The focus of my ENAM critical thesis is a comprehensive comparison between the fictional experiences of Sophie Fevvers, of Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, and of Sethe Suggs, of Toni Morrison’s 1987... [ view full abstract ]
The focus of my ENAM critical thesis is a comprehensive comparison between the fictional experiences of Sophie Fevvers, of Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, and of Sethe Suggs, of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved. Both of these texts gave to the world two supremely non-traditional heroines who deviated from the literary trajectories of feminism. How similar were they?
Critical precedent demonstrates how Morrison and Carter used these novels to break dominant cultural myth and recover negated histories. How can we learn more about these myth-breaking female protagonists by comparing them? Distinguished on the premises of race, class, and community, these heroines seem to lead overtly disparate lives. Furthermore, their experiences of oppression are incapable of being weighed as equally traumatic. However, both engage in complex struggles of self-reconciliation and self-defined liberation that are, as I will argue, developed by some surprisingly similar themes and styles.
Thematically, Sophie and Sethe fight to achieve personal identities greater than objects or animals, as such demeaning reductions are often imposed by external forces. Stylistically, both authors drive these plots with the heavy use of magical realism and the motif of birds. I am primarily interested in outlining the novels’ shared literary approaches in the contexts of second-wave feminism, African American feminism, and British feminism. Employing feminist and critical race theory, how can we understand the constructions of these two characters as they are both reflected in, and products of these social and historical contexts?