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."

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.

From Beowulf to Chaucer: The Struggle to Impose Order on the British World

Since the emergence of the human race, people have struggled to impose order on their world.  Homo sapiens is spectacularly unfit for life in the wild:  physically slower and weaker, with more limited senses and less innate protection against the elements, than many other species.  Only mankind's creative intelligence, which gives us the ability to impose order on our world according to our needs, allows us to survive in an otherwise hostile and dangerous world.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find an obsession with order in the recorded thought and literature of any civilization.  Perhaps due to unique geographical and political conditions, however, this obsession with order is particularly prominent in British literature.  A constant preoccupation with the definition and imposition of order-in times of war and uncertainty, upon the outside world, and, once the culture had achieved adequate levels of stability and sophistication, upon society and the self-unifies early British literature and ties its development inextricably to the early history of the British Isles.

Truth in Masquerade: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Storyteller's Manifesto

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.
(Shakespeare 1.2:50-51)

Scholars have long recognized William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night as a celebration of the carnivalesque in Elizabethan England.  As the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write in “Twelfth Night,” their introduction to the play of the same name, “[In Elizabethan England], Twelfth Night, the Feast of the Epiphany...marked the culminating night of the traditional Christmas revels...A rigidly hierarchical social order...temporarily gave way to raucous rituals of inversion” (1078), allowing the relief of class resentment and envy.  Twelfth Night's disguises, deceptions, eventual comic revelations, and assortment of happy endings mirror the Twelfth Night festivities.  The masquerades around which Twelfth Night's plot revolves, however, do more than express humanity's need for occasional communal games of dress-up and pretend.  A deeper significance lies in the statement Twelfth Night's masquerades make about the power of performance itself:  that some truths can only be transmitted through