Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1994. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2848. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves).

Descriptions of food are very prominent in Barbara Pym's twelve novels. They are used on one hand for purely comic purposes. But more significantly, they evolve into a language with a structure and set of rules. To expose the language of food inherent in Pym's fiction, I have employed a combination of social history, structural anthropology and semiology. Roland Barthes' application of structural linguistics to food, and his concern with its' symbolic nature hold particular bearing to this study. The language of food functions on three interrelated levels in Pym: a social level where groups are defined and hierarchised; a gendered level where the sexes are defined and differentiated; and a more personal level where an individual either communes or alienates him/herself from a given group. Identity, whether national, social, sexual or individual, is confirmed in relation to eating habits and roles surrounding food preparation and consumption. With the help of complex strategies of irony, Pym uses the language of food to signal an interest in social and gender reform by presenting the artificiality of social constructs and gender stereotypes.

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In my study on Barbara Pym's novels, the focus is first on the two basic ironies in love-marriage relations: irony of dilemma in which marriage is seen as the end of romantic love; and irony of situation in which excellent but plain-looking women are deprived of the chance to express their basic need for love. Chapter I of this study introduces the major themes and ironies in Pym's novels and the nature and functions of her irony. The following six chapters examine the two major ironies in six of Pym's twelve novels: Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, Less Than Angels, A Glass of Blessings, and A Few Green Leaves. While discussing the uniqueness of each of Pym's heroines, I also explore how Pym underwent changes in her views of love and marriage and how she attempted to keep a balance between her romanticism and her sense of irony. Pym's other six novels are discussed in Chapter VIII, the concluding chapter.

In this study of several novels each by Barbara Pym, Fay Weldon, and Margaret Atwood, I focus on two areas: the ways in which female protagonists break out of their victimization by individuals, by institutions, and by cultural tradition, and the ways in which each author uses a structural pattern in her novels to propel her characters to solve their dilemmas to the best of their abilities and according to each woman's personality and strengths.

The last works of Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, written while each was knowingly dying, both continue and transform a discourse of illness and cure traceable through their canon. Illness figures both literally and metaphorically in their narratives; in Austen as failures in wholeness and in Pym as failures in love. After undergoing the metaphorically medical treatments of purging and vivifying in Austen and inoculating in Pym, their female protagonists achieve conditions of health and wholeness by closure of the narrative. In the dying works, individual metaphorical illnesses become a general societal condition of fragmentation, and cure becomes more elusive. The shared use of a village undergoing profound change reflects each writer's own bodily transformation as certain death approaches, and the restoration of health to the village-as-body becomes one of achieving balance or homeostasis. This is effected in the narrative by the hinted-at curative powers of nature in Sanditon and of restored faith in A Few Green Leaves. On a theoretical level, both texts reflect their narratives of dis-ease and cure. Pym's last text remained unpublished before her death and therefore "ill" because not functioning, but second opinions and faith in her reputation confirmed its public health. Austen's Sanditon as a fragment embodies its own discourse of dis-ease, or failure of wholeness, and requires a curative act on the part of the reader to restore it to some sense of ideal wholeness or health.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-198).

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