Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

Spring 2025

Thesis Director

Melissa Ames

Thesis Committee Member

Randall L. Beebe

Thesis Committee Member

Julie D. Campbell

Abstract

The word “spinster” has undergone a series of evolutions over the past seven hundred years, first coined to describe the occupation of women engaged in the spinning of plant and animal fibers into thread and yarn in the Middle Ages and later a legal marital status designation used until the 21st century. The connotation associated in social contexts became pejorative. This project’s tracing of the word spinster is used to set up the broader scope looking at how the spinster can be viewed as an archetype, what we can learn through the lenses of gender and feminist theory, and how she can be traced and analyzed in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and especially its witch characters. For much of its publishing history, Pratchett’s Discworld series has avoided much examination by academics, all but ignored except for some genre-specific attention. His brand of absurdist satire, metafiction, and critique not only of the fantasy genre but of societal norms, warrants much more serious consideration than it has received. Genre fiction is often relegated as a lower form of literature. Fantasy, especially, has been dismissed while science fiction novels by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, and Philip K. Dick have been the subjects of more scholarly attention. The dismissal of his work’s value as literature is aided in part by Pratchett’s own style of satire and metafiction. Like fantasy and other genre fiction, comedy is often overlooked in scholarship. Looking at Pratchett’s work through an exclusively genre-focused lens discounts its value as a humorous and populist critique of both modern and historical life, and genre itself. This project instead looks at his work through a gender and feminist theoretical lens, and how Pratchett’s use of satire fits into that, to get a deeper understanding of the series’ characters and the spinster they represent. Through Pratchett’s concept of “narrative causality,” used throughout the series to describe the influence stories have over our understanding of cause and effect and the power stories have over people’s lives, we find a humorous critique of the consensus fantasy universe and a metaphor for prescriptive gender roles and gender performance, emphasizing the importance of making choices and living life authentically regardless of the path a repeated narrative may try to lead you down. Joining the albeit limited academic conversation of Pratchett’s work and adding to it the understudied figure of the spinster, this project aims to broaden the understanding of both.

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