ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology Spring 2015 Dr. Debra MacComb, Professor Department of English & Philosophy Printed on campus by UWG Publications and Printing. Behind the Veil: Inspecting and Interrogating Marriage in the Form of Fiction • • Introduction 5 by Dr. Debra MacComb Going, Going, Gone Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn: Scarlett O’Hara’s Battle 9 Against Traditional Southern Gender Roles During the Civil War Era in the Film Gone with the Wind by Carolyn Eaton Fifty Shades of Mocking Gray “The Girl on Fire” Now in the Hearth: Marriage in the Epilogue 23 of Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay By Jessica Bell Fucking Tradition, Hard: Undressing Marital Form in E.L. 39 James’ Fifty Shades of Grey by Taylor Boltz Everybody Loves Downton Abbey A House Built on Marriages: The Implications of a Continuous 53 Narrative on the Marriage Plot in Downton Abbey by Danielle Smith Everybody Hates Raymond: The Tragi-Comedy’s Repurposing 67 of Traditional Marital Forms and the Unexpected, Retrospective Un-Conventionality of Sitcoms by Sarah Robertson Girls Gone Neverland Seduction of the Gone Girl 85 by Michael Chisholm Becoming Wendy: a Feminist Analysis of Wendy Darling in 99 Peter Pan by Jessica Fountain A Blonde Valentine for a Han Chinese Girl Saying “I Do” In Legally Blonde: The Double-Proposal and 113 Female Power by Courtney Grieb The New Deal: A Need for Renegotiating the Marriage Contract 125 in Blue Valentine by Alex Thompson Let’s Get Down to Business: The Double Proposal Narrative 137 in Disney’s Mulan. by Megan Shirley The Content of the Form ohn Singer Sargent’s late nineteenth-century painting “Mr. and Mrs. JI.N. Phelps Stokes” has long been a favorite of mine: jaunty and self- assured, Mrs. Phelps Stokes seems to step forward to greet me, some wry observation on her lips, and invite me for an energetic walk. She so dominates the viewer’s focus, clad in her dazzling white skirt and just fractionally off center within the picture’s frame, that one may forget that this is a double portrait, a portrait of a married couple, a Mrs. and Mr. Indeed, the painting’s title seems extraordinarily out of kilter with the representation it captions: Mr. Phelps Stokes seems a late arrival to the portrait session, sneaking behind his wife and into her shadow, his neutral-toned suit blending in to the background, his body partially out of frame or hidden by the Mrs. whose fashionable boater becomes a modern day fig leaf. What can it mean? How do the painting’s for- mal elements tug against that conventionally realized idea of “Mr. and Mrs.? Against the fundamental meaning and purpose of the coordinat- ing conjunction “and?” One of the most difficult concepts to address in the seminar on Marriage and Literary Form is the notion that form--textual “architecture”--conveys meaning in and of itself, meaning that supplements considerations generated by plot, character, setting, etc. In the painting of the Stokes Phelps, the social and legal conventions govern- ing marriage and a historical tradition of marriage portraiture are challenged by Sargent’s use of space, perspective and contrast—formal attributes akin to those authors deploy in developing their representations. What does it mean, for instance, that Hawthorne provides three evenly distributed scaf- fold scenes in The Scarlett Letter? What does it mean when Austen substitutes a series of walks in the second half of Pride and Prejudice for the dances that punctuated the first? Why does How- 5 ells nearly abandon the narrative principle of exposition in A Modern Instance, jumping almost immediately into the betrothal of his main characters--an action that generally caps the trajectory of the marriage plot rather than begins it. “Reading” form is a tricky endeavor, but one that amply rewards the effort. The essays in Behind the Veil: Inspecting and Interrogating Marriage in the Form of Fiction reflect the parallel interest that the students in the Spring 2015 Senior Seminar had with marriage plots from both the center and the margins of literary and social tradition. Their engagement with often thorny structural issues as a path to meaning in the novels, films, and television shows about which they wrote not only elevates their analyses of these texts, but also demonstrates that the fruitful “mar- riage” between form and content endures. Dr. Debra MacComb May 2015 6 Senior Seminar, Spring 2015 • • Going, Going, Gone CAROL EATON is in the final stages of a 30 year old Bachelor of Arts in English. On the way to her degree she has managed bookstores and movie theatres and has a great collection of stories she would like to write down one day. Did you know they save popcorn overnight? She has worked the last 16 years in a law library and can practically recite portions of the Constitution. Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn: Scarlett O’Hara’s Battle Against Traditional Southern Gender Roles During the Civil War Era in the Film Gone with the Wind by Carolyn Eaton • • I wish to Heaven I was married, she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. I’m tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I’m tired of acting like I don’t eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I’m tired of saying, ‘How wonderful you are!’ to fool men who haven’t got one-half the sense I’ve got, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they’re doing it . I can’t eat another bite. Scarlett O’Hara, Gone with the Wind ebster’s Dictionary defines marriage as the “state of being united Wto a person of the opposite or same sex in a consensual and con- tractual relationship recognized by law” (761). Interestingly enough the word love is not found in two major definitions of marriage. Joseph Al- len Boone states that “the marriage rite in almost all cultures plays a central role in sustaining a structured social order” (36). In the movie adaptation of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara embodies the Web- ster’s definition by marrying three men, consensually and contractually with no thought of love. She uses her second and third marriages to pre- serve her status through financial security. But what does that say about Scarlett? Is she a person who is devoid of love or simply someone who does not understand it? It can be argued that Gone with the Wind is a love story; however, it is more a testament to what marriage means to 9 one person and a lesson in how inner strength and obsession can cause one to overlook love. It becomes a bildungsroman as Scarlett moves from a child’s infatuation with the unattainable to the understanding of a woman’s love for someone who is her perfect match. Scarlett uses her marriages to express her frustration with her situation and as a way to acquire things that she is unable to accomplish as a single woman. The Civil War allows Scarlett the opportunity to become a powerful woman in business and she uses her marriages to further her ability to move beyond the traditional gender roles in the Civil War era. Scar- lett fought against the genteel Southern woman role that was expected. She fought against eating like a bird, and never having an opinion. She fought what she felt was against her nature and the Civil War gave her the ability to step beyond the Southern belle. During the pre-Civil War period, young women and men were “expected to acquire funds to establish their own independent house- hold” prior to marrying (Hacker 2). For women, this meant finding a rich man to marry. This structure was inherent during Scarlett’s time. Being married was necessary to maintain the ways of the Old South. Scarlett O’Hara is not like all the other Southern Belles. Scarlett at the beginning of the movie shows little interest in anything other than flirt- ing. While Margaret Mitchell’s book gave us an in depth look into the mind of Scarlett, the movie gives viewers an abbreviated view. While everyone around her wants to talk about the War, she doesn’t want to hear about it. When everyone else dresses properly, she wants to wear something that “shows her bosom before three o’clock.” When everyone else is taking a nap, she is in the library throwing herself at Ashley Wil- kes. Her nature is willful and she conducts herself in a way that battles against the traditional gender roles of her time. When she learns that Ashley is to marry Melanie Hamilton, she confronts him and declares her love. Much to her dismay he cannot be dissuaded from his course and Ashley tells Scarlett that she is “so young and unthinking that [she doesn’t] know what marriage means.” This statement draws our atten- tion to Scarlett’s youth and ignorance in the ways of relationships. In her mind, she is in love with Ashley because he fits into the structured order of the Old South. As a representative of the romantic values of Southern society, he stands for everything with which she is familiar. She sees Ashley as the choice to secure her future and refuses to believe that he could love someone like Melanie.