the very methods and elements that El Saadawi uses …

A Stylistic Analysis Of Adrienne Rich's "Planetarium" And "Power", Malek Zuraikat, Ekab Al-Shawashreh, Shrooq Awamleh

Association of Arab Universities Journal for Arts مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للآداب

Adrienne Rich utilizes free verse to surprise her readers by covering the intertwined relationship between politics and society, which results in encapsulating everyday practices in most of her poems. She tries to articulate the depressed voice of women, thus making this group noticeable by people. The study discusses Rich's poems "Planetarium" and "Power", focusing on pronouns, spacing, enjambment, and diction. It explains how the change in pronouns, for instnace, serves the theme of uniting women's experience of oppression and resistance and how the enjambment and the choice of diction are used to add emphasis on women's suffering and their consequent …

Feminism And Identity In Victorian Novels Of Brontës, The Interchangeability Of The Binaries: Center And Margin, Reality And Appearance, Original And Copy, Mutsuko Takahashi

Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation approaches feminism and identity in the novels of the Brontë sisters, in which characters have struggled with the tension between outsider and insider. The study will discuss, in Part I, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), and in Part II, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), seen through multiple lenses such as feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, etc. Various versions of powerless male protagonists in the Brontës are examined, for they help illuminate the situation of the female protagonists. Marginal males try to take over the central position by using …

Redeeming Femininity: A Steinian Catholic Feminist Reading Of Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction, Amanda Pugh

Dissertations and Theses

By situating an analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction in conversation with Edith Stein’s theology of gender, this project contributes to the critical conversation that interprets O’Connor’s fiction through various feminist frameworks. I respond by proposing an alternative feminist framework that centers O’Connor’s sacramental or incarnational vision of the human body and her characters’ movement from fallenness to redemption. Stein’s theology posits that men and women live their fallenness and redemption in differentiated ways that correspond to their embodied masculinity and femininity, respectively. For men, participating in redemption involves imitating the sacrificial love of Christ’s crucifixion. For women, participating in …

Sylvia Plath As A Confessionalist Writer : The Queen Bee, Alexandra Tangarife

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Sylvia Plath is a renowned Confessionalist poet from the early-mid 20th century in America. She frequently compares to her predecessor, Robert Lowell, and her friend and colleague, Ann Sexton. Confessionalism was an emotionally authentic form of poetry that split off from prior poetry, such as Modernism. Modernist founder T.S Eliot wrote in his “Tradition and The Individual Talent,” “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (1). Despite this mentality, Confessionalists addressed the elephant in the room: the fragmented and emotionally disturbed nation. …

The Commercialization And Imposed Voices Of Femininity In The Summer I Turned Pretty, Danielle Mcclelland

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This essay seeks to explore and analyze the novel The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han. The novel’s ability to maintain relevance as a piece of popular YA literature despite its release over ten years ago makes it an interesting title to study because it demonstrates the concept of a “formulaic text,” which is defined as having, “...simple syntax, frequent repetition, and explicit authorial interpretations” (Smith 31). Additionally, Han’s novel displays the commercialization of femininity and enforces the common heteronormative relationship narrative displayed in this strain of romantic fiction. This essay aims to explore these social phenomena and how …

“I'M Kind Of A Big Deal In This Industry:” How Killing Eve’S Villanelle Subverts The Femme Fatale Archetype, Molly Kent

Honors Theses and Capstones

From the instant Catherine Tramell stepped on screen with shaven, glossy legs and a perfectly curled, bouncy, blonde bob, Basic Instinct (1992) became a cult classic, centered around the dangerous and seductive femme fatale who makes the movie tick. Nearly 25 years later, a new monstress steps on screen as a suited, quirky, slicked-back assassin with a penchant for curly-haired women and a destiny to reform the femme fatale trope: Villanelle of Killing Eve.

The co-lead and resident femme fatale of Killing Eve, Villanelle, subverts the traditional role of the femme fatale in a decentering of the patriarchy …