DARLING CLEMENTINE AND “THE SEMIOTICS OF BEAVERS”

It isn’t the abuse that kills. It’s the silence. This creative thesis includes two works—"Darling Clementine,” an excerpt of a novel manuscript, and “The Semiotics of Beavers: The In-Différant Girl and the Hierarchal Girl,” a hybrid creative/critical essay. In both works, a girl, one fictitious and one real, explores and survives incestual abuse. In a literary culture that continues to publish and herald the girl as victim as told through the eyes of a male writer, these narratives attempt to explore abuse and survival through a gender authentic lens. #metoo.