Finding Hope in a Backward Glance: Wandering Women Creating Utopia Through Spiritual and Feminist Bonds in Late Twentieth Century Feminist Fiction

摘要

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Paradise by Toni Morrison are novels written in the 1980s and 90s that directly address women's trials in the past, women's desire for a more female-friendly world in the future and women's journeys pursued in the hope of locating or creating places identified as utopian when compared to their past environments. In addition to sharing strong connections between spirituality, feminism and the characters' dreams for a better world, all of these novels also possess traits that could only be defined as utopian when examined through the lens of hope. In particular, the hope being referenced is Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope in which he determines that utopian desire can be found everywhere and in all aspects of human endeavors. In his three volume text on this subject, Bloch argues that to attain this type of hope one must look backwards to assess the problems of the past and use the information obtained to create future dreams. Using Bloch's theoretical perspective, this dissertation will argue that these three female-authored texts, in response to conservative social and political phenomena occurring during the 1980s, create backward looking utopias, which utilize hope and maintained connections between spirituality and feminism while their characters pursue utopia through journeys from dystopic patriarchal environments to utopian female-friendly spaces.