Graduation Semester and Year
2021
Language
English
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English
Department
English
First Advisor
Cedric May
Abstract
By analyzing the experiences of four different incidents of shaming women—Dallas police officers photographing partially nude prostitutes during booking, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinksky, and Christine Blasey-Ford—in contemporary American History in the same way as one would analyze literature, there becomes similarities between the archetype of the fallen woman and the treatment of the women. Each situation is paired with literary texts including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. This pairing helps to reveal that the archetype of the fallen woman may influence social praxis, and ultimately reveals that the patriarchy’s hegemonic forces are at play when it comes to victim shaming and blaming.
Keywords
Fallen woman, Anita Hill, Lucy Patterson, William Holbrook, Christine Blasey-Ford, Sexual assault, Prostitution
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Weaver, Terri, "JUSTICE FOR THE FALLEN WOMAN" (2021). English Theses. 111.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_theses/111
Comments
Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington