scholarly journals Fairies and Fairness:

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa Herzig
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
The Self ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Power Imbalance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
Construction Of Whiteness ◽  
The Individual

The traditional association of whiteness with fairies warrants a closer examination, as this mythological yearning for a specific childlike realm reveals an idealization of a white past. Indeed, the likening of women to a pure, infantile domain reveals an elevation of whiteness, which, by default, degrades people of color as lesser. While there has been considerable scholarship on the racialization of Charlotte Brontë’s Haitian character Bertha Mason, the construction of whiteness in conjunction with Jane Eyre’s character has remained largely unexplored. I explore these themes of the construction of whiteness through fairies and the romanticization of a white past through a close analysis of humanity in Jane Eyre. I first investigate Victorian and Edwardian fairy visuals, moving on to demonstrate how Jane’s individuality and feminism gains autonomy with her religious spiritualism. I also show, however, how the faerie language in the novel serves to override and disregard Jane’s position as a human being with agency due to Mr. Rochester’s aesthetic of white femininity. Through close readings of the supernatural in Jane Eyre, I scrutinize how the use of fairy language creates a power imbalance where the dehumanization of women and minorities creates a male fantasy directly opposed to the theme of the individual. I discuss how the sexualization and racialization of women as supernatural beings bolsters the self-serving, problematic construct of the ‘human’ which continuously labels women and minorities as less than. Therefore, to restructure this racism and misogynistic thought, I propose a decentering of humanity from a white male perspective, seeing women and minorities not as a monolithic “Other,” almost supernatural beings, but as equally human and worth of respect and dignity.

Why British Society Had to ‘Get a Young Virgin Sacrificed’: Sacrificial Destiny in The Tree of Heaven

May Sinclair ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanna Melin Schyllert
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Tree Of Heaven ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Personal Sacrifice ◽  
Central Characters

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair’s fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here. This chapter investigates the concept of sacrifice in the war novel The Tree of Heaven and how it is connected to community and feminism. In order to find an understanding of sacrifice as proposed by Sinclair, and its meaning in the lives of both women and men in the context of early 20th century England, the chapter discusses the crossroads in the text between sacrifice, idealism, feminism, and the nation-wide feeling of community that appears to be required in wartime.

Faces of the Self

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Vanita Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Muslim Woman ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Face ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis paper traces the centrality of the human face in the construction of modern individuality. It argues that the face of individuality no less than that of typology, is mired in and born of historical and political conditions that are subsequently disavowed in order that the individual (and the face she bears) is rendered a product of nature, an instantiation of the universal. Attempting to denaturalize and defamiliarize the authority invested in the face, this paper maps out three interrelated arguments: that the human face is historically produced; that its history is closely tethered to the production of modern subjectivity, and that its status as a purveyor of meaning relies upon the reiteration of preexisting norms through which it can be “read.” And yet, while this paper turns to the nineteenth century to trace the novel privileging of the face as an extension of selfhood, interwoven through this history is the figure of the “effaced” Muslim woman and the Muslim terrorist type.

scholarly journals A Foucauldian Reading: Power in Awakening by Kate Chopin

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-166
Author(s):  
Narges Raoufzadeh ◽  
Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh ◽  
Shiva Zaheri Birgani
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Kate Chopin ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This paper traces Foucault’s notion of power in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The writers bring into the light, different aspects of a woman’s position in the society of late nineteenth-century America. Paper looks at private and social conditions of women, using Foucault’s ideology of power, and discuss the reactions of Chopin’s protagonist in relation to her actions towards the workings of power in her life. With a close analysis of the novel based on Foucault’s ideology of power, researchers discuss the workings of power in the protagonist’s married and social life, including her efforts to set herself free from this power and her process of resistance analyzed according to Foucault’s theory. The research comes to the conclusion that the impossibility of acting outside power, the possibility of resisting power from within and Foucault’s “Care of the self” as the only way to traverse the power-defined failed of possible actions. Paper shows that, Chopin’s protagonist does not resist patriarchy based on Foucault’s methods and her actions towards power do not lead to any effective ending.

scholarly journals Conjunctive Adverbials Used by Charlotte Brontë in the Novel “Jane Eyre”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Eva Leláková ◽  
Nikola Šavelová
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Semantic Coherence ◽  
The Way

Conjunctive adverbials or simply conjuncts represent specific sentence elements contributing to the overall semantic coherence of a text. Their use or omission depends entirely on the decision of the author of the text, the way he or she perceives and intends to convey a particular type of connection between its individual parts. In the present linguistic study of the literary work—the self-selected novel “Jane Eyre”—we observe and subsequently specify and evaluate occurrence of conjunctive adverbials in the text with the focus on their particular semantic categories and positions within a sentence.

