Motherhood in Pat Barker’s post-industrial working-class fiction: a study of Union Street and Liza’s England /

Download

index.pdf

Date

2014

Author

Çağlar, Bircan

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

313
views

182
downloads

This thesis aims to explore issues such as motherhood, poverty, entrapment, procreation, abortion, alienation and violence in Pat Barker’s two early post-industrial novels Union Street and Liza’s England by foregrounding the role of socio-economic factors in female characters’ oppression. Christine Delphy’s Close to Home and Stevi Jackson’s “Women and the Family” have been used as a theoretical framework in order to explore Barker’s portrayal of working-class wives’ and mothers’ oppression in a patriarchal society. The novels’ emphasis on how poverty limits possibilities, affects the experience of motherhood, causes moral ambiguities and violence is underlined through an analysis of the treatment of motherhood in the novels. Barker’s critical stance to the experience of motherhood her exploration of the ways in which the practices of motherhood are contingent upon other factors such as poverty, hard work and, constant procreation are studied in the light of Anne Woollet, Anne Phoenix and Eva Llyod’s Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies. This thesis also analyses the ambiguity of relationships between mothers and daughters and the socioeconomic factors shaping the practices of motherhood.

Subject Keywords

England, Motherhood, Poverty, Working class

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12618064/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/24107

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Realisms and working women in the novels of Gaskell and Brontë / Kahveci, Rana; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2014) This thesis demonstrates the use of social realism in Mary Barton and Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell and the use of psychological realism in Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë in the representation of working women in Victorian fiction. The study starts with a discussion of differing critical and philosophical definitions of the term “realism” in literature to point out the complexity of the term, that is based on its inherent apparent contradiction in referring to attempts to render “real” life through ...
The Other mothers in Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage and The Lost Child Güzen, Aybüke; Yıldız Bağçe, Hülya; Department of English Literature (2022-9) This thesis explores the fictional motherhood representations in Caryl Phillips’s novels The Final Passage (1995) and The Lost Child (2015) through the critical lens of matricentric feminism. Although there is an extensive body of scholarship focusing on these novels from various perspectives, there seems to be a gap in exploring their motherhood representations, which Phillips successfully treats. Phillips, in these novels, presents plural Other motherhood experiences in various contexts. Thus, his novels ...
A Study of feminist possibilities of escape from the panopticon and the male gaze in Pat Barker’s Union street and Angela Carter’s Nights at the circus Atar, Merve; Öztabak Avcı, Elif; Department of English Literature (2016) The aim of this thesis is to study Pat Barker’s Union Street (1982) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) to explore the novels’ treatment of how modern institutions discipline women in the light of Foucault’s conceptualization of the “Panopticon” in his Discipline and Punish (1977). This study will also be attentive to the works of feminist scholars such as Sandra Lee Bartky and Susan Bordo, who in their articles “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” (1988) and “The B...
A feminist subversion of gender binarism on cyborgian grounds through a critical analysis of cyberpunk fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass Göksu, Deniz; Alpakın Martınez Caro, Dürrin; Department of English Literature (2019) The aim of this thesis is to explore the transgressive role of cyborg as a posthuman subject in feminist cyberpunk fiction in destabilizing the socially constructed binarisms concerning humanness and gender stereotypes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass. With the fall of Humanism, the taken-for-granted assumptions of Enlightenment mindset have begun to be unsettled by posthumanists. The problematization of what it means to be human set the ground for elucidating the artificialit...
The Challenges and aspirations of professional middleclass parenting in Turkey Toğay, Sevil; Beşpınar Akgüner, Fatma Umut; Department of Sociology (2019) Drawing on 15 interviews with middle-class parents who occupy professional positions at work-life, this study examines the intersectionality of gender and class in professional middle-class parenting experiences and practices- a family strategy for class reproduction. Gendered segregated networks in parenting are existent and this is why woman and man have similar and different parenting experiences as they differently do parenting in the midst of expectations of the intensive parenting ideology, class posi...

Citation Formats

B. Çağlar, “Motherhood in Pat Barker’s post-industrial working-class fiction: a study of Union Street and Liza’s England /,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2014.