Albany student presents research at seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event

2017 May 2

Carthage College held the seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event on Friday, April 28, 2017. Celebration of Scholars is a poster exhibition that features original research, scholarship, and creative work completed by Carthage students.

Olivia Whitney of Albany presented "Destroy to Create: The Young Female Artist's Formation of Personal Identity" at the event.

This is the project's abstract:

"With novels centered around life before and after major World Wars, division isn't limited to the outside world - discord brews in the domestic sphere as people realize their identities in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Ian McEwan's Atonement. There are many parallels in style, setting, and sentiment between the two; many critics have investigated the biased narrator in Atonement, the place of the female in To the Lighthouse, and the elegiac nature of art in both novels. I built upon these thoughts through literary analysis of the novels and comparison with existing feminist criticism; I delved into the most striking similarity of the novels that had not yet been considered - how the young female artist forms her unique identity. For a young female artist to satisfy her impulse to create a self, she must identify the "Angel in the House" in her world and "kill" her, breaking from society's designated mold, and claim mind and body both as a sexually independent woman. Once she has fully realized herself, she uses her art to commemorate and even apologize to the Angel she destroyed. After much analysis, it became clear that the age at which the young female artist breaks away is crucial to her success or downfall, and that the novelists differ in the notion of apology through art and the freedom of the artist."