This comparative study examines Scarlett O'Hara as a literary archetype, revealing critical prejudice against strong female characters. There are two portrayals of Scarlett O'Hara: the famous one of ...the film Gone with the Wind and Margaret Mitchell's more sympathetic character in the book. In A Study of Scarletts, Margaret D. Bauer examines both, noting that although Scarlett is just sixteen at the start of the novel, she is criticized for behavior that would have been excused if she were a man. Her stalwart determination in the face of extreme adversity made Scarlett an icon and an inspiration to female readers. Yet today she is often condemned as a sociopathic shrew. Bauer offers a more complex and sympathetic reading of Scarlett before examining Scarlett- like characters in other novels, including Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, Toni Morrison's Sula, and Kat Meads' The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan. Through these selections, Bauer touches on themes of female independence, mother-daughter relationships, the fraught nature of romance, and the importance of female friendship.
The purpose of this essay is twofold: to identify the key characteristics of the collection of work called Ghost-wave feminism and to apply this concept to an exploration of two stories that are ...representative of this larger female tradition, Nancy Mann Waddel Wilson Woodrow's "Secret Chambers" (1909) and Glasgow's "The Past" (1920). These authors work toward revising Gothic tropes in ways that speak back to the tradition's originators and make it a powerful vehicle for expressing the terrors and complexities of female existence in America. In these texts female characters are able to achieve agency through a type of "spectral reality" not given to their male counterparts.
...Glasgow, a Virginian who in the early twentieth century held a strong claim to inclusion in the literary canon, depicted herself as a pioneer-as a southern woman who never knew that those of her ...sex could write for publication, yet accomplished that feat in Richmond, where the principal intellectual activity was glorifying the Lost Cause. ...it seems highly likely that their bond of friendship helped to embolden them in their independence and socially transgressive ways.
Through an extraordinarily wide-ranging study that invokes canonical (e.g, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein), popular (e.g., Edna Ferber, Ruth Suckow, Fannie Hurst), and sometimes obscure ...(e.g., Kate Cleary, Dorothy Scarborough, Batterman Lindsay) women authors writing in a diverse variety of forms (novels, short stories, prostitution testimonials, etc.) and connects these women's writings to the early film industry, Campbell "restores a missing context" (325) of naturalism and proves that literary critics indeed have much to gain through such an expanded, interdisciplinary understanding of naturalism's cultural categorization. Campbell's inclusive treatment of naturalism is a welcome addition to contemporary studies in the field, including Mary E. Papke's Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (2003), which considers naturalism in relation to imperialism, sentimentalism, chaos theory, and detective and social justice fiction, and Eric Carl Link's The Vast and Terrible Drama, which argues that the confusion surrounding naturalism's classification stems from its links to multiple fields, including philosophy, science, and literature. Most disappointingly, Sui Sin Far is given only one paragraph in the entire text, and most of the readings of "ethnic" protagonists concern the tenuous whiteness of turn-of-the-century immigrants like the Irish, not those explicitly raced like African-Americans. ...Campbell fails to adequately address a crucial component-race-that would make Bitter Tastes truly representative of the breadth of naturalistic literary production.
Antebellum Southern writers like William Gilmore Simms and John Pendleton Kennedy raided Scott for plot structures and characterisation techniques, while the relatively recent events of the War of ...Independence furnished a convenient historical background.10 Nor is this unusual; "Every writer," observes George Dekker, "borrows details of plot and characterization as well as the favourite topoi and 'matter' of the period from his contemporaries and recent predecessors.
Haunting the Hospital BANKS, EMILY
The Mississippi quarterly,
07/2016, Letnik:
69, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In Ellen Glasgow's The Shadowy Third, we encounter a ghost hardly frightening in the traditional sense. A little girl "dressed in Scotch plaid, with a bit of red ribbon in her hair," Dorothea is ...marked as an uncanny figure only by the "look of profound experience, of bitter knowledge" in her eyes (56). In this story, the ghost functions not to scare but to expose the terrifying conditions of subjugation and confinement experienced by women in a culture of male dominance. Interacting exclusively with women, as is often the habit of literary ghosts, Dorothea's presence creates a haunted space that subverts the male gaze and facilitates a powerful relationship between two women: the Victorian relic, Mrs. Maradick, and her independent modern nurse, Margaret. In "The Shadowy Third," Glasgow demonstrates skepticism for modern medical practitioners--undoubtedly informed by her own lengthy history of illness--through the characters of Doctor Maradick and the esteemed alienist Doctor Brandon.
IN HIS ATTEMPT TO DEFINE WHITENESS IN MOBY-DICK, HERMAN MELVILLE concedes that "not yet have they solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul" ...(169). Melville struggles gamely with the proliferation of its transcultural significations that include innocence, blankness, mourning, and alterity. Though inconclusive, Melville's endeavor to define whiteness is not a failure; rather, it reveals what Mike Hill terms the concept's "epistemological stickiness and ontological wiggling." In attempting the impossible, which is the formulation of a universal definition, such propositions reduce the complexity of whiteness and compound its "epistemological stickiness." For Peter Kolchin, the solution lies in paying closer attention to "historical and geographical context. " What is required is an approach to whiteness that will demonstrate its inherently differential nature through an engagement with a particular place and time.
