thesis

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and its preface, "The Custom- House," the author himself and Pearl Prynne are characters who engage in travel, escaping the restrictiveness imposed onto them by their hometowns and finding greater creative freedom elsewhere. Their journey, however, is not necessarily physical but rather creative. Hawthorne and Pearl employ writing and imaginative thinking, respectively, in order to characterize Salem and Boston as foreign locations through which they may tour. The two are what Hawthorne calls "citizen[s] of somewhere else," although they have not departed from their homes yet. By considering how "The Custom-House" relates to The Scarlet Letter based on the themes of travel and home, a new interpretation arises about Hawthorne's book as well as his definition of the American romance, which posits that a person may use creativity in order to find his or her place both within and away from the community.

The gopher tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus, is a threatened species native to the southeastern United States. The breeding season of G. polyphemus is reportedly from April to June. However, out of season hatchlings in Jupiter, Florida, suggest that in South Florida, the very southernmost part of the gopher tortoise's range, the warmer climate allows a longer period of reproduction or a year-round breeding season. My research sought to find evidence for an extended breeding season and to collect fecundity data on the South Florida tortoises by capturing female tortoises and X-raying them at different times of the year to check for the presence of eggs. Although I found no conclusive proof of an extended breeding season, I present additional circumstantial evidence for it, as well as information regarding the fecundity of tortoises in the spring.

The academic debate on gender and migration has missed some of the key factors that impact women's lives and communities of origin. Interviews conducted in Jacaltenango, a Mayan sending community in Guatemala, suggest that while the migration of a spouse does bring substantial financial benefits there are significant individual and social costs that result from migration. More importantly, the interviews uncovered the crucial impact of transnational gossip on women's lives, a feature that has been absent in previous academic treatments of gender and migration. Transnational gossip has exacerbated the negative effects of migration for women in migrant-sending locations, pushing women to stay in the "private sphere" and serving as a form of social control that keeps women from actively participating in their communities. For many women, long periods of time living apart from their spouses combined with fears about transnational gossip have brought severe loneliness, anxiety, health problems and even seclusion. This phenomenon is helping define the contemporary social structures of Jacaltenango, and represents one of the most important effects of migration in terms of the lived reality of spouses and families of the predominantly male immigrants who leave Mayan communities in Guatemala to seek work in the United States.

Terror Management Theory posits that induced death-related cognitions lead to anxiety. To relieve anxiety, individuals may bolster their self-esteem or current cultural worldviews. The current study hypothesizes that induced thoughts of social connectedness will be an anxiety-buffering mechanism that will reduce the need to defend one's worldview. Participants watched one of two films which were intended to either induce social connectedness or have no effect on the individual. Each participant watched a short film clip then completed measures pertaining to moral transgressions, affiliative and agentic extraversion, self-esteem, and positive and negative affect. Females who were high on affiliation were found to defend their worldviews more often than males high on affiliation following the social connectedness induction. The experimental (42-Up) condition showed lower levels of punitiveness than the control (K-Web) condition.

Many critics and readers assume that Tess of the d'Urbervilles is simply the tragedy of a ruined country maiden and that the sexually-driven scenes are the most important aspects of the novel. In my thesis, however, I argue that Thomas Hardy created a novel centered on his complex heroine, Tess, not on simplistic notions of sexual ruination and sensational plot developments. In other words, Tess is an autonomous, detailed character who cannot be relegated to the usual stereotypes of Virgin, Whore, Mother, etc. Through my reading, we gain a greater understanding of the novel as a whole, instead of as a fractured, deterministic, and plot-driven tragedy. I begin my argument by examining Hardy's subtitle, "A Pure Woman," asserting that our focus should be on the word "Woman" and Tess's subjectivity, not reductive concepts of "purity" or chastity. In Chapter Two, I examine two significant scenes that occur in Alec's carriage, showing how many critics' readings underestimate Tess as helpless, and arguing that she fights against her oppressor in covert ways. My third chapter continues this defense of Tess by critiquing the critical debate surrounding the sexual encounter in "The Chase". I posit that the entire debate is flawed and that Tess should be defined based upon her actions and not simply her sexuality. Lastly, in my conclusion I present a broader defense of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in which I assert that the ambiguous plot scenes in Tess are conscious attempts by Hardy to subvert traditional assumptions about what is important in a novel. My goal in this thesis is to critique popular but simplistic interpretations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles which diminish Tess's role; instead, I emphasize the way her character, in the words of critic Kathleen Blake, "invites but frustrates oversimplification."

