Domesticity has endured as a facet of everyday life in the late twentieth century and beyond, despite cultural acceptance of feminist beliefs and ideals which encourage womens movement away from the private sphere of the home. A tumultuous and remarkable cultural transformation has marked the four decades since the publication of Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique, a key text of early second-wave feminism. Equality and choice seem viable and attainable, yet many women today feel overwhelmed by responsibilities and the pressure to live up to the idealization of motherhood. Domesticity can be used as a tool of oppression, against which feminisms may provide useful forms of resistance; but feminisms and domesticity can also function in concert, which can strengthen their potential to transform individual womens lives and cultural attitudes about women. Interior Revolutions: Doing Domesticity, Advocating Feminism in Contemporary American Fiction examines how various late twentieth century writers represent this complex relationship and reveals domesticitys potential as a site of transformative feminist discourse and praxis.
Through a third-wave, feminist poststructuralist lens I analyze nine contemporary works of fiction from a variety of genres and one key feminist text, The Feminine Mystique, in order to reconsider the scope of American domestic fiction. Interior Revolutions illustrates how advocating feminism is a useful means of personal and political transformation for characters, readers, and American women. Representations of domesticity convey ways that our culture perceives women and their relationship to domestic space; such representations may in turn influence how women see their own relationship to domestic spaces and responsibilities. Engaging with these representations can spur women to reconsider and revise their conceptions of the ways that feminism and domesticity function in their own lives, potentially prompting them to advocate feminism. Interior Revolutions examines texts and discourses about feminisms, domesticity, and the meaningful connections between these concepts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-01222006-164241 |
| Date | 23 January 2006 |
| Creators | Westmoreland, Kalene |
| Contributors | Rick Moreland, Robin A. Roberts, John May, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Kevin Bongiorni |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-01222006-164241/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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