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The Woman as Hero in Twentieth Century Women's Fiction

Handy, Patricia M.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1566463066608664

Abstract Details

1979, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, English.
A major focus in twentieth-century fiction has been on development of the "self" in characters, and this has been especially obvious in fiction by and about women. This study does not speculate on the reasons why modern and contemporary fiction has focused in this direction, although all speculative theories about man's alienation from society, God, and self apply. Rather this study concetrated on an expansion of literary critical evaluation of female character and her search for "self." The critical mode most usually appropriate to an examination of the individuation process is the archetypal, which is based on the precepts of Carl G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, but this approach is not well-suited, unless it is modified, to an examination of women's fiction because it ignores the psychic development of Woman/Heroine. Instead of allowing her equal status with the male hero, she is assigned roles which are essentially passive in nature, and which are extensions of the male hero's psyche. As a result, archetypal criticism fails to allow female protagonists the stature of "hero" and tends to perceive them as victim/heroines. This study examined the emergence of the female psyche in the twentieth-century women's novel, and analyzed the individuation process in a sequence of representative works from the United States and Great Britain by utilizing a combination of a revisionist, feminist archetypal framework and a close textual reading. Authors treated were Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf for the early period, Sylvia Plath and Eudora Welty for the middle period, Lois Gould, May Sarton, and Margaret Atwood for the contemporary period. Special attention was paid to the endings of the novels and the hero's attempts to re-integrate herself back into her society, a crucial stage in the ultimate success of the mythic hero's individuation.
Donna Fricke (Advisor)
Literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Handy, P. M. (1979). The Woman as Hero in Twentieth Century Women's Fiction [Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1566463066608664

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Handy, Patricia. The Woman as Hero in Twentieth Century Women's Fiction. 1979. Bowling Green State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1566463066608664.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Handy, Patricia. "The Woman as Hero in Twentieth Century Women's Fiction." Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 1979. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1566463066608664

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1566463066608664
724
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