Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2020, English

This dissertation explores the political possibilities of being unruly. Following Sara Ahmed's definition of willfulness, this project traces the figure of the "willful woman'" through modernist narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and ending with Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), the project uncovers the political possibilities of representing willful women with three aims in mind: to articulate the representations of women in these modernist texts as being willful; to explore how these representations of willfulness are working on and against the dominant discourses of subjecthood and intelligibility in the modernist period; and to demonstrate, by reading these texts together, the ways in which modernist authors created new realities, thereby exposing how cultural paradigms are constructed and malleable. In putting these texts in conversation with one another, I create a willfulness archive of unruly subjects who collectively offer alternatives to narratives that render certain types of subjects unintelligible. This archive, I argue, articulates how the modernist aesthetic used willfulness as a trope to create and hold open space for new and different stories and realities to be made intelligible.

Committee: Madelyn Detloff Ph.D. (Advisor); Katie Johnson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stefanie Dunning Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ann Elizabeth Armstrong Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature