Browsing by Author "Barbara Bennett, Committee Member"

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Dispatches from the Homefront: Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding
(2007-04-25) Powell, Lisa Lanier; Barbara Bennett, Committee Member; Elaine Orr, Committee Member; Michael Grimwood, Committee Chair
During an interview, Eudora Welty described her inability to write directly about World War II: "I couldn't write about it, not at the time, it was too personal. I could write or translate things into domestic or other dimensions in my writing, with the same things in mind" (qtd. in Ruas 66). The purpose of this paper is to examine Welty's 1946 novel Delta Wedding as a translation of, or response to, the war. Welty goes out of her way to avoid any association with the war; she conspicuously places the novel in the year 1923 because it was not a "war year." She retreats from the epic violence of war into the seemingly peaceful, pastoral delta country of Mississippi. Yet, by its avoidance of war, Delta Wedding paradoxically depicts the war by providing a negative image of the war. With the mobilization of men to the front lines during the masculine event of war, the feminized homefront left behind became another negative image of war. During World War II, traditional patriarchies were transformed into practical matriarchies. Women entered the workforce to help fill the labor shortage left by men, often taking jobs traditionally thought of as "men's only." This proved to be a turning point for women in American history. In Delta Wedding, Welty's portrayal of a matriarchal family on a patriarchal plantation mirrors the 1940s society. She depicts women in various stages of life, which reflect the stages in Susan Lichtman's cycle of the female hero. They include the virgin, mother and crone stages. Through such characters, Welty celebrates the female journey toward self-actualization, helping the reader to value such a journey as heroic. In doing so, she gives an alternate view of the hero: not typical war hero of the time, but instead the hero of the everyday, not limited by gender.
"Only the blind are free": Sight and Blindness in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin
(2005-03-31) Lin, Michelle H; Barbara Bennett, Committee Member; Leila May, Committee Co-Chair; Deborah Hooker, Committee Co-Chair
Sight plays a pivotal role in Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Blind Assassin (2001). Sight and blindness are manifested on multiple levels, with multiple implications, within the intertwining narratives of the novel. The novel's treatment of sight, however, is largely negative, mirroring the increasingly ocularphobic discourse (particularly that in France) during the twentieth century. This discourse challenged the reliability and validity of sight and perception, as well as the ideologies based on a visual conception of the world. In the novel, treatment of sight can be separated into three categories: unreliability of sight, fear and mistrust of sight, and blindness as the ultimate solution to the problems posed by sight. Chapter 1 studies the use of photographs and mirrors in the novel in order to expose the deficiencies of sight: sight is not reliable because it is subjective and because the visual does not represent fully the human mind or experience. Another mechanism that undermines sight is discussed in Chapter 2, which examines four scopic structures that are employed in order to establish a fear and mistrust of sight in the novel. These four scopic structures include the gaze of the absent mother/father, God, the Panopticon, and the lover. Sight is not only unreliable, but it is also something to be feared, even when the look emanates from a supposedly benign subject. Like many French ocularphobic theorists, the novel refuses to posit neither the restoration of nor an alternative to sight. Blindness is the novel's ultimate solution to the deficiencies of and imprisonment in a sight-based world. The blind carpet-weavers believe that only the blind are free, a conclusion that Iris ultimately agrees with. Despite the disastrous consequences produced by her blindness, Iris prefers blindness because it is, she says, what ultimately allows us to live. Iris' preference for blindness, however, is based on aconfused definition of sight. However, she is correct in her conclusion that blindness enables us to live, to make mistakes, because it is from these mistakes where the trajectories and stories of our lives take shape.