A. S. Byatt attempts to recover lost voices in Possession and Angels and Insects (a collection of two novellas) by examining the limiting roles of women in literature and society. Chapter one examines Possession in which the characters search for their connections to the literary past, ultimately locating them through a lesser-known, female, Victorian poet. In chapter two I consider "Morpho Eugenia," the first novella in Angels and Insects. Byatt illustrates how the male gaze names women and defines their roles. In the second novella, "The Conjugial Angel," analyzed in chapter three, Byatt (re)tells Emily Jesse's story, one formerly appropriated by Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam. I conclude that Byatt attempts to relocate her heroines from the margins to the center by deconstructing hierarchical patterns of storytelling. Rather than replacing male-monopolized narratives with female ones, Byatt undermines the dominating viewpoint by demonstrating the way in which it obscures all other perspectives.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.26302 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Pearce, Margaret |
| Contributors | Westphal, Sarah (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001434131, proquestno: MM99919, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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