No heroes: Woman as crime and criminal, betrayer and betrayed in their own stories. Women's voices in the twentieth century

My dissertation studies the frequent portrayal of women in the works of women writers in western culture as "others" outside of mainstream society. I discuss not only contemporary fictionalized autobiographical works by women but also their "scientific" medical/psychoanalytical representations, informed by health critics who studied the development of "modern" woman-hating gynecology in nineteenth-century America and various "experts" who approve present-day clitoridectomies in third-world nations, literary critics, and gender researchers, who address the idea of women as androgynous individual.; Alice Walker, Mary McCarthy, Maya Angelou, and Dorothy Allison all consider the ways women are treated, from childhood freedom and innocence, to menarche, rape, and loss of innocence, to the imposition from outside of heterosexuality, to the re-experiencing of their particular lives and situations as being outside the "norm" of society. Through their works I reconsider "progress" within the basic female experience, specifically as it involves sexual attitudes, body image, religious and moral strictures, and literary/self-worth by the creative woman. Such reconsideration reclaims the literary narratives that tell about certain women through both theoretical and practical redefinitions of woman and womanhood--with the caveat that "womanhood" is the socially-imposed device and "woman" is the individual.; Pairing works by African-American women writers with white women writers who also belong to disadvantaged groups links diverse women's experiences and serves to underline my basic points: that most women in male-centrist western society must undergo a transformation of knowledge and perspective because of the aura of violence that fundamental social pressures and sexual manipulation and control work upon them at menarche by medical/psychological/religious entities. These women demonstrate that, for all their differences, they each discover a creative way to construct their lives and selves in order to gain an aesthetically-positive, gender-positive, sexually-free identity to replace the "cult of womanhood" imposed on them as children. They discover that they can create in themselves the strength to resist becoming sexual evils/birthing vessels/sexless madonnas, and instead become individual artists, celebrating their own lives and making their own struggles heroic.