Date of Award
Spring 2024
Degree Type
Thesis
Department
English Language and Literatures
Director of Thesis
Dr. Susan Felleman
Second Reader
Dr. Catherine Keyser
Abstract
During the mid-20th century, a wide-ranging yet topically focused genre of women’s writing began to emerge in earnest, currently categorized as existential and confessional. Works like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) offer explanations of why an ineffable feeling of malaise permeated the lives of 20th-century women and led them to adopt these methods of writing and thinking. However, existential feelings akin to that of the 20th-century female malaise have returned to stake their claim on the minds of 21st-century women, evidenced in popular contemporary works such as Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). Why have women been unable to escape this looming feeling when they have made considerable advancements in both the personal and professional realms since the mid-20th century? This thesis seeks to explicate the cyclical, contemporary rise in existential and confessional women's writing and women readers through exploration and analysis of sociopolitical influences and mid-20th century women writers—Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Françoise Sagan, and Anne Sexton—to positively position this resurgence as a rightful response to the female situation within patriarchal society.
First Page
1
Last Page
52
Recommended Citation
Conrad, Sophie Elisabeth, "Plath Fostered It, Women Are Nurturing It: Cycles of Existential and Confessional Women's Writing in the Mid-20th Century and Beyond" (2024). Senior Theses. 705.
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/senior_theses/705
Rights
© 2024, Sophie Elisabeth Conrad
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, Political Science Commons, Psychology Commons, Sociology Commons