Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2008

Thesis Director

Anne Zahlan

Thesis Committee Member

Unknown

Thesis Committee Member

Unknown

Abstract

Realistic fiction has recorded changing fashions of architecture and landscape, clothing and coiffure. For at least three centuries, writers of narrative have described the clothing and the hairstyles of their fictional women both to set them within a specific time ar place and to offer a key to their character. Hair as natural endowment and artificial adornment has served as an essential component to the character costume. Novelists have understood that women send messages, albeit sometimes unconscious ones, about themselves, their lives, and their feelings through the style, color and length of their hair. Writers have sometimes described women's hair and its arrangement to suggest character and and emotional state, as well as social position and political attitudes in their characters. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Penn Warren are three major American novelists of the first half ofthe twentieth-century that use hair as a component of the character costume. This thesis analyses the use of hair as an essential component in the character costume in texts by three major American novelists: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (1921), and Tender is the Night (1934), Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946)

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