A farewell of sorts

The current phase of my education is coming to a close, and I don't think I'll have many more papers to post here for some time.

I've never made any claims to the greatness of my writing; as the title of this blog states, they're just papers that have earned A's from the teachers who graded them. I am pretty proud of them, however.

I don't intend to stop blogging, but in the absence of new papers to post, I'll be taking a different direction. If you're interested in improving your own writing, please head over to my new blog, Write Better Papers. There, I'll explain the tips and tricks that have helped me improve my own writing. See you there!

The Great Social Evil: Victorian Society's Creation of Prostitutes

Scholars today widely agree that the Victorian age, from 1830-1901, was not the best time for English women.  As the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "political and legal reforms in the course of the Victorian period had given citizens many rights...but women did not share in these freedoms" (990).  Given few educational opportunities; lacking the right to participate in the political process, either through voting or holding political office; and unable, until the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 to 1908, even to "own or handle their own property" ("Introduction" 990), women--particularly women of the upper and middle classes--were relegated to home and hearth, and "feminine idleness was treasured as a status symbol" ("Woman Question" 1582).  In an age of great social change, however, women's subservient position did not go unnoticed; many writers of the time addressed the "Woman Question."  An examination of the career of Becky Sharp, one of the two women at the center of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, reveals the oppressive paradox at the heart of genteel Victorian womanhood:  a woman's financial and social security depended on her use of her sexuality to attract a mate, and yet a virtuous woman could never use that sexuality knowingly to further the cause of her own survival.  According to Victorian mores, only wicked women dared try to take control of their own fates.  Unfortunately for many women, the unlucky accident of poverty or low social class could turn an intelligent and ambitious woman "wicked."

Mad Plunges Against Fate: Marriage and Divorce in the Fiction of Edith Wharton

"The great argument," Edith Wharton declared in The Writing of Fiction, "requires space" (76).  She was writing of the importance of fitting one's theme to its appropriate fictional form, whether short story or novel.  If one considers her argument in relation to her fiction, it becomes easy to pick out some of her particular "great arguments."  Marriage and divorce play significant roles in her body of work, from The House of Mirth to The Age of Innocence.  This thematic concern becomes understandable in light of Wharton's history:  according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, she was married for twenty-eight unhappy years before seeking a divorce "on grounds of her husband's adultery" (829).  Also understandable in light of her history is her particular treatment of marriage and divorce.  Consistently throughout her novels, Wharton presents marriage as oppression, and divorce as liberation.

"You Care What People Think of You": Personal and Racial Identity in Tripmaster Monkey

Postmodern American fiction is often characterized by its focus on the issues of personal and ethnic identity in a heterogenous nation.  "Trippers and Askers," the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey, explores these issues in a day in the life of Wittman Ah Sing, a second-generation Chinese-American poet.  Relentlessly self-centered, self-consciously determined to both distinguish himself from others and claim a place within a group, and often shallow and cruel in his judgments of others, Wittman makes a sometimes unsympathetic character, but a perfect representative of complex humanity in search of a simple answer.  Through him, we see that the search for identity is often an ugly affair:  we judge, reject, and hurt others in our efforts at self-definition, all while mistaking others' perceptions of ourselves for our true identities.

Waves and Radiation: The Pervasiveness of Media Culture in White Noise

Even before the Internet and social media made media saturation in American life a cause for constant discussion and concern, the mass media had provided fertile ground for literary exploration.  In 1938, John Dos Passos's U. S. A. called attention to the popular media through the use, as the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature write, of "newspaper excerpts and headlines, snippets from popular songs, and quotations from speeches and documents...in an imitation of the weekly feature one saw at the movie house" (1854).  Nearly fifty years later, Don DeLillo presents the mass media as a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, and explores the consequences of that ubiquity.  The mass media, DeLillo suggests in his novel White Noise, replaces human intellect and experience with unthinking consumerism, and addresses the human need for meaning by creating new mythologies based on the outlandish fictions of trashy supermarket tabloids.

Reality and Superstition in Silas Marner

Despite the scientific advancements that have made the twenty-first century's technological marvels and unprecedented understanding of natural forces commonplace, debates still rage between empirical reason and unprovable faith or superstition.  Debates such as these are not new.  Nearly two hundred years ago, new theories about geological time and the evolution of all species challenged long-established religious beliefs.  The ensuing debate broke free of the rarefied confines of theological discourse and made its way into larger society, appearing in the literature of the times.  In the novel Silas Marner, Victorian intellectual and novelist George Eliot explores empirical reason and irrational faith, ultimately bringing them together in a philosophy with room for aspects of both.  With the title character's tale, Eliot argues that while there may indeed be supernatural or divine forces at work in the world, those forces can achieve no good without human reason and choice.

The Emptiness of J. Alfred Prufrock

The early twentieth century marked a significant change in American life, forcing upon the American people an urbanized, industrialized modernity, which not everyone embraced.  The intellectuals of the day devoted their creativity to responding to the rapid changes in their society, producing a body of work now known as "American literary modernism" ("Introduction" 1178).  Foremost among the Modernists was the conservative poet T. S. Eliot.  His 1918 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," makes clear with every line his discontent with what he perceived as the emptiness and meaningless of modern life, especially as compared to the richness and beauty of the past.