Undergraduate Theses

ABSTRACT: The cultural turbulence of the Nineteenth-Century along with the increase and prevalence of literature written by women, gave rise to a complex discourse concerning women in the public domain. The amalgamation of the “Woman Question,” the nature of criticism, and prejudice towards the practice of female authorship engendered within the class of women writers both anxieties and an awareness of the singularity of their position. This shared cognizance within the set of woman writers developed three distinct effects: the widespread use of pseudonyms and anonymity; the fictional representation of the capable female author and artist in the literature of women; and finally, the seeking of a distinctive, sophisticated feminine literary voice and tradition. Using George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” sections of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, and Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, this thesis argues that as women sought recognition of their talent in the midst of conflicting social conditions, they discovered truths about the essence of female literature and the identity of the woman writer. These truths include the importance of reconciling love and art, or femininity and career; the necessity of accepting one’s womanhood and not imitating men; and the idea that the perfect literary tradition is the meeting of ostensibly “masculine” and “feminine” qualities in literature. The latter point is perhaps one of the most important queries answered in this thesis; Nineteenth-Century women were beginning to understand that men and women have the same skills, deserve the same respect, and do not in actuality write within the confines of a “manly” or “womanly” style.

ABSTRACT: This thesis investigates the presence and role of ekphrastic writing in postcolonial novels. In this thesis I propose to investigate John Everett Millais’ The Boyhood of Raleigh in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the Igbo pots in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, in order to explore how figurative art, in the context of these novels, both broadens the postcolonial discourse and serves as a medium of interaction between the colonizer and the colonized. I intend to look closely at Millais’ painting, which has come to represent the British expanding and colonizing influence, in the context of a novel, Midnight’s Children, centered on post-independence India, and at Richard’s, a white British man, obsession with the archaeological testimony of the Igbo autochthonous, pre-colonization, culture and art, as narrated in Half of a Yellow Sun. I intend to explore how the colonized relates to the art of the colonizer, as in Rushdie’s novel, and how the art of the colonized is observed and appropriated by the colonizer, as in Adichie’s. I propose to analyze both these cases of representation of visual forms of art as exemplifying instances of how figurative art can be explored, in postcolonial literature, as a means of cultural interaction between the colonized and the colonizer.