Date of Award

12-2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Program

English

Department

English

Major Professor

Dr. Elizabeth Steeby

Second Advisor

Dr. David Rutledge

Third Advisor

Dr. Rhiannon Goad

Abstract

Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of girlhood during the early twentieth-century, these authors established their work as inherently feminist. However, the conversations surrounding these novels must continue to evolve and include topics like unwaged labor, slut-shaming, purity culture, and internalized misogyny, among others.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.

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