Crossing the Accepted Sexual Frontiers: Mary Traverse’s Faustian Quest in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse

Li WANG

Abstract


Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse is about how the heroine Mary Traverse, defying the bounded atmosphere of the patriarchal society represented by her father, crosses the accepted sexual frontiers, ends up bruised and battered but still has a hope for a just world in the future. The paper analyzes Traverse’s Faustian quest for power in the public space. With a critical portrayal of the lives of women in patriarchal society, Wertenbaker shows that to gain power, women need to dismantle the ideological biases toward women rather than merely mimicking and appropriating the behaviors of men under the patriarchal ideology.

 


Keywords


Timberlake Wertenbaker; The Grace of Mary Traverse; Sexual frontiers; Faustian quest

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.ccc.1923670020130906.3029

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