Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

English

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Jeffrey Gonzalez

Committee Member

Laura Nicosia

Committee Member

Melinda Knight

Abstract

This thesis examines how Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman,” the opening chapter of her memoir, The Woman Warrior, and Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, portray communal perceptions of women who contradict traditional gender norms surrounding sex. The titular characters in each of these stories express their sexualities in ways deemed unfit by their people and are accordingly demonized and outcast from their communities. These characters are afforded some subtle admiration for their personal power by the artists who are portraying them, but this reverence is inevitably rescinded and replaced by the disdain of the tight-knit communities surrounding them. This tension also reflects the authors’ own complex views on female rebellion and how unconventional women are not allowed the same heroic status that nonconforming men are, both stories containing social lawbreaking men who go unpunished. Both texts use circular imagery to represent an ordered reality, emphasizing how acts of sexual nonconformity threaten this societal order and provoke communal retaliation, especially in the case of women. Ultimately, I argue that while the No Name Woman and Sula are vilified and cast aside, their presence is essential to the moral and social self-definition of their respective communities and that their stories offer compelling critiques of the fragility and hypocrisy within traditional patriarchal systems of virtue and order.

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