| From the Grandstands to the Dugout: Women in Baseball Literature extends the examination of women characters within the discourse of sport literature by applying feminist frameworks to some of the previously overlooked Implications of women's crucial roles in baseball literature. This dissertation employs a variety of feminist theories and approaches from literary criticism, archetypal analysis, and psychology to discuss literature about baseball written by both men and women.;This study first examines the contributions of archetypal studies and myth criticism and applies them to the gendered characterizations of women in the fiction. Using Robert J. Higgs's Laurel & Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature and Cordelia Candelaria's Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature as inspiration for the archetypal analysis of baseball literature, this study explores both the absence and presence of women characters as mythic types. Through the work of Nancy Chodorow on the psychoanalysis and sociology of gender, this dissertation then examines the literary implications of both the absence of biological mothers and the presence of heightened maternal qualities in both men and women characters in the works of Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, Lamar Herrin, Nancy Willard, Silvia Tennenbaum, and Barbara Gregorich, among others.;This work then applies Jean Shinoda Bolen's Goddesses in Everywoman : A New Psychology of Women to baseball literature, calling attention to patterns of behavior in women characters previously overlooked. These patterns that recall the Greek goddesses Demeter, Hestia, and Hera are here labeled "transformational" goddess types. Those figures whose attributes embrace more than one goddess and whose personal development is emancipatory are here termed "compound" goddess types. An examination of the contributions of these goddess types cannot be understood without a thorough appreciation of what Candelaria describes as the "gender exclusivity" that characterizes the sport of baseball and defines most of the criticism of baseball literature. This study, thus, pushes the boundaries of existing criticism beyond the overt cultural practices of an exclusively male and masculinized sport by furthering scholarly recognition of how women characters, the feminine, and the feminist imagination inhabit baseball and its literary representations. |