scholarly journals Negotiating Identity Across Boundaries Arab-American: An Identity in the Making

1970 ◽  
pp. 65-75
Author(s):  
Ghia Osseiran
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Shed Light

“Once I claimed a past, spoke my history, told my name, the walls of incomprehension and hostility rose, brick by brick: unfunny ‘ethnic’ jokes, jibes about terrorists and Kalashnikovs, about veiled women and camels … Searching for images of my Arab self in American culture I found only unrecognizable stereotypes,” says Lisa Suhair Majaj (1994, p. 67), depicting her experience of what it is like to be a Palestinian living in the US. This paper strives to shed light on precisely this search for the self in the “Other,” focusing on the discursive formation of an anti-essentialist Arab-American subjectivity entrenched in the Arab-American experience, through a close analysis of the delineation of the individual and communal selves in the works of three Arab-American writers: Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, and Diana Abu-Jaber.

scholarly journals Connection and Disconnection in Tom’s Midnight Garden

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Mouhiba Jamoussi
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The Individual

This paper entitled ‘Connection and Disconnection in Tom’s Midnight Garden’ aims to challenge a particular reading of Philippa Pearce’s novel Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) as nostalgic and concerned with aging and death. Tom’s Midnight Garden is regarded by some literary critics as a nostalgic work concerned with the past rather than the present. Its protagonist Tom is sometimes considered as disconnected from the real world and living in the fantastic. This paper will argue that, quite the contrary, Tom’s Midnight Garden stands against disconnection, between the child and the adult, the fantastic and the real, and the past and the present. Tom’s Midnight Garden celebrates connection through the interrelation between the self and the other, through a fantastic world constantly interwoven with the real, and a past tightly tied to the present. This paper relies on a thorough reading of the novel, on findings on the child-adult relationship, and on the effects of connection and disconnection on the individual.

scholarly journals Human behavior under conditions of limited freedom in the novel by A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s “In the first circle”

Neophilology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 82-90
Author(s):  
Yang Bai ◽  
Nataliya V. Sorokina
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Image Features ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

The work is devoted to the study of the image features of the people’s behavior in the conditions of camp imprisonment in the A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the first Circle”. We study the forms of artistic embodiment of the theme of inner and outer freedom of the individual. We compare the principles of depicting the daily life of prisoners in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and the novel “In the First Circle”. We pay attention to the meaning of the titles of these works by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. We consider the writer’s portrayal of events and actions of people in the absence/limitation of physical freedom. We emphasized the role of creative endea-vors in the self-preservation of human dignity. We outline the main parameters of the depiction of love storylines and family stories in the novel. We are clarifying the meaning of the author’s font emphasis in the text. We focus on the enduring relevance of the topic of preserving the mental strength of a person during periods of forced bondage and limited living conditions, which is one of the priorities in the work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. The results of this study contribute to the expan-sion of ideas about the ideological and artistic specifics of the writer’s “camp prose” and can be applied when studying the history of Russian literature in universities, at special seminars and spe-cial courses on the work of the classic of the 20th century.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Margaret Mahy: An Adlerian Reading

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
KATHRYN WALLS
Keyword(s):  
Young Female ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alfred Adler ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Magical Power ◽  
Margaret Mahy ◽  
The Individual

According to the ‘Individual Psychology’ of Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Freud's contemporary and rival, everyone seeks superiority. But only those who can adapt their aspirations to meet the needs of others find fulfilment. Children who are rejected or pampered are so desperate for superiority that they fail to develop social feeling, and endanger themselves and society. This article argues that Mahy's realistic novels invite Adlerian interpretation. It examines the character of Hero, the elective mute who is the narrator-protagonist of The Other Side of Silence (1995) , in terms of her experience of rejection. The novel as a whole, it is suggested, stresses the destructiveness of the neurotically driven quest for superiority. Turning to Mahy's supernatural romances, the article considers novels that might seem to resist the Adlerian template. Focusing, in particular, on the young female protagonists of The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984), it points to the ways in which their magical power is utilised for the sake of others. It concludes with the suggestion that the triumph of Mahy's protagonists lies not so much in their generally celebrated ‘empowerment’, as in their transcendence of the goal of superiority for its own sake.

Manageable Self in the Early Hellenistic Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Vaia Touna
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Self ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

This paper argues that the rise of what is commonly termed "personal religion" during the Classic-Hellenistic period is not the result of an inner need or even quality of the self, as often argued by those who see in ancient Greece foreshadowing of Christianity, but rather was the result of social, economic, and political conditions that made it possible for Hellenistic Greeks to redefine the perception of the individual and its relationship to others.

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