American Freedom Story: a journey from "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" to the "Secret Life of Bees"

Abstract

This dissertation identifies an American freedom story in a set of novels from 1885 to 2002 beginning with the foundation text Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Five American writers use similar elements and approaches to consider the freedom quest: Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, and Sue Monk Kidd. This story frame leads a misfit hero to leave family and hometown to form a community and experience personal freedom without cultural, religious, gender, racial, or ethnic limitations. The community, as well as the experience of freedom, exists only fleetingly. As the notion of freedom itself changes in America from the Civil War to the present, the hero and the quest in these novels must change as well. The use of the freedom story genre facilitates viewing these works and their diverse authors across historical time, critical approaches, and social contexts.