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- Title
Moving Beyond Progress: Retracing the Narrative and Social Cycles of Margaret Oliphant's Hester.
- Authors
Merte, Melissa
- Abstract
In Margaret Oliphant's Hester , the protagonist repeatedly confronts obstacles to her vision of the future. From her desire to open a cours , to her hope of managing the bank, her prospects diminish in the small, claustrophobic town of Redborough. Oliphant specifically directs irony at the gendered concepts of "desire" and "choice," as Hester's freedom of choice is repeatedly undercut or frustrated. But Oliphant structurally evokes these same questions about development through her use of formal patterns, patterns that are centrally traced throughout the novel and positioned as complicating forces to linear trajectories. These same patterns critique the conventional pursuit of narrative progress by suggesting that formulaic ideas of development both limit fictional possibilities and become complicit in the social structures that restrict gendered progression. Oliphant's decisive emphasis on recursive actions and structures ultimately gestures toward the underlying societal norms that construct them.
- Subjects
PROTAGONISTS (Persons); FUTURE (Logic); IRONY; DESIRE; CHOICE (Psychology)
- Publication
Studies in the Novel, 2021, Vol 53, Issue 4, p1
- ISSN
0039-3827
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/sdn.2021.0042