LE3 .A278 2023

2023

Quéma, Anne

Acadia University

Master of Arts

Masters

English

English & Theatre Studies

I investigate how the women from Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark (1934), Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Petty’s True Story: A Novel (2020) are imprisoned in historically located patriarchal systems as they try to make a place for themselves and to have their voices heard. My project focuses on the historical evolution of these recurrent features across these three different and singular texts. The three novels draw on the technique of intertextuality to refer to literary texts and other media that were created in the past and that have created a patriarchal legacy of masculinist discourses and practices trying to dominate women in the name of feminine respectability. The experiences of the narrators and the protagonists of these novels depict how such a masculinist cultural legacy succeeds in persisting despite social transformation. The protagonists of Rhys’s, Atwood’s, and Petty’s novels experience this persisting legacy by enduring economic and socio-political oppression. As a consequence, they find themselves vulnerable to psychological depression due to their endurance of economic, sexual, and socio-political exploitation. It is in this context that I analyze the role of narrative voice in these three texts. While the three authors clearly empower female protagonists with a narrative voice, their feminist critique of economic and social domination reveals that having a voice is not necessarily a manifestation of power in itself. Because of the transmission of inequality and its patterns of recurrence, voices are under duress in these novels.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3959