"Is She the Right Amount of Crazy?": Mythologization of Fictional Women in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad
Abstract
In her novel A Visit from the Good Squad (2011),
Jennifer Egan constructs a diverse facet of female characters
that explore the ramifications of archetypal compartmentalisation in pop culture and literature. Cultural tropes such
as the manic pixie dream girl and the trophy wife can be
analyzed within the novel to show their long-term effects on
women. The novel creates a template to analyze the hierarchical nature of female archetypes in pop culture, and by extension, the dehumanization of women as these archetypes
transcend from literary tropes to cultural expectations of a
woman’s place in society
Any submissions made by the author to the Albatross are in agreement of release under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license. This license permits The Albatross as well as others to share this work through any means for non-commercial purposes given that proper attribution is given to the author as well as the publisher.
Authors retain copyright of their work.
By submitting their article to The Albatross, the author grants the The Albatross the rights for first publishing.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
