Re-remembering the past: Feminist storytelling appropriations in the fiction of Eudora Welty, Gayl Jones, Julia Alvarez, and Octavia Butler
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on memory and storytelling as aesthetics utilized by four authors: Eudora Welty, Gayl Jones, Julia Alvarez, and Octavia Butler to explore concepts and themes paramount during critical periods in feminist history. I argue that all of these authors, despite the various cultural, social, and historical differences among them, use storytelling as a method of revision: of memory itself, as well as myths, fairy tales, and entire histories. Each author in her own particular way makes use of the notion of what I term a "safe place" in order to revise androcentric stories, thus producing new stories told from a specifically female point of view. These safe places -the beauty salon, childhood, or the stage, for example - offer the female protagonists a space which is safe in the sense that it offers them comfort. At the same time, however, the characters in the narratives actively resist these safe spaces in search of a place that leads to their autonomy. I argue that the authors all use memory and storytelling as their vehicle for showing the impossibility and undesirability of remaining in these safe places, and ultimately, as a critical method of articulating, activating, and creating new memories about an individual or collective past. All of these memories - reactivated, re-functioned, and new - serve to highlight gender oppression and present the possibility for a feminist politics to emerge.
Recommended Citation
Sarah Himsel Burcon,
"Re-remembering the past: Feminist storytelling appropriations in the fiction of Eudora Welty, Gayl Jones, Julia Alvarez, and Octavia Butler"
(January 1, 2009).
ETD Collection for Wayne State University.
Paper AAI3355624.
http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/dissertations/AAI3355624
View More
