Penelope’s Daughters: Seizing the Means of Reproduction in 20th Century Art, Literature, and Film

Abstract

Penelope’s Daughters: Seizing the Means of Reproduction in 21st Century Art, Literature, and Film seeks to illuminate how counternarratives of narrative, textual, artistic and biological reproductive freedom can provide relief and hope from the reproductive injustices that exist in the United States (and elsewhere). I argue that these artistic counternarratives become a space where women can and do set the terms of their own reproduction. The dissertation begins with Homer’s Penelope (who, by weaving and unweaving a shroud, gains both agency and freedom) before illuminating how Penelope’s legacy informs counternarratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. Penelope’s Daughters argues that poetry, memoir, avant-garde film, novels, journalism, collage, and textile art are an answer to institutional threats to bodily and artistic autonomy. The artists of Penelope’s Daughters create their own counternarratives by offering vastly different mediums and ways of thinking about reproductive freedom, but they all consider reproduction on their own terms. The dissertation first reads H.D.’s double trilogy as it insists on holding artistic and biological reproduction together before turning to Maya Deren’s reformation of ritual to undermine external forces of control over women. Then, it moves to Zora Neale Hurston’s textual reproduction as an act of emancipation and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s use of accumulation and indexing in serial poetry as an offering of hope. Overall, Penelope’s Daughter holds these works as significant in their own rights, not just as cultural products, but as stories that can counter the dominate cultural discourse about reproduction; and maybe, just maybe in countering this discourse, we find the beginning of a new nomos, one where women weave their own reproductive webs.