Showing 1 - 10 of 21 Items

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Ella Pearl Crabtree

Access: Open access

“‘Possessive Gentleness’: Insecure Attachments in American Literature” applies psychological attachment theory to works of American Literature. Each novel examined—Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856), and The Minister’s Wooing (1859) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Third Generation (1954) by Chester Himes, and The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison—describes the forces behind insecure attachment relationships between child characters and their caregivers. The first chapter of this project focuses on Stowe’s anti-slavery novels. It argues that the institution of slavery is in conflict with Christianity in these works, because it impedes disinterestedly benevolent mothering and disrupts secure attachments. The second chapter analyzes The Third Generation, and suggests that colorism in the black community is the cause of insecure attachments in Himes’ work. The third and final chapter examines The Bluest Eye, and presents sympathy, as embodied by the novel’s narrator, as a potential remedy for insecure parent-child attachments. Together, these texts elucidate how societal forces (e.g. colorism, poverty) intrude upon the family structure and destabilize parent-child attachments. Optimistically, however, they also suggest that improved parent-child attachments might function as a vehicle of broader social change.

• Embargo End Date: 2026-05-18

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Andrew YH Chang

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Susu Gharib

Access: Open access

This paper details the ways in which IVF and infertility influencers on Instagram use their platforms to resist the silence surrounding reproductive difficulties. The analysis draws upon a thematic analysis of posts tagged with IVF-related hashtags and a semi-structured ethnographic interview with one influencer. Through these methods, I found that influencers build intimate publics through their platforms by sharing their journeys, interacting with followers, and reciprocal support. Within the context of the intimate publics, influencers are able to connect with others who understand their experiences, allowing them to break through the silence they may feel in their offline social groups.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Ishani Agarwal

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Natsumi Lynne Meyer

Access: Open access

I think it started in December 2017, when my Mama sent me to Japan to take care of my grandparents, Baba and Jiji, alone. I had been to Japan almost every year since I was eleven years old, and several times before that too, but this was my first time without Mama. When Mama was there, Japan was filtered through her. I could poke bits of myself through her editing and approval. I could read street signs because of the way she read them, and I could understand my grandparents’ sighs from the timbre of her translation. That December, though, I had to see and hear alone. The tiny shakes in Baba’s legs and the indentation in Jiji’s forehead from when he fell down the stairs crystallized in my memory, and I had to write about it. This project includes a series of creative nonfiction and fiction pieces centered around telling my family stories. Writing from interviews, observations, and generational memories, I weave together these story fragments to discuss Asian American identity and immigration, WWII trauma, aging, and inheritance.

• Embargo End Date: 2026-05-20

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Lianna Harrington

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Ella Marie Schmidt

Access: Open access

I wrote Divinity School, an Honors Project for the Department of English, under the auspices of my project advisor, Professor Anthony Walton, and my readers, Professors Marilyn Reizbaum, Ann Kibbie, and Aaron Kitch. Divinity School is a novel whose conflicts are religious, generational, and familial. Set mostly in Hoboken, New Jersey with vignettes in Manhattan, Vienna, the west coast of Ireland, and an anonymous New England college town, it is the story of one family and the open secrets that keep them apart. Hal Macpherson is a Divinity School professor uged into premature retirement by allegations of misconduct; his wife, Annie Price, is a withdrawn would-be actress. They are parents to Amelia Macpherson, a woman in her twenties who rejects her father’s righteous claims of innocence and her mother’s exhausted but unwavering devotion to him. This project is concerned with sex and pedagogy, youth, want-it-all politcs, parenthood, getting old, Protestantism, and domestic life. Using third-person free indirect style, I traverse the public-private planes of literature. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, I have enjoyed the privilege of a great English education in literature, creative writing, and independent work. Divinity School is the culmination of these studies.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Gemma Jyothika Kelton

Access: Open access

Published narratives about adoptions have typically been told from the perspective of the adopter. In recent years, Asian American writers who are part of the transracial, transcultural, and even transcultural adoptions, have published their narratives and expanded the discourse on adoptions to include the voices of orphans and adoptees. While there are still not many published works by adoptees, more and more writers are coming forward with their own stories separate from their adoptive parents. This honors project is a memoir and a work of nonfiction that examines the author’s experiences as an adoptee from India. It explores the issues of skin color bias (or colorism) in Indian adoption, as well as Indian government policies on inter-country and in-country adoptions. This memoir also delves into the complexities of an adoptive mother-daughter relationship, particularly in the transracial context. The work of non-fiction tells the story of a single white American mother adopting a 10 year old Indian girl to the United States. Written from the adoptee’s perspective, the memoir follows the different points of transitions in both the mother’s and the daughter’s lives and the ensuing challenges, chaos, vulnerabilities, and moments of tenderness, mutual support, care, and love that blooms in their adoptive mother-daughter relationship. This work draws upon narratives of Asian American women writers including Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, and Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black to acknowledge their own voices and give credibility to the adoptee narrative.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Norell Sherman

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Philip Carl Bonanno

Access: Open access

This project explores fiction from white authors in the Southern Renaissance, specifically William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. By examining their work alongside some of the performers that appeared historically in freak shows of the South, chapter one investigates how physically enfreaked individuals (usually phenotypically white) have access to power and the powers of whiteness. Chapter 2 interrogates how the South pathologizes promiscuity as mental illness with words such as moronic or feeble-mindedness, and the ramifications it has for the stratification on class divides among Southern elites and “White Trash.” The chapter seeks to answer the question of why, for a short period in the 1940s, white women were more likely to be punished with forced sterilization than Black women. Chapter 3 uncovers the rhetorical agency used by Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, looking at how he resists the powers of whiteness through crip time and his trauma responses to his family that seeks to reinsert the Antebellum South. Using an intersectional approach of critical whiteness studies, disability studies, crip theory, and queer theory, relies on a variety of scholars including, but not limited to; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Richard Dyer, Matt Wray, Jasbir Puar, Ellen Samuels, and Allison Kafer. The primary works examined include promotional materials of historical freaks, McCullers’ The Ballad of a Sad Café, William Faulkner’s The Hamlet and The Sound and the Fury, and Flannery O’Connor short stories “Good Country People” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”