The picaresque woman: Gender -bending, genre -bending, and the episodic self in "Moll Flanders", "The Runagate Courage", "Mother Courage and Her Children", and "Fear of Flying".
Item
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Title
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The picaresque woman: Gender -bending, genre -bending, and the episodic self in "Moll Flanders", "The Runagate Courage", "Mother Courage and Her Children", and "Fear of Flying".
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Identifier
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AAI3074685
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identifier
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3074685
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Creator
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Spaldo, Ellen Lanese.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Women's Studies | Literature, Germanic | Literature, English | Literature, American | Theater
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Abstract
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This dissertation focuses on the figure of the picaresque woman as it appears in selected works from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. It posits the viability and flexibility of picaresque literature by examining the narrative strategies and energies that are engaged when picaresque elements interact with feminocentric concerns. The study explores the ways in which the picaresque shapes the construction of the feminine self and either supports or resists the assertion of a feminist stance. Questions about the feasibility of a female novel of development are raised, and the relationship of the feminine picaresque to the female Bildungsroman is discussed.;Major twentieth-century critical statements on the picaresque reveal considerable disagreement over the picaresque canon and increasing frustration with the apparent malleability of the term picaresque. A modal approach is offered as an alternative methodology. Picaresque structure is seen as contributing to the construction of an appropriate and cohesive personality---the "episodic self"---especially when enacted in a female character.;Lazarillo de Tormes is discussed as an early model of a representative picaresque text. Moll Flanders reveals a structure of narrative retrospection within which Moll rewrites episodes of her past, thereby revising her early dreams of becoming a gentlewoman toward a new goal of adopting the role of a gentleman-tradesman and, in the process, accomplishing a "vicious" parody of the process of becoming a man. A comparison of The Runagate Courage and Mother Courage and Her Children reveals a significant emancipatory gesture (gender-bending) in the seventeenth-century work and highlights Brecht's adaptation of the picaresque mode to dramatic form (genre-bending) in his twentieth-century play. Finally, the picaresque mode in Jong's Isadora Wing trilogy creates a vital and attractive picara but produces a narrative that severely limits the protagonist's capacity for personal autonomy.;This dissertation suggests that we are turning, in cyclical fashion, to a sense of the world as a postmodern picaresque in which development is undefined, genre is deconstructed, and gender is flexible. The picara opportunistically takes over that space that has been contended for so long---the junction of gender, genre, and structure---and flourishes there.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
