2 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Item Pregnancy, Illness, and Violence : The Power Discourses of Motherhood in Mary Morrissy's Mother of Pearl(North Dakota State University, 2011) Oster, Rebecca RenaeThis paper aims to explore the connection between the power structures of religion and medicine within Mary Morrissy's Mother of Pearl. Morrissy's text explores the ways in which women are oppressed by the Irish construct of perfect motherhood, which stems from the internalized social control exemplified in the religious and cultural expectations of women. Morrissy's text points out that a woman's national and individual identity is directly defined by her role as a mother and a religious figure. Morrissy's text critiques this construct and shows it to be unattainable as the power structures create a new form of oppression that continues to mandate the mother construct through bodily control. The connection between these power structures is exemplified through the geographical and political borders of Ireland as well as the physical borders of women's bodies. The medical power structure physically invades women's bodies and leaves them scarred, marked, and dependent on the construct for any identity. Morrissy's text critiques this impossible standard and a culture's tendency to perpetuate the myth of perfect motherhood within the ideological community.Item “What Shall Befall Him or His Children”: The Figure and Anxiety of the Child in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man(North Dakota State University, 2019) Banasik, Jasmine DelThe scholarship currently surrounding Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is scarce in comparison to the amount of scholarship with her more well-known text Frankenstein. One of the popular trends of Frankenstein scholarship centers on analyzing anxieties of motherhood in the text. This paper utilizes this scholarship to examine a set of analogous anxieties present in The Last Man, set against an apocalyptic future where there is no next generation. This paper uses a combination of feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and new historicism to examine the anxieties surrounding motherhood and children in The Last Man. I begin by analyzing the figures of the mother and the child in the novel before analyzing the different anxieties present both in literal motherhood and then in metaphorical reproduction through technology, literature, and companionship in animals. Mary Shelley’s work, and not only Frankenstein, deserves acknowledgement and study.