University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Female heroism and self-fashioning in young adult adaptations

Hartley-Kroeger, Fiona

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HARTLEY-KROEGER-DISSERTATION-2022.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116096

Description

Title
Female heroism and self-fashioning in young adult adaptations
Author(s)
Hartley-Kroeger, Fiona
Issue Date
2022-07-13
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Mahaffey, Vicki
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Mahaffey, Vicki
Committee Member(s)
  • Stevens, Andrea
  • McDowell, Kathleen
  • Hoiem, Elizabeth
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Young Adult Fiction
  • Female Heroism
Abstract
In a 1992 speech later republished as Earthsea Revisioned, Ursula K. Le Guin used Adrienne Rich’s concept of “re-vision” to explain the creative and political impulses underlying Tehanu, the fourth book in what had been the Earthsea trilogy, which drastically overturns many fantasy narrative conventions that the previous three books comfortably reinscribed. Rich’s concept of “re-vision” holds that women must imagine possibilities for themselves by re-imagining ways in which they have been portrayed in literature; in re-visioning Earthsea, Le Guin re-visioned both a fantasy tradition and her own place in it. Le Guin placed special emphasis on how the Earthsea books envisioned women, noting, “I had reimagined the man’s role but not the woman’s. I had not yet thought what a female hero might be” (9). Tehanu was Le Guin’s space for re-thinking—re-visioning—“what a female hero might be.” How have transformational works published for young adults approached this question in conversation with earlier generations of story and earlier generations’ responses to the question? This dissertation examines female heroism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Young Adult (YA) transformations of fairy tales, myth, and earlier canonical works. These works reshape earlier texts in ways that engage with cultural and literary assumptions about what it means to be adolescent, female, and heroic within the boundaries of particular genre conventions. My project shows that YA adaptations use narrative transformation to engage in “re-vision” as a means for young women (and the adults they will become) to imagine possibilities of self and subjecthood within and in response to existing narrative frameworks. To this end, I imagine female heroism as an ever-changing, many-stranded weaving (both a product and a process). By conceptualizing female heroism as a series of interwoven strands, flexible and expandable, I can describe how its patterns work in different contexts without seeking to impose a monomyth. This project follows three predominant interwoven strands from chapter to chapter: 1) Re-authoring and creativity: women writing themselves into being; 2) Regendering and problems of gender idealism; and 3) The rescue/the return as a heroic mechanism for self-fashioning. Chapter 1 argues that in response to frustrations with Romeo & Juliet, novels by Rachel Caine, Stacey Jay, and Melinda Taub enable the Petrarchan mistress to author herself into a version of Rosaline/the romantic heroine who doesn’t have to die. Chapter 2 shows how Francesca Lia Block, Justina Ireland, and Guadalupe Garcia McCall regender the Odyssey into a site for exploration of anger by female Odysseuses and counter a tradition of white supremacy in the classics. Chapter 3 extends regendering to re-visions of Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel by Sharon Cameron and Diana Peterfreund, showing how trickster heroines deploy rescue as a means of self-fashioning and pursuing “sideways growth” life paths. The heroic rescue becomes problematic, weird, or outright subverted in Chapter 4 as Holly Black, Pamela Dean, Diana Wynne Jones, and Joanna Ruth Meyer use the ballad “Tam Lin” as the basis for heroines to embrace the supernatural and the supernatural self. I end with a coda of sorts, one that continues the supernatural thread to discover that reading the fairy lore at the heart of Malinda Lo’s Ash can illuminate how we read what’s queer about a queer “Cinderella.”
Graduation Semester
2022-08
Type of Resource
Thesis
Handle URL
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116096
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2022 Fiona Hartley-Kroeger

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