This thesis presents an examination of the trope of photography in E. L. Doctorow's latest novel, The March, which takes General Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas as its subject matter. The Civil War, as the first major American military conflict to be photographed, is the perfect vehicle for the novel's meditation upon the representation of significant political and cultural events. As this paper argues, photography functions in the novel as a metaphor for visual culture in general. In particular, I argue that the discrepancies which the novel posits between the photographic record and lived experience function to trouble notions of media transparency. As the novel suggests, the popular conception of photography, which constructs it is an irreproachable and infallible medium, has lent itself to political manipulation. Thus, through photography, the novel depicts history as the conventional framing of events for posterity, not as a comprehensive record of events.

The Florida Scrub-jay is the only bird endemic to the state of Florida, and is entirely restricted to pyrogenic xeric oak scrublands. The species is listed as Threatened, and all populations throughout the state are in decline. The major causes of decline are habitat modification due to development and fire suppression. Preservation and proper fire management is crucial for the continued survival of the species. The territories of three families of Florida Scrub-jays at Savannas Preserve State Park were delineated, and the area calculated using 100% MVCP analysis and compared to work previously published by Cowan (2005). The results of this study show that Savannas Preserve State Park oak scrub habitat is deteriorating, but that aggressive fire management can restore the scrub to optimal Florida Scrub-jay habitat.

The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) continues to be an object of intensive study with respect to its genetic heterozygosity and its drastic decline in the wild. Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) has been used to evaluate the levels of inbreeding and monomorphism in the cheetah. A measurement of craniodental FA was undertaken to compare the southern African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus) with previously collected craniodental FA measurements from the East African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus raineyi). Unlike their counterparts, the southern African cheetah did not show significant asymmetry. These findings suggest that fluctuating asymmetry cannot be used as a determination of genetic depletion in cheetahs.

Extensive blooms of the marine cyanobacterium Lyngbya majuscula occurred during 2006 in Halodule wrightii seagrass beds. We examined the effects of L. majuscula blooms on seagrass by removal treatments and assessed if this was primarily an effect of shading by conducting artificial shade treatments. We tested the effects of L. majuscula removal and artificial shading on fifty individual 0.25 m2 experimental seagrass plots infested with L. majuscula in a fully crossed, two-way experiment. Measurements included blade elongation, biomass, and stem density. Blade lengths of H. wrightii were significantly increased by the presence of artificial shading and L. majuscula. L. majuscula removal resulted in increased below ground biomass in shaded plots, suggesting an increase in stores, when possible, for accelerated recovery following a shading event. Adverse L. majuscula effects occurred after declines in bloom biomass indicating that L. majuscula can have a prolonged negative effect on H. wrightii production.

Harvestmen are known to secrete a wide range of defensive chemicals in order to protect themselves from predators. An earlier study examined the phylogenetic pattern of defensive secretions produced by 22 species of harvestmen. This research, however, assumed that there is a genetic link between the defensive secretions. I wished to determine whether harvestmen defensive secretions may be diet-based by introducing several irritants into their food and then testing their secretions in the same manner. I performed a GC-MS analysis on 13 samples from the Vonones sp. But I found no initial GC-MS readings that showed this species of harvestmen to contain any irritants in their secretions. The absence of irritants does not allow any evaluation of whether harvestmen secretions are genetically or dietarily based.