English Honors Theses

Date of Creation

5-10-2026

Degree Type

Departmental Honors Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Patrick Whitmarsh

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative analysis of women writers from the twentieth to twenty-first century. Works by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, and Otessa Moshfegh, contain an emerging pattern and relationship linked through an ephemeral bodied aesthetic which depicts women's bodies as deconstructed, intangible, and undefined.

The first chapter analyzes works by Woolf, including To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own. Starting in the modernist age we see the body coming into question, becoming denaturalized while the institution of the "novel" is renewed through women's contributions to the literary canon. Women’s productivity, and the potential to take up space in the material world is a primary concern for Woolf. Yet, the women in her novels frequently undergo moments of disembodiment, where their minds, souls, or bodies, seem to separate from their unified whole identity. Her work, like many other modernist women writers, lays the foundation for this particular ephemeral bodied aesthetic which persists through to the contemporary age, reacting to continuously evolving struggles which women face.

The second chapter focuses on Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman which brings about new economic and social concerns rising during the early-second-wave feminist movement. As the protagonist encounters her own cognitive dissonance within patriarchy, her body, and essentialized figure are explored and extremized through her eating disorder. Production, consumerism, and consuming, are central themes to the novel which explore women's struggle against capitalism and patriarchy, manifested in the body and leading to a deconstructed and etherealized figure.

The final chapter focuses on Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation which explores the most contemporary reaction to feminism, patriarchy and the conditions of a late-capitalist, high consumerist society. The narrator, who sleeps for most of the novel, displays an ephemeralized body which points towards a struggle against productivity and consumerism. This contemporary work, and the overarching continuous ephemeral bodied aesthetic, reveals the current consequences of a gendered body and the ramifications of patriarchy on women's socio-political and productive potential.

Comments

Reader: Daniela Kukrechtova

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