WOMEN’S CONFINEMENT AND STRUGGLE AGAINST THE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY STRUCTURE: A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF SELECTED WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE LIGHT OF KATE MILLETT’S CONCEPT OF SEXUAL POLITICS
Tez Türü: Yüksek Lisans
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Yeditepe Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı, Türkiye
Tez Danışmanı: Nina Cemiloğlu
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2023
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Desteklendiği Program: Diğer
Özet:
ABSTRACT
The aim of
this thesis is to analyze the main female characters in two short stories and a
novel written in three different periods, using the conceptual analysis
framework that Kate Millett puts forward in her 1970 work Sexual Politics. In
her book Sexual Politics, Millett formulated two important concepts as “sexual
politics” and “sexual revolution” and focused on how the family institution and
genders were handled in literary works. The most important contribution of her
work and the reason why it is one of the founding texts of the second wave
feminist movement is that she sees the abolition of the traditional family
structure as the basic prerequisite for a real sexual revolution. Millett saw
the patriarchal social structure as the biggest obstacle to the emancipation of
women. In this direction, the present work discusses stories of women who
belong to the middle class and try to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers
congruously in the traditional family lives of their historical periods, but
lose their harmonious existence as soon as they feel that they are confined to
this family structure. Studies to be considered are Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Doris Lessing's story
"To Room Nineteen" (1963), and Margaret Atwood's novel "The
Blind Assassin" (2000). Although each of the protagonists expresses this
discordance process with different verbs such as going crazy, committing
suicide and writing, what they have in common is that they have experiences
that alienate, subordinate and trivialize them in the patriarchal family life.
The fact that they can be replaced in this structure, that they are defined as
hysterical, crazy, depressed people when they do not fulfill their role in the
reproduction of this family life, and that they are oppressed, highlights
Millett's analysis, and the fact that the novels and their characters live in
different historical periods, makes it possible to follow differences and
similarities between them through different waves of the feminist movement.
Keywords: Feminist Literature, Feminist Critics, Kate
Millett, Sexual Politics, Image of Mad Woman