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- Genre: Academic theses
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This thesis examines the use of the earth goddess figure in John Varley's Gaean Trilogy (1979-1984). In the figure of Gaea (Varley's alien goddess villain), the reader is presented with a host of popular culture feminine archetypes with connotations connected to the long-standing tradition of associating femininity and materiality, and Varley's literary examination, operating through the exaggeration of these archetypes, displays their essential flaws. The ultimate antagonistic functions of these archetypal figures, relative to the human characters occupying the world underwritten by them, suggests that Varley uses such figural archetypes to deconstruct, via their varied failures, both the archetypes themselves and the evocative symbolic contexts associated with them, therein demonstrating their inherent limitations and providing a cautionary tale that highlights the fallibility of projective archetypal construction-even seemingly positive ones. By examining these archetypes as performances of gender, the thesis illustrates Varley's integration, at the end of the 1970's, of second-wave feminist theoretical ideals into science fiction (a genre with a long history dedicated to the experimental examination of all social typology) initially sets up and then subsequently breaks down the archetypal villain, thus pursuing a political dimension as well. The narrative experiment in typology promotes a turning away from the ancient symbolic associations of femininity to explore a new kind of goddess, one not reliant on pre-existing archetypes but one more attuned to the emergence of "gender" itself as a construct used to define the feminine itself.
ContributorsPope, Geraldine (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Cook, Paul (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.
ContributorsWagner, Johanna M. (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012