"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
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