Browsing by Subject "Virginia"
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Item Bodily subjectivity as alternative selfhood : The Voyage Out beyond the bildungsroman(2015-05) Kreider, Aleina Anne Nicholas; Carter, Mia; Wojciehowski, HannahVirginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, by initiating and yet resisting the traditional bildungsroman form, illustrates the inadequacy of this genre's brand of self-development and seeks an alternative mode of selfhood. The novel’s protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, though apparently "formless" and unable to "develop," nevertheless exhibits a sense of self and seems to be more than mere blankness. In exploring what selfhood might be when the bildungsroman-self is untenable, The Voyage Out ultimately reaches toward a kind of subjectivity not rooted primarily in intellectual and linguistic experiences—which typically come to shape the subject in the bildungs—but in bodily experience. This bodily subjectivity offers rewards beyond those the telos of the bildungsroman enables, and in affirming the value of the bodily, The Voyage Out also simultaneously facilitates a feminist move towards reclaiming this characteristic of "femininity" that has so often been used to render women lesser-than. Subjectivity and self having long been associated with mind rather than body, they have also long been in the masculine domain, while the feminine is aligned with the bodily, the other, and the object. As The Voyage Out reclaims the value of the body and its involvement in subjectivity, then, it also challenges the notion that to be a subject one must be the mental, masculine hero of the traditional bildungsroman.Item The politics of race and mental illness in the Post-Emancipation US South : Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane in historical perspective(2014-05) Brooks, Adia Awanata; Gross, Kali N., 1972-; Davis, King EIn "The Politics of Race and Mental Illness" I explore the relationship between conceptualizations of black mental health and white social control from 1865 to 1881. Chapter one historically contextualizes black mental health, highlighting psychiatrists', slaveholders', and black slaves' perspectives on black mental illness. In this chapter, I argue that the current racial disparities in psychiatric treatment and diagnosis stem from a legacy of cultural incompetence, that is, a failure to fit diagnoses and treatment methods to the needs of culturally diverse populations. The second chapter analyzes the nature of racial power relations in the US South during Reconstruction. It asserts that not only did racism thrive, but that the white population also sought methods of re-subjugating the black population during this period. Using primary sources, I argue in chapter three that whites institutionalized blacks in Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane (CLA) for non-mental health reasons as both a punishment for attempts at economic independence and in order to culturally censor them. While most modern mental health literature avoids discussing social control, my research examines the reasons for black commitments to CLA within the context of white re-subjugation of the black population in order to emphasize the centrality of social control to black mental health care in the Post Emancipation era.Item The Cavalier Image in the Civil War and the Southern Mind(2012-07-16) Allgood, ColtThis thesis examines the methods and actions of selected Virginians who chose to adopt irregular tactics in wartime, and focuses on the reasons why they fought that way. The presence of the Cavalier image in Virginia had a direct impact on the military exploits of several cavalry officers in both the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. The Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War gave rise to the original Cavalier image, but as migrants came to Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image became a general term for the Southern planter. This thesis contends that selected Virginia cavalry officers attempted to adhere to an Americanized version of the Cavalier image. They either purposefully embodied aspects of the Cavalier image during their military service, or members of the Southern populace attached the Cavalier image to them in the post-war period. The Cavalier thus served as a military ideal, and some cavalry officers represented a romanticized version of the Southern martial hero. This thesis traces the development of the Cavalier image in Virginia chronologically. It focuses on the origins of the Cavalier image and the role of the Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War. After the Royalist migration, and especially during the American Revolution, Virginians like Henry Lee embodied aspects of the Cavalier image during their military careers. Between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War, some Southern authors perpetuated the image by including Cavalier figures in many of their literary works. In the Civil War, select Virginians who fought for the Confederacy personified the Cavalier hero in the minds of many white Southerners. Despite a Confederate defeat, the Cavalier image persisted in Southern culture in the post-Civil War period and into the twentieth century.Item The rhetoric of Southern identity: debating the shift from division to identification in the turn-of-the-century South(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Watts, Rebecca BridgesRecent debates as to the place of Old South symbols and institutions in the South of the new millennium are evidence of a changing order in the South. I examine -- from a rhetorical perspective informed by Kenneth Burke's theory of identification and division -- four debates that have taken place in the South and/or about the South over roughly the past decade, 1995 to the present. In this decade, Southerners and interested others have debated such issues as 1) admitting women to the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel; 2) integrating displays of public art in Richmond to feature Confederates and African Americans side by side; 3) continuing to fly the Confederate battle flag in public spaces such as the South Carolina Capitol or including it in the designs of state flags such as those of Georgia and Mississippi; and 4) allowing Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, who seemed to speak out in support of the South's segregated past, to continue in his position of Senate leadership. Looking at each of these debates, it is clear that at issue in each is whether the ruling order of the South should continue to be one of division or whether that order should be supplanted by identification. Judging from the outcomes of the four debates analyzed here, the order of division seems to be waning just as the order of identification seems to be waxing in influence over the turn-of-the-millennium South. But a changing South is no less a distinctive, continuing South. I argue that a distinctive Southern culture based on a sense of order has existed and continues to exist amidst the larger American culture. If some form of "Southernism" is to continue as a distinctive mindset and way of life in the twenty-first century, Southerners will need to learn to strike a balance between their past, with its ruling order of division, and the present, with its ruling order of identification.