This thesis brings together eighteenth-century attitudes to the abduction of women portrayed by the law, by newspapers, and in fiction. I focus attention on the interest these different forms of narrative share in scrutinizing women’s behaviour and argue that the abduction plot is more important than its status as a stock literary convention would imply. Rather, it is a pliant, complex, and nuanced motif that allows writers the space to explore the difficult and contradictory position of women and attitudes to sexual relations. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part comprises two chapters that look at abduction from an historical perspective. The first chapter examines the legal context of abduction as a criminal act and the second chapter examines the social context of ‘abduction’ as a euphemism for a sexual adventure. This part includes preliminary analysis of abduction plots in Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Story (1789). The second part comprises three chapters in which I read a range of novels for their abduction plots and scenes. Chapter three focusses on reviewing and on lesser known novels that are not widely read today. It examines the uneasy dialogue between novels and the way they were conveyed to readers. I argue that reviewing presents a discourse of aggression towards women. Chapter four considers abduction plots in domestic fiction focussing on a short story from Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46), Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), and Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760). Chapter five considers the gothic abduction plot in Frances Burney’s Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (1796), Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher (1798) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). I take an historicist approach and underpin my analysis of fictional abduction plots with newspaper research that suggests ‘abduction’ had a meaning in social and cultural discourse that associated it with gossip and innuendo. This research demonstrates that newspapers played an important role in establishing the ambiguity of ‘abduction’ in the public consciousness. I argue that this journalistic discourse contributed to the suppression of abduction as a violent crime that endangered women. I suggest that the introduction of comprehensive reviewing created the space for a discourse of aggression to flourish. Many reviews are short, pithy comments criticising a novel as derivative, badly written, and immoral. I argue that a series of reviews appearing on a single page gives the impression that violence towards women is a normal everyday occurrence and abduction is a familiar hazard on the road to domestic felicity. I conclude that ‘abduction’ is a porous term in which disparate ideas – sexual aggression, violent crime, and euphemistic social commentary – are held in tension with each other. This tension enables a complex interpretation of what at first appears to be a simple narrative of violent male aggression and female culpability. The ambiguity this tension creates reveals the abduction plot as a versatile motif that challenges the social hierarchy and posits an alternative narrative for women.

archives@tulane.edu / This study presents an analysis of otome, dating simulator games popularized throughout Japan and South Korea, specifically exploring how the fictive relationship formed between the female main character (MC) and various male non-player characters (NPCs) enables the user to adopt the role of sexual and emotional agent. By examining the degree to which player choice influences a game’s plot, character development, and the tenor of the romantic relationship formed between MC and NPC, this research will seek to contextualize otome games as a digital affinity space uniquely positioned to address female fantasy and respond to culturally informed demographic changes relating to dating, sex, and marriage in South Korea and Japan. Using examples of Korean and Japanese otome titles across multiple platforms and related trends in popular culture and media, this paper will conclude with an examination of the gendered, emotional labor necessitated by the typical otome game structure as a method of reframing the commodification of the shojo archetype from a female perspective. / 1 / Meredith Connelly

This thesis analyses key documents from the United Nations Security Council (the Council) meetings during the period of 1999 to 2001. This thesis maps out the shift in the discourses that occurred within the Council, when adopting United Nations Security Council’s resolution (UNSCR) 1325. Moreover, this thesis argues that the nodal point ‘Civilians’ has become gendered by being replaced by the concept of ‘Women’. This thesis argues that UNSC is misrepresenting female agency within the discourses, which has contributed to a gendering of the concept of civilians. Sexual violence, defined as a wartime weapon, has also been part of the construction of stereotypical gender binaries, which has constituted a representation of women as either victims or saviors within the discourses. It becomes evident that the notion of female agency as for example independent, empowered or strong has been neglected. The discourse theory provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is applied in order to map out the existing discourses within the Security Council meetings. The aim of this study is to acknowledge the importance of that women have been and still are being excluded from the ontology of war. Furthermore, when the role of women in war is described, it is in relation to constructed stereotypical gender binaries.

Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century prose romance, Le Morte Darthur, depicts public and private identity as distinct and often incompatible halves of the Arthurian courtly community. In addition, masculine and feminine identity are represented as having different roles and functions within the text. Arthurian scholarship has predominantly focused on Malory’s portrayals of masculine and communal identity, as exemplified by central figures such as Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. However, in the past two decades an increasingly concentrated interest in the Morte’s female protagonists has emerged. As a contribution to this burgeoning site of critical inquiry I offer a tripartite case study of three marginal queens in this text: Igraine, Morgause and Morgan. Despite being the mother and sisters of King Arthur, these women have attracted comparatively little attention, either as individuals or as a family. This thesis argues that Malory presents noteworthy portraits of marginality in Igraine, Morgause and Morgan, which reveal the significance of space to the formation of identity in the Morte. Each of these protagonists is imagined in a variety of spaces in the Arthurian world: narrative, social, geographical, physical and emotional. Such spaces are contained within two principal romance locations, the court and quest wilderness, in which protagonists’ expressions and activities differ. Courts are typically governed by patriarchal authorities such as kings, knights, magicians and clerics, who privilege masculine public identity and political issues affecting the Arthurian community. By contrast, the quest wilderness encompasses places governed by what are termed ‘matriarchal’ authorities including queens, ladies, supernatural women and nuns, where private identity and individual emotions are more readily expressed. Marginal women speak and act in both the court and quest wilderness, but their identities are articulated differently in each. This thesis argues that Malory’s text presents moments when Igraine, Morgause and Morgan are marginalised by the Arthurian community critically, whilst the development of their individual identities in the quest wilderness is depicted sympathetically. As such, an examination of these protagonists’ movements across a variety of spatial boundaries in the world of the story as well as the narrative’s composite structure offers a revised reading of identity, gender and marginality in Malory studies. This thesis challenges two dominant assumptions about female voice and agency in the field. Firstly, that marginality is primarily a position of disempowerment, particularly for medieval women. Secondly, that marginal individuals are inherently subversive and threaten the Arthurian community.

Medieval tales of father-daughter incest depict more than offensively dominant fathers and voiceless, victimized young women: these stories often contain moments of surprising counternarrative. My analysis of incest narratives foregrounds striking instances of feminine resistance, where daughters act independently, speak unrestrainedly, adopt masculine behaviors, and invert masculine gazes. I argue that daughters of incestuous fathers participate in a complex back-and-forth of attraction and rejection that thrusts the fraught nature of the incest into sharp relief, revealing the ways in which medieval families--as well as the medieval church and state--constructed and deconstructed identities and sexualities. Extending Judith Butler's insights on how incest tales interrogate state and kinship networks, I show how the liminal position of daughters in the family destabilizes the sex/gender system as it functioned in both the family and the larger world, secular and sacred. My dissertation thus relocates daughters from the periphery to the center of the medieval family. Christian thematics likewise provide a key framework for both my argument and medieval audiences: biblical translations and retellings, saints' lives, and moral exempla offered familiar points of reference. By revealing how authors and artists employed well-known religious stories to impart political readings of sexuality and of the family, the four chapters of my dissertation assert daughters' key role in medieval Christian culture. I examine both Anglo-Saxon texts--the biblical epic Genesis A and the prose Life of Euphrosyne--as well as the late medieval poem Cursor mundi and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. My readings are enhanced by recourse to the medieval visual record offered by three manuscripts that illustrate the Lot story--British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv, the Old English Hexateuch, and Oxford Bodleian Library MSS Junius 11(the Genesis A manuscript) and Bodley 270b, a Biblé moralisée. Artistic renderings of father-daughter incest are no less unsettled than their literary counterparts, and demonstrate that the position of daughters was so fundamentally unstable that it often varied not only within an era, but also within a single manuscript. I argue that authors and artists radically reimagined the fundamental texts of the Middle Ages, including the Old Testament, to establish new narratives of sin and salvation, self and other, and power and submission.

