This thesis puts in dialogue two texts – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – comparing them through the analytical...Show moreThis thesis puts in dialogue two texts – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – comparing them through the analytical perspective of dystopian literature. The thesis demonstrates that dystopian fiction extrapolates from history to build nightmarish societies, but also that certain historical experiences can be revitalized and actualized through a dystopian conceptualization. In fact, Atwood’s dystopian novel can be used as a “dystopian lens” to understand Jacobs’s testimony of women’s lives under chattel slavery as a “concrete dystopia”, that is a historical experience characterized by dystopian features. In order to do so, Atwood’s text is at first situated within existing scholarship and theory on dystopian literature and thoroughly analysed by highlighting how the text encourages reflection on women’s sexual and reproductive exploitation. Successively, I shift the focus to the context of American chattel slavery by reading Jacobs’s Incidents as dystopian in terms of setting and narrative devices and trajectories. By doing so, Jacobs’s testimony is liberated from its historical contingency and can be actualized. Atwood’s dystopian novel as analytical lens illuminates the ways in which coercive power, psycho-physical alienation, body commodification and systemic destruction of identity characterise women’s experience of slavery in Incidents. Moreover, it invites us to reflect on the ways sexual violence and appropriation of motherhood shape the slave woman’s construction of the subject as site of production and reproduction of oppression. However, the analytical comparison of the two texts sheds also light on the ways hope is performed by the narrative’s protagonists through storytelling. After being addressed by their testimonies, we, the witnessing readers, should be able to recognize the dystopian and utopian potential in our own reality as regards women’s sexual and reproductive self-determination and freedom, which seem to be continuously under threat.Show less
This thesis analyses Gloria Anzaldúa’s redefinition of "home" in her ground-breaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and applies it to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street....Show moreThis thesis analyses Gloria Anzaldúa’s redefinition of "home" in her ground-breaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and applies it to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. Anzaldúa redefines home as a space of contradictions, instead of comfort, and this notion of home can also be seen in The House on Mango Street, especially towards the end of the novel. Importantly, home in the borderlands Anzaldúa and Esperanza inhabit is closely connected with their fractured sense of identity. However, both Anzaldúa and Esperanza eventually are able to make a home in the borderlands and resolve their identity struggles, albeit in different ways. Anzaldúa accomplishes this by theorizing what she calls a “mestiza consciousness,” which allows her to accept her multiple identities and to make a home in the contradictory space of the borderlands, while Esperanza makes her home by writing about growing up in the poor urban Latino neighborhood of Mango Street and thus comes to terms with her identity conflicts by constructing an identity for herself as a Chicana writer.Show less
Investigates the lives of Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz before, during, and after their marriage with their husbands, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Growing up in an environment...Show moreInvestigates the lives of Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz before, during, and after their marriage with their husbands, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Growing up in an environment characterized by social injustice, both women found their duty in challenging these injustices, although Coretta much earlier than Betty. However, both women were faced with gender norms in the 1950s and -60s which restricted them socially. After the death of their husbands, Coretta and Betty were determined to preserve the legacy of their husbands, and to build up a career for themselves, which they succeeded in.Show less
This thesis provides a close reading of Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents. In the novel, the García family is forced to flee to the United States to escape Rafael Trujillo’s...Show moreThis thesis provides a close reading of Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents. In the novel, the García family is forced to flee to the United States to escape Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorial regime in the Dominican Republic. The Garcías’ forced migration is a traumatic experience which has tremendous consequences for the entire family. This thesis concentrates on the cultural conflicts that arise with migration, focusing first on the contrast between the communal Latino culture and the individualistic North American culture, then on the different views on gender and sexuality in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and lastly on the importance of language, concluding that the main protagonist Yolanda’s identity is constituted in language.Show less
Anxieties about writing and privacy are often at the heart of Edith Wharton’s fiction. In the two works discussed in this thesis, Wharton’s early novels The Touchstone (1900) and The House of Mirth...Show moreAnxieties about writing and privacy are often at the heart of Edith Wharton’s fiction. In the two works discussed in this thesis, Wharton’s early novels The Touchstone (1900) and The House of Mirth (1905), private letters written by women acting outside the domestic sphere, a woman writer and an adulterous wife, play a central role. Wharton uses these letters to explore the boundaries between the private and public spheres and to ask questions about the position of woman writers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether they can function in the public realm and make themselves heard, or are destined to remain in the private sphere and be silent. The principal female characters in The Touchstone and The House of Mirth are, in a sense, both “authors” who are unable to break free from the limitations of their lives. In spite of their moral superiority, they remain subordinate to men who misread their writing, with disastrous consequences. Although Wharton criticises the male-dominated society of early twentieth-century America, she suggests that woman writers had better stayed within their domestic confinement, and, as a consequence, that private letters by women had better be burnt than published.Show less
This thesis gives an analysis of Sinclair lewis’s Character George Babbitt in his novel Babbitt. The analysis shows that Babbitt is unsatisfied with his life. This is because Babbitt is, unlike...Show moreThis thesis gives an analysis of Sinclair lewis’s Character George Babbitt in his novel Babbitt. The analysis shows that Babbitt is unsatisfied with his life. This is because Babbitt is, unlike Benjamin Franklin, not a self-made man. Franklin set an example of how to live your honourable. Ralph Waldo Emerson created with his essay Self Reliance a view that stated that man should be nonconforming to society. Emerson believed that conforming to society and neglecting personal dreams would lead to an unhappy life. Therefore, this thesis states that Babbitt is also unsatisfied because of his conformism to the materialistic American society of the 1920s.Show less
Literature on wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese American describes the opposition and resistance to the governmental policies mostly in terms of deficiency. This interpretative bias is...Show moreLiterature on wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese American describes the opposition and resistance to the governmental policies mostly in terms of deficiency. This interpretative bias is characterized by privileging the governmental account of the removal and incarceration over the Japanese American accounts while disregarding any incident short of civil disobedience as unimportant. Moreover, Japanese Americans' cooperation is seen as contributing greatly to the success of the procedures that ultimately deprived them of their liberty. This view, though widely held, does not provide an accurate description of Japanese American attitudes and actions during the fateful months after the Pearl Harbor attack. I will argue that the number of strikes, the extent of community organization, and the scope of individual and group protest inside the relocation camps testify that Japanese Americans' reaction to their wartime removal and incarceration was anything but passive. Japanese Americans protested against the injustice of their evacuation and incarceration, but they were systematically silenced, intimidated, and punished by the government. Moreover, the relocation program officials and generations of relocation scholars contributed to the marginalization of Japanese American resistance by uncritically accepting the governmental account of mass removal and incarceration which refused to recognize evacuee resistance as legitimate protest.Show less
This thesis examines how a memorial’s narration, stakeholders, and assigned purposes have led to the creation of the National September 11 Memorial. This thesis argues that the stakeholders, the...Show moreThis thesis examines how a memorial’s narration, stakeholders, and assigned purposes have led to the creation of the National September 11 Memorial. This thesis argues that the stakeholders, the creators (the LDMC and the designers), financers, family advocacy groups, and politicians, have constructed a complex memorial that not only serves a cathartic or political purpose, but that also raises questions about the current state of memorialization, its purpose and urgency, in modern American society. By defining the National 9/11 Memorial as a cathartic memorial, a narrative of healing has been created. At the same time, a narrative of victimization has been assigned to the memorial. This victimization offers political capital to the American political apparatus, but also proves to be problematic for certain family advocacy groups of firefighters and policemen who perished in the attacks; these family members desire a heroic memorial to remember their loved ones. These conflicting narratives raise questions about how the memorial will be used and interpreted in the future.Show less
