The Southern woman : representations of the American female Southerner in the fiction of Pat Conroy and inter-mediatic adaptations

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary fictional representations of the American Southern woman in literature and the media. This is done through a focus on a select range of the works of Pat Conroy (1945-2016) and on film adaptations of his novels. Fiction emerging from or written about the Southern United States is often dominated by the figure of the alpha male, and the region is typically presented as a space where traditional gender roles are upheld. The autobiographical fiction of Pat Conroy generally centres around the male protagonist who has come of age in the patriarchal South and struggles with his masculinity in the shadow of an abusive father, with female characters featuring less prominently. Film adaptations of Conroy's novels have followed a similar course. Yet, while Conroy's female characters do not appear central to themes in the writer's literary works and their adaptations at large, Conroy himself has described his own mother - the inspiration for many of his female characters - as a considerably more powerful force than his father. The dissertation takes its lead from this observation, in order to show that the female characters in Conroy's fiction are, at various levels, more significant than initially appears. The introduction presents an overview of the historical and cultural landscape of the South, subsequently underscoring predominant themes in Southern literature and exploring the significance of Conroy's legacy. This is followed by the first chapter, which examines fictional portrayals of the Southern woman throughout literary history and in the media. The second chapter analyses representations of Southern women in Conroy's fiction, through a discussion on the novels The Great Santini (1976) and The Prince of Tides (1986). Representations of the figure of the Southern woman in film adaptations of Conroy's works are then studied in the third chapter, through a focus on the films The Great Santini (1979) and The Prince of Tides (1991), and a comparative analysis of the portrayals of these female characters in literature and film is conducted. The fourth chapter addresses Conroy's depictions of the female Southerner in Beach Music (1995), with the aim of exploring whether these depictions constitute a response to film adaptations of his earlier works and the extent to which the novel helps shape Conroy's cultural legacy. Contemporary works of literature, film and television are considered in the Conclusion, so as to determine the ways in which portrayals of the Southern woman have evolved since the publication of Beach Music in the mid-1990s, and to evaluate whether such works echo and extend Conroy's perspective.