Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

Reader 1

Thomas Koenigs

Reader 2

Tessie Prakas

Abstract

Being an American is widely understood to mean having the freedom to be whoever one wishes to be; to have the leisure to fashion oneself to make one’s dreams a reality and thus, achieve the ‘American Dream.’ This ideal is considered the framework upon which the country was founded, and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson have long perpetuated it. The belief faces its challenges, however, when the question of gender, race, and class are put in the mix. In both early and modern writers, it is found that such a liberating philosophy is not holistically applicable. Specifically, both Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye pull the rug out from underneath the idea of unconstrained freedom to curate oneself through their characters Isabel and Pauline and Pecola. Though the socioeconomic and racial status between James’s and Morrison’s characters differ significantly, in their respective works, both authors form their own kind of warnings against the ruinous outcomes of obsessive self-fashioning.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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