To follow an elephant’s footprint
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Date
2023-04
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
The MA thesis, To Follow an Elephant’s Footprint, is a short story cycle covering four interlinked female generations in King’s County, New Brunswick. The stories examine female identity, maternal influence, and the psychological links and emotional bonds between mothers and daughters. They employ a realist voice, alternating from third person to first, and work backward from 2021 to 1934, highlighting a defining moment in the lives of each of the four main characters. Aspects of domestic abuse, women’s political and reproductive rights, intergenerational trauma, parenting, and bilingual tensions are explored through a female, white settler, anglophone, and Maritime lens. As the narrative looks forward and back, these female characters and their relationships are contrasted and complicated to critically illuminate the social ideologies surrounding women and gender and the traditionalist and patriarchal systems present in and dependent upon family and community life in the Maritimes, then and now.