Rewriting the Scripts: Marriage, Motherhood, Family, and Trauma in the Novels of Dorothy Allison, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, and Sue Monk Kidd.

摘要

This researcher examines the changing roles of women within the family as reflected in contemporary American novels by women. The author argues that because the oppressive scripts of the traditional and monolithic family still pervade our culture, contemporary women novelists continue to write about the past, or more particularly, the era surrounding the second wave of feminism and that the selected novelists highlight the cultural narrative patterns of silence, repression, abuse, and traumatic aftermaths in order to underscore the stifling gender dynamics within a traditional family and the violence that often results. Thus, modern-day readers, those living in the purported post-feminist age, will be illuminated to the embedment of these issues in contemporary American society, will be encouraged to challenge these existing oppressions, and will perpetually continue to rewrite the scripts by embracing the shifting, dynamic, and perhaps more importantly, self-defined cultural narratives of women and family.;The first chapter and introduction of this project includes an overview of feminist literary theory, an outline of prescriptive cultural narratives of women in the family, as well as a brief summary of trauma theory and how it relates to literary study. The bulk of the project in the following five chapters uses these outlined theoretical frameworks to closely examine the intersection of gender, family, and trauma within these selected texts: Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, Toni Morrison's Paradise and Love, and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees. The author concludes that although significant changes have been made to familial scripts, both in fiction as well as in reality, such important strides veil the fact that there is more work to be done and thus imperative that conversations about gender and the past be kept alive and be continuously revisited in order to shape a more equitable future.