The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine the representation of female madness in The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, and Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, with a particular emphasis on the depiction of madness as a form of revolt against the oppression of women in patriarchal societies. I focus specifically on the textual construction of female insanity in three twentieth-century reading of these depictions in relation to an influential contemporary example of Western psychological discourse, namely The Divided Self (1960). Drawing on the work of Western feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Lillian Feder, I engage with the broader questions of the female malady and dilemma. I pay attention not only to the various tropes, metaphors and images which are employed in the representation of madness, but also give attention to the explanations of madness that are offered in each text as well as the ways in which the various stories of madness are resolved. In the introduction, I offer an overview of the history of madness (and female madness in particular) and consider the importance of Laing and the antipsychiatry movement in challenging conventional definitions. In Chapter 1, I explore the depiction of madness in The Bell Jar, with the focus on the protagonist, Esther, whose madness, I argue, is represented as a conflict between female creativity and mid-twentieth century feminine ideals. In Chapter 2, I discuss Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel which gives a voice to the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Jane Eyre. I argue tha rather that a particular construction of madness that of the stereotypical wild madwoman is imposed upon her. In addition, I argue that her madness is presented as the result of being abandoned and cast as insane by her husband, whom she marries as part of an economic exchange. In Chapter 3, I explore the ways in which, in Surfacing madness is attributed both to her abortion as well as to the realisation of her own complicity in the patriarchal oppression of women and nature. In all three novels, I suggest, female madness is represented sympathetically as a reaction to, and revolt against patriarchal oppression. In addition, I argue that each novel makes a contribution to an emancipatory feminist politics by suggesting several routes of transcendence or escape. In my concluding chapter, I draw on the previous discussion of the various ways in which madness is figured in the novels in order to show how, in contesting stereotypical views, the three authors must create new vocabularies and metaphors of madness, thus engaging with patriarchal language itself. In this way, they not only contest normative constructions of the female malady but also bend patriarchal language into new shapes. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / English / MA / Unrestricted

In the hands of two prominent authors, Elizabeth Inchbald and Frances Burney, a critical paradox concerning female silence arises: while both authors operate very successfully in the publishing world, both do so while subverting impositions of silence, exhibiting a clear breach of propriety. An examination of Inchbald's novel A Simple Story and play Wives as they Were, Maids as they Are and Burney's novel Cecilia and play The Witlings, elucidates how each author adapts literary genres to portray female wit, exposing eighteenth-century impositions of silence in the process. By engendering female characters with the ability to employ humor as young women, Burney and Inchbald develop characters with agency and articulation.

This dissertation is a study of contemporary Pashto prose writing in a context of war and crisis based on a corpus of digitally published and/or printed short stories from the 1990s onwards. Out of this larger corpus, 16 stories have been selected and analysed under four topics: "The Terrorist", Female agency: Representations of and by, "The Madman", and Axtar: Longing for peace or imaging disillusion. A central idea is that the analysis should be text-oriented, but the contextualisation of the analysed texts is a secondary important focus. Chapter one presents the material and gives a general context to the study. In the second chapter, after a general conceptualisation of the short story genre, I discuss the borders between prose and poetry. In chapter three I provide an overview of Pashto literature where the aim is to pinpoint certain characteristics of literature in what I call a poeticised community, such as that of the Pashtuns. The fourth chapter contains an introduction to the four topics mentioned above, a summary of each of the four stories belonging to the specific topic with selected parts in direct translation from the Pashto original, as well as a discussion of form and contents of each topic separately. Chapter five consists of a general conclusion. An appendix with the original Pashto text of translated sections is found before the bibliography. One feature that has emerged from this study is the notion of how the narratives are often found to communicate and respond to their immediate surroundings, in time as well as in space. Another important conclusion is that devices normally regarded as belonging to the realm of poetry are not uncommon in Pashto short story writing.

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes her production as feminine and, therefore works to castrate her own femininity in her pursuit to create texts that are liberated from the critical assignation of “feminine productions.” Female self-castration is a violent act of displacement. As the author gains empowerment through the writing process, she creates characters that bear the mark of castration. The text opens a field of play in which the author utilizes the page as a way to cut, disfigure, or erase the feminine sexual body. On the authorial level, the feminine writer works through her self-castration process through the process of writing, editing, and publication. Within the text, her characters demonstrate a will toward liberation from authorial productive hegemony by carrying the mark of their creator’s castration and by taking on the power the process allocates to the writer.

This paper is an in-depth analysis of music artist Beyoncé Knowles's career in relation to female autonomy and sexuality. It delves into the symbolic annihilation of an accurate portrayal of female sexuality in the media and how that translates to young women being misinformed about their own sexual pleasure and satisfaction. This misinformation and its effects on the sexual experiences of college-aged women are demonstrated through a series of original creative short stories.