Comparative Literature (Bi-College)

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Strange at home, stranger abroad : women, borderlands and the uncanny
(2002) Adelman, Lizzie
My thesis looks at the issues of women, migration and the borderland within Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Luisa Valenzuela's Realidad nacional desde la cama. In particular, I am focusing on the way a female's experience of migration opens up a variety of opportunities and new freedoms for the woman and the way in which these changes effect the role she plays within society. Building upon Freud's ideas of the unheimlich, I look at the way in which the woman migrant is portrayed as an unfamiliar, threatening figure and how her uncanniness is drawn onto her body and mind. The new spaces that these women move allow them to finally take control over their own lives, a power that turns them into unsettling forms within a patriarchal society. The thesis comes together to address briefly the issues of the migrant woman in general and how the ideas generated by these two novels can be applied on a larger scale.