| This dissertation analyzes six contemporary narratives to interrogate the representation of home. The narratives are Toni Morrison's Beloved , Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Callie Khouri and Ridley Scott's film Thelma and Louise, Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine , and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Configured variously as domestic space, colonization, slavery, cultures, or nations, home is represented in these works as a place of confinement, isolation, or abuse for the female characters. Transgressing the boundaries of home, the characters opt for reinvention and movement. Home, however, exerts an enormous pull through such forces as nostalgia, memory, absorption, assimilation, and recuperation. Contradictions and conflict offer literary resistance. Each narrative also creates new forms of blended genres and discourses.; Beloved is the study's cornerstone because of Toni Morrison's imagining of the internal lives of both enslaved and freed black people in the United States, her depiction of the role of home, and her rewriting the white canon. Home reveals the historical and cultural containment of women of color, their resistance to those harsh restraints, and their struggle to rewrite home, in spite of the legacies of that containment.; Both Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart and Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place address the legacy of slavery and colonialism, cultural violence, and postcolonial homes. Khouri and Scott's film Thelma and Louise incites conversations about survivors of abuse and women who act on their rage to hold men accountable for their actions. An ironic, postmodern tale, Bharati Mukherjee's controversial novel Jasmine depicts an illegal immigrant's flight from home after home, eluding containment. The character Jasmine represents the savvy immigrant who uses her skills and intelligence to gain agency. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping spirals backward and downward through one family's history, searching for reasons why family members could be so disconnected from one another and why women could be so dispensable in cultural, literary, or historical stories. The dissertation ends with a Coda which discusses the use of literature and transgressive narratives in the writing classroom. |
