LIT 3383.001 Fall 2023 Biagi

This class is concerned with how conceptions of women’s agency and empowerment have evolved in literature over time. The 19th century saw the emergence of romantic love as a powerful metaphor for idealized happiness between couples and an avenue toward women’s self-realization, agency, and empowerment—and yet we have been challenging this “happily ever after” metaphor ever since. How does romantic love offer empowering opportunities for women, and how does it oppress women by reinscribing dominant, patriarchal systems of power? In what ways do sexuality and pleasure counteract oppression, and in what ways can they be co-opted by it? How do women’s friendships and partnerships, their families, and their participation in motherhood, interact with their agency? And what does it look like when women seize power for themselves? How are race and class embedded throughout these questions as novels explore the dominant systems of power oppressing women’s lives? We will start by reading Jane Eyre as a foregrounding text, situating it in its historical context and its implications for women’s agency in the 19^th century. Then we will move on to its 1966 postcolonial, feminist critique, Wide Sargasso Sea. We will continue to explore the themes of women’s oppression and empowerment in the contemporary literary landscape with Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Matrix by Lauren Groff, and The Power by Naomi Alderman.