| Questing, a woman dares to imagine herself a hero. Carrying a torch, she lights unknown regions, calling out of the darkness stories never heard before. She sails against the tides of great legends that recount the adventures of male heroes, legends deemed universal, timeless, and fundamental. Yet these myths and rituals do not fulfill her need for an empowering self-image, nor do they grant her the mobility she requires to imagine, enact, and represent her quest for authentic self-knowledge.;"Radical Departures: The Feminization of Quest-Romance," proposes that a female quest is a revolutionary step in both literary and cultural terms. Indeed, despite the difficulty that women writers face in challenging myths, rituals, psychological theories, and literary conventions deemed universal by a culture that valorizes masculine ideals and universalizes male experience, a number of revolutionary texts have come into existence over the last forty years by such American women writers as Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Anne Moody, Marilynne Robinson, and Mona Simpson, all of them working to redefine the literary portrayal of American women's quests. They work, in part, by presenting questing female characters who refuse to accept the roles accorded them by restrictive social norms, even if it means sacrificing themselves in the name of rebellion, In more recent texts, female heroes survive their "lighting out" experiences to explore diverse alternatives to the limiting roles that have proscribed female development.;This dissertation explores the techniques through which the quest has been transformed to express the need for a viable theory of female development, and new literary forms to represent their developmental structure. My thesis contends that by tracing the emergence of female quest-romance in American women's writings of the last forty years, we bear witness to its development as one of the most fundamental formal expressions of women's awakening to selfhood, mobility and influence in both American culture and a more general humanizing mythology. |
