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Heaven and Earth: A Collection of Short Stories
| Title: | Heaven and Earth: A Collection of Short Stories |
| Author: | McCaffrey, Molly Ann |
| Description: | This dissertation consists of two components: a collection of short stories called Heaven and Earth and a scholarly essay on Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. The focus of both my critical and creative work has been on the formation and development of identity in terms of gender, class, culture and ethnicity. The title story of this collection follows two American women visiting East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. During their travels, these characters confront not only their loyalty to each other but also American attitudes about class and nationality. Although my fiction works primarily in the realistic tradition, it simultaneously subverts traditional ideas about conventional morality, thus challenging social institutions and political ideologies that affect identity. For instance, many of my stories feature women who reject patriarchal assumptions about gender and culture. In “Sliders,” a young pregnant woman comes face to face with antiquated notions about gender while eating hamburgers with her grandmother. “Things in Common” explores how issues of class come to bear on the development of a lower middle-class teenage girl growing up in the rural Midwest. Conversely, a short story called “Gravy Train” explores the impact of wealth on an urban young woman’s self-esteem. The collection’s title, Heaven and Earth, like that of the title story, represents a meeting of the real and the ideal, a metaphor that can also be applied to the condition of the women in my fiction. While these characters suffer from both earthly tragedy and petty frustrations, they also experience moments of transcendence, that is, moments that keep them yearning for more of life despite its ongoing difficulties. The critical component of this dissertation explores these issues in an essay asserting the sociopolitical impact of The Wind Done Gone , Alice Randall’s 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind . Randall’s revisionist novel challenges the ideas of racial purity and historical truth, and it is my intent to question the same types of prescribed notions about identity in both my academic and creative pursuits. |
| Permanent Link: |
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1116245589
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/12415 |
| Date: | 2005 |
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