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Description
This thesis addresses the concept of "silence" in Vercors' 1943 novel on resistance in occupied France, The Silence of the Sea, contesting the arguments of scholars who designate silent resistance as expressly "female" and applicable only to women. Although women in France were supposed to be apolitical and removed from activities such as public debates and direct warfare, an examination of allegorical and historical female figures, together with male and female interpretations of those figures, suggests that men and women in France understood patriotism, and especially female patriotism, through a conceptual framework that was informed by and manifested itself in female images of the French Republic. My study on the gendered applications of female images focuses upon the French use of female allegorical figures, and resistance symbols such as the Lorraine Cross, to denote opposition to the Prussian/German acquisition of lands that the French people perceived as French, exploring commonalities between images from the Franco-Prussian War and World War II. Utilizing images relating to the republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, including Marianne, the female allegory of the people's Republic, and Joan of Arc, a historical character who became a female allegorical figure, this thesis argues that female allegories of republican resistance to tyranny were combined with resistance to Prussia (Germany) during the "Terrible Year" of 1870-1871. Furthermore, these images combined masculine militant elements, with perceived feminine qualities such as purity and saintly endurance, giving rise to divergent interpretations of female imagery among men and women, and a perceived association between women and silent, indirect resistance. Bourgeois men applied the militant aspects of female images to real women in abstract form. However, with the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, resistance techniques and symbols that had been gendered feminine gained precedence and became associated with men as well as women. Recent scholars have utilized the masculine/feminine dichotomy in French female allegories to classify World War II-era resistance as either "active" or "passive," failing to consider the conflation of the masculine/temporal and feminine/spiritual spheres in Vercors' novel and in documents such as "Advice to the Occupied."
ContributorsStevenson, Julia (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Fuchs, Rachel (Committee member) / Wright, Kent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This dissertation examines the history of urban nightlife in New York City and San Francisco from 1890 to 1930 and charts the manifestation of modernity within these cities. While some urbanites tepidly embraced this new modern world, others resisted. Chafing at this seemingly unmoored world, some Americans fretted about one of the most visible effects of modernity on the city—the encroachment of sex onto the street and in commercial amusements—and sought to wield the power of the state to suppress it. Even those Americans who reveled in the new modern world grappled with what this shifting culture ultimately meant for their lives, seeking familiarity where they could find it. Thus, this dissertation details how both Americans who embraced the modern world and those who perceived it as a threatening menace similarly sought a mediated modernity, seeking out and organizing spaces within modern amusements that ultimately reinforced existing cultural hierarchies.
Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same.
Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same.
ContributorsHoodenpyle, Morgan (Author) / Gullett, Gayle (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This thesis explores the relationship between the ideological justification for civil disobedience in British India in the twentieth century and the contemporary responses to the nonviolent resistance. By evaluating the elements of preparation and reaction to the Champaran, Kheda, Rowlatt Hartal, Khilafat, Bardoli, Dandi, and Quit India satyagraha campaigns, an understanding of the goals and values of civil disobedience and noncooperation was established. By studying the intellectual works of Indian independence leaders, correspondence between British government officials, widely distributed newspapers (The Times of London, The Times of India, Young India, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The New York Times, etc) and first hand participant accounts, I was able to see how the ideas of independence leaders translated into popular participation and policy reform. A wide range of opinions existed amongst British contemporaries ranging from the encouragement of the Indian agitators to a deep hatred of the resistance. In addition, this thesis possesses an accompanying historical comic book which chronicles one family's participation in the Dandi March of 1930. The creative project attempts to introduce audiences to a historical case study of non-violent resistance. Similar to how Mahatma Gandhi chose salt to represent the oppression of all Indians by the British, the Salt March of 1930 was selected as the topic of the comic book in order to introduce all audiences to the experiences of twentieth century satyagrahis. Mass civil disobedience continues to be used as a tool for political change around the world today. "Soul Force" studies the pioneering efforts in mass nonviolent resistance within colonial India.
ContributorsMiller, Kaycee Elaine (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis director) / Machander, Sina (Committee member) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
In the sixty-seven years following the end of World War II, West Germany and Japan underwent a remarkable series of economic and social changes that irrevocably altered their respective ways of life. Formerly xenophobic, militaristic and highly socially stratified societies, both emerged from the 20th Century as liberal, prosperous and free. Both made great strides well beyond the expectations of their occupiers, and rebounded from the overwhelming destruction of their national economies within a few short decades. While these changes have yielded dramatic results, the wartime period still looms large in their respective collective memories. Therefore, an ongoing and diverse dialectical process would engage the considerable popular, official, and intellectual energy of their post-war generations. In West Germany, the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (VGB) emerged to describe a process of coming to terms with the past, while the Japanese chose kako no kokufuku to describe their similar historical sojourns. Although intellectuals of widely varying backgrounds in both nations made great strides toward making Japanese and German citizens cognizant of the roles that their militaries played in gruesome atrocities, popular cinematic productions served to reiterate older, discredited assertions of the fundamental honor and innocence of the average soldier, thereby nurturing a historically revisionist line of reasoning that continues to compete for public attention. All forms of media would play an important role in sustaining this “apologetic narrative,” and cinema, among the most popular and visible of these mediums, was not excluded from this. Indeed, films would play a unique recurring role, like rhetorical time capsules, in offering a sanitized historical image of Japanese and German soldiers that continues to endure in modern times. Nevertheless, even as West Germany and Japan regained their sovereignty and re-examined their pasts with ever greater resolution and insight, their respective film industries continued to “reset” the clock, and accentuated the visibility and relevancy of apologetic forces still in existence within both societies. However, it is important to note that, when speaking of “Germans” and “Japanese,” that they are not meant to be thought of as being uniformly of one mind or another. Rather, the use of these words is meant as convenient shorthand to refer to the dominant forces in Japanese and German civil society at any given time over the course of their respective post- war histories. Furthermore, references to “Germany” during the Cold War period are to be understood to mean the Federal Republic of Germany, rather than their socialist counterpart, the German Democratic Republic, a nation that undertook its own coming to terms with the past in an entirely distinct fashion.
ContributorsPiscopo, Michael (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Moore, Aaron (Committee member) / Machander, Sina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
This thesis is concerned with literary representations of the passions in a selection of eighteenth-century French epistolary fiction. In close readings of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu’s 1721 Persian Letters, Francoise de Graffigny’s 1747 Letters of a Peruvian Woman and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 Julie, or the New Heloise, I consider how the passions serve, in the context of narrative, to ground claims about human nature and sexual difference, and to speculate on the social and political apologetics at work within each text. The importance of sensibility in the culture and literature of the eighteenth century has to some extent eclipsed the role of the passions in literary representations of human nature and sexual difference. However central sensibility became to eighteenth-century imaginations, it did not eclipse but rather complemented developing moral and natural philosophical conceptions of the passions. As each of novels explored here attest, the passions remained central to literary and philosophical claims about human nature and sexual difference in the eighteenth century, providing a common vocabulary for making claims about the state of the social and political order. Entrenched, polysemous, and changing, discourses of the passions in Early Modern Europe served multiple and divergent ends. The goal of this thesis is to contextualize their representations in the narratives of three eighteenth-century novels as interventions in moral philosophy, shaped not only by epistemological philosophy but also the imperatives of a French literary tradition of gallantry.
ContributorsLindsay, Ruth (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Barnes, Andrew (Committee member) / Wright, J K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022