Articulationg Intersectional Advocacy in Sarah Scott's
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
BEYOND THE WOMAN’S UTOPIA: ARTICULATING INTERSECTIONAL ADVOCACY IN SARAH SCOTT’S MILLENIUM HALL AND GRANT MORRISON’S WONDER WOMAN: EARTH ONE ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English ____________ by Brenda Bran Summer 2017 Copyright by BRENDA BRAN 2017 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to Ana and Salvador Bran and Rosa Lopez for their continued support and love throughout my academic career. No hay suficientes palabras para agradecer les por su apoyo, cariño, y por el ánimo que me dieron. Los quiero mucho y los aprecio mas de lo que puedo explicar. This project is also dedicated to Cosmo and Luna who stayed up with me night after night as I worked on term papers and on this project. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis committee: Dr. Helen Oesterheld, Dr. Jane Lee, and Dr. Jon Hauss for their patience and assistance in the completion of this project. Without their continued support, this project would not have been possible. A special thank you to Dr. Debra Best for first encouraging me to pursue a graduate education. A very special thank you to my best friend, Jennifer Henriquez, who has been my partner- in-crime for the last thirteen years. Jennifer, thank you for encouraging me when I wanted to give up and for always listening to my political and literary rants. I could not have done this without you, so thank you. Lastly, I’d like to thank my thesis support group, Christine Walker, Tory Russo, Livia Bongiovanni, Paula Sherrin, and Terri Fleming- Dright. Thank you all for your encouragement, guidance, and love. You’ve all made surviving grad school possible. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE ............................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ........................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................ v LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................ vi ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1 2. UTOPIAN VISITORS’ TROUBLES AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES ..................... 8 3. UTOPIA’S FAMILY AND HIERARCHY PROBLEM ................................................. 33 4. THE INTERSECTIONAL UTOPIST AGAINST UTOPIA........................................... 61 5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 86 WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................................... 94 v LIST OF FIGURES PAGE 1. Fig 1. Diana attempts to heal Steve Trevor with the purple ray .................................... 16 2. Fig 2. Botticelli, Sandro. The Birth of Venus .................................................................. 17 3. Fig 3. Steve Trevor lands on Amazonia for the first time .............................................. 18 4. Fig 4. Hippolyta question Steve Trevor during Diana’s ................................................ 27 5. Fig 5. Collage of multiple panels with Hippolyta’s all-seeing mirror ........................... 46 6. Fig 6. Amazonia ................................................................................................................ 50 7. Fig 7. Diana and Steve Trevor escape Amazonia through the storm barrier ................ 52 8. Fig 8. Cover art................................................................................................................... 54 9. Fig 9. Mala and the Amazons leave in pursuit of Diana and Steve ............................... 56 10. Fig 10. Diana hands Steve Trevor a collar ..................................................................... 64 11. Fig 11. Nubia confronts Diana before the trial .............................................................. 69 12. Fig 12. Diana in Man’s World comforts a dying woman .............................................. 74 13. Fig 13. The Holliday girls confront the Amazons ......................................................... 76 14. Fig 14. Diana learns the truth about her conception and purpose ................................. 79 15. Fig 15. Diana embraces her mother ................................................................................ 80 16. Fig 16. Diana arrives in Man’s World ............................................................................ 82 17. Fig 17. The Amazons are enslaved ................................................................................. 89 18. Fig 18. Hippolyta reminds Diana of Hercules’ rule ...................................................... 90 19. Fig 19. The Fates make observations about Diana’s influence on others .................... 92 vi ABSTRACT Women’s utopian fiction has allowed writers a figurative space in which they can negotiate for women in leadership roles, but the genre’s progressive impulse is stunted by imposing a strict gender ideology on its community and imagining a specific location as the ultimate goal. The following project examines Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One and their women’s utopias through an intersectional critical lens which examines the multiple forms of oppression individuals face as a result of their gender, race, and class. Despite its noble goals, utopia proves limiting in addressing and remedying all forms of oppression, but the intersectional utopian impulse, a trait embodied by Wonder Woman, drives other characters to work toward a vision closer to what utopia promises: a perfectly just society. vii 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Women’s utopian fiction has traditionally allowed authors a literary space in which to argue in favor of female agency. In her 1762 novel, Millenium Hall, Sarah Scott presents the titular woman’s utopia as an idyllic community meant to protect marginalized members of British society who have systematically been ignored and harmed by existing social structures. Scott presents a cast of characters familiar to eighteenth-century readers: genteel but economically distressed women, older working- class women, disabled individuals who were once forced into circus work, and a number of other marginalized figures who cannot prosper economically because of the social stratification and stigmas they face within British society.1 These characters are introduced to the reader through Sir George Ellison and his travel companion, Lamont, who stumble upon Millenium Hall after their carriage breaks down.2 They find in Millenium Hall a sanctuary for these aforementioned characters. Within the community, each character is allowed to form small family units and flourish economically in ways that society outside of the community simply does not allow. Millenium Hall’s residents are representative of an eighteenth-century English society that favors its male landed gentry at the expense of everyone else. The characters in Scott’s novel are fortunate 1 In Sensibility: An Introduction, Janet Todd notes that literature of this period often featured distressed characters such as the ones that Scott presents (Todd 1-4) 2 Ellison’s name is not revealed until Millenium Hall’s sequel: The History of Sir George Ellison when he attempts to replicate his own utopian community after witnessing the success of Millenium Hall. 2 enough to escape to the utopian community in search of protection and companionship, but in doing so, they reveal the inadequacies of life outside of Millenium Hall. The need to escape from a cruel and unjust world likewise appears in Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One, an American graphic novel published in 2016, two hundred and fifty-four years after Scott first published her novel. In Morrison’s text, the Amazons escape Hercules’ cruelty after years of living as his slaves. They flee to Amazonia and live in harmony for three thousand years in total isolation from Man’s World. 3 The sudden appearance of United States Air Force Flight Lieutenant Steve Trevor, however, utterly disrupts the harmony within Amazonia and leads Diana, or Wonder Woman, to rebel against her fellow Amazons and her mother, Queen Hippolyta. Diana helps Trevor off Amazonia and immediately faces charges of treason. Her mother is then forced to preside over Diana’s trial and enact her punishment. Both Scott and Morrison present women attempting to escape the tyranny of patriarchal societies, and, more importantly, they endeavor to normalize female leadership and agency, though with varying results. This question of female agency and leadership drives much of the discussion around utopian fiction, a genre in which gender is a constitutive element. In her novel, Scott suggests that matriarchal leaders simply work better because of their sympathetic nature. The leaders of Millenium Hall, for example, attempt to exhibit their wisdom in constructing their