While stories celebrating ‘brother bonds’ abound, it is far more likely for sisters – literal and figurative – to be pitted against one another, frequently in competition for a man, if they are present at all. As this paper will show, Tin Man does not simply transport Dorothy into a more modern setting, but subverts the patriarchal ideologies underpinning the perennially screened 1939 MGM film.Tin Man challenges patriarchal assumptions about gender, portraying a female hero who is strong, brave and assertive, but also embraces a more ‘feminine’ style of leadership, rather than performing as a male hero ‘in drag’. Sci Fi Channel mini-series _Tin Man_ presents a darker, futuristic ‘Oz’ story, that illustrates how a text can subvert the ideologies of its intertext without mocking or deriding it. Judy Garland’s Technicolor journey down the Yellow Brick Road is arguably one of the best loved and most watched films in cinema history, and _The Wizard of Oz_ has been remade and adapted, its characters and tropes incorporated into other stories, many of which repeat the patriarchal ideologies of the MGM film. With this in mind, this project reveals ecophobia as a lynchpin of American manhood. The figure of the witch is a force of nature and a part of nature. She is a figure who is both marginal and marginalized-a non-normative threat to the social order. This research has revealed how the figure of the witch moves through multiple narrative forms across the history of American literature and culture as a figure for the ugly, wicked, or the abject side of nature. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Andrew Fleming’s 1996 film The Craft, are American products from the twentieth and twenty-first-century however, my research spans from the seventeenth-century to contemporary time. The texts I analyze, Robert Egger’s 2016 film The Witch, L. Worry cultivates fear, and both untamable nature and women have been feared, since together they threaten masculine identity and the structure of American patriarchy. This male subjectivity has often left men, from generation to generation, in a continuous existential angst over their position within their home, community, and nation.
Throughout American history, men have worked to maintain certain expectations for what it means to be an American man.
Though she represents many things, this thesis examines the relationship between witches and nature-specifically, the discarded parts of nature. The figure of the witch is forever ingrained in American history and culture, and her powers still hold much strength today as she manages to linger and scratch at the American psyche.
0 kommentar(er)
