Gwendolyn Goodyear. “’Stop and Smell the Roses’ to Survive: An Analysis of Nature’s Healing Power for Women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale”
This thesis intends to analyze Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale through an ecofeminist lens by specifically examining the relationship between women and nature in the novel. Ecofeminism asserts the connection between the subjugation of women and the exploitation of nature through patriarchal oppression. The thesis will demonstrate a connection between the radioactive history of Gilead and the history of nuclear warfare. I am going to study representations of a woman’s body to consider why females in the novel, such as Serena Joy and Offred, find hope in strengthening their relationship with nature and contribute to discourse which suggests nature’s healing power for women when facing oppressive patriarchal norms.
Through the discussion of a woman’s connection to nature, I will analyze how people in positions of power can use their awareness of this relationship to obtain control. More specifically, by examining how societies over-identify women and nature, there is a possibility to acknowledge the outcome, which is the exclusion of women from both public and social spheres. I believe it is critical to recognize the predatory behaviors that aim to deteriorate a woman’s connection to natural surroundings, and by unearthing the goal to detach women from nature, there is an opportunity to recognize why this relationship is deemed to be a threat to the social order. Furthermore, I think it is essential to acknowledge a woman’s relationship with nature as a means of strength that can assist women in overcoming discrimination and inequality at large. This strength, ultimately, weakens the persistence of structuralized norms and I believe it is necessary to highlight how this connection limits control over female bodies.
Samantha Lange. “Killing Romanticism in Madame Bovary”
In reflection of the tumultuous transitions society has gone through this year, I find myself often thinking back to Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel, Madame Bovary, a text which stood at the crossroads between various altered states in society, culture, and literature. Written at a time in French history that the political regime was once again in transition from a republic to an empire, the story of Madame Bovary reflects a major cultural and literary upheaval in society’s behavioral practices and philosophies. At its heart, the novel is the Realist equivalent to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, tracing the degenerative movement of Romanticism allegorically through its dysfunctional, delusional heroine, Emma Bovary. Much like any agent who refuses to embrace a new, altered state when it becomes necessary to do so, Emma becomes increasingly miserable clinging to the Romantic beliefs fed to her by the works of Sir Walter Scott, Delille, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Despite the dissatisfaction Romanticism brings her, she continues to stick to this old school of thought until it robs her of everything: her money, her love, and eventually her life.
Madame Bovary marks the end of a French society and literary scene rooted in Romanticism and the beginning of Realism, a way of thinking that, in Flaubert’s words, explores “the damp and moldy corners of the soul” (Steegmuller 129). Flaubert’s work transitions society into admiring the average person and appreciating the ordinary things in life, all the while combatting the gender norms that Romanticism reinforces. By writing the character of Emma to have traditionally masculine characteristics, such as ambition, cunning, and independence, and portraying her male love interests as subservient to her, Flaubert challenges what roles and duties French society believed men and women should fulfill within a relationship.
