Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis (Master's)
Department or Program
Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
First Advisor
Nancy Canepa
Second Advisor
Barbara Kreiger
Third Advisor
Rena Mosteirin
Abstract
Everyone feels like a monster at some point in their lives. We’ve all grappled with the desire to climb out of our own skin, the desire to kick and scream and rage, the desire to let our pain manifest as a physical thing. These are the feelings that I set out to capture within my novella What We Consume.
My story follows three girls—Aislin, Breena, and Vivien—who agree to be interviewed for a documentary about their disappearance and the subsequent death of their best friend Poppy. Themes of belonging and grief are explored through the girls’ physical circumstances. They are cannibalistic fairy changelings wearing human faces, and they struggle to reconcile this dichotomy within themselves. By alternating between flashbacks and present-day interviews, I examine the ways that my main characters have been shaped by their trauma and dissect how being both human and inhuman affects the girls as they discover who they really are under their human facades.
At its core, my novella centers around the question “What makes a monster?” This story grapples with conforming to the expectations of a small town, loss of innocence, girlhood and what it is like to be a monster living in another person’s skin.
Recommended Citation
Villasenor, Sarayah, "What We Consume" (2024). Dartmouth College Master’s Theses. 140.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/masters_theses/140