Working against closure : sexuality and the narrative endings of Little Women and Jacob Have I Loved

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2003
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Both Little Women and Jacob Have I Loved focus on the time of adolescence, when young adults are beginning to experience sexual feelings, but cannot yet express them in socially-acceptable ways, such as marriage. Although both texts allow their female protagonists freedom to express their sexuality in non-conventional ways, thereby leading the reader to expect certain independent qualities from them, the endings of both novels remain conventional in confining the protagonist to a proper lifestyle expected of women. However, by using D.A. Miller's theory on the effects of closure in a novel, which maintains that a novel's closure does not subscribe full meaning to the text as a whole, it becomes possible to again, even in the novel's closure, view these female protagonists as the independent heroines the reader admired.
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