Date of Award
Fall 12-15-2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
English
College
College of Humanities and Fine Arts
First Advisor
Kate Faber Oestreich
Abstract/Description
When I was in elementary school most of the books that I voluntarily read featured female characters. Part of the reason was that it was expected of me and those books (about girls/women) were the ones recommended to me. Another part was that female characters were the ones I could most closely relate to. They gave me ideas about what it is to be a woman, and subtly led me to approach the question of what kind of woman I wanted to be. It took me years to really pick up on the stereotypes and recurring female characters, and it is only recently that I began to realize how detrimental these stereotypes are. The fiction included in my portfolio are responses based on my question: what does literature tell us about women and their "place" in the patriarchal world? More specifically, where do women fit in a heteronormative society, in a world where men are the traditional rulers of the overall system?
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Hunter, Hannah, "Beyond Marriage and Motherhood: The Motifs Involved in the Portrayal of Women in Literature" (2014). Honors Theses. 17.
https://digitalcommons.coastal.edu/honors-theses/17