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Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women’s Writing 1925 – 2005

McDaniel, Jamie Lynn
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1278650822

Abstract Details

2010, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
This dissertation examines novels for spatial and temporal practices, what I call “tactics of trespassing,” used by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel, and Jeanette Winterson to re-imagine established constructions of national and gender identity and its relation to property. I focus on property’s ability to enable or to prevent particular identity formations and chart the responses of modern British women writers to the ways that legal, political, and economic treatises have historically rendered property ownership in terms of the masculine. As a result, these discourses have defined feminine propriety through property’s inaccessibility for women. In novels by these writers, I discern a preoccupation with “looking back,” a process through which authors revisit narratives of national and gender identity – narratives that did not account for or represent particular sections of the British public – for the goal of redefining what, as a result of this absence, was defined as properly “British” for a woman. The specific sites through which these works look back are incarnations of property. By enacting new narratives of identity that challenge the propriety of traditional accounts, contemporary women writers aim to stake a claim for a place within the current British body politic. Through their tactics of trespassing upon grounds of property and propriety defined by masculine society, in other words, these writers show how traditional constructions of national and gender identity are essential but insufficient for marginalized groups to understand their relationship to and position within Britain. By showing how these writers establish a degree of plurality and creativity in their intellectual heritage, this dissertation disputes the claims of British property discourses that assert to represent the whole of British society. My approach investigates contemporary novels that current studies of British identity often neglect and combines the idea of looking back with examinations of property in order to draw together two strands in British Studies previously considered in isolation.
Kurt Koenigsberger (Committee Chair)
Mary Grimm (Committee Member)
Gary Stonum (Committee Member)
Joseph Fagan (Committee Member)
203 p.
English literature; Gender; Law; Literature; Womens Studies
property; propriety; identity; looking back; Britishness; law and literature; feminism; gender studies; contemporary British women writers; Virginia Woolf; Jean Rhys; Penelope Fitzgerald; Hilary Mantel; Margaret Drabble; Jeanette Winterson

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • McDaniel, J. L. (2010). Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women’s Writing 1925 – 2005 [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1278650822

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • McDaniel, Jamie. Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women’s Writing 1925 – 2005. 2010. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1278650822.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • McDaniel, Jamie. "Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women’s Writing 1925 – 2005." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1278650822

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1278650822
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This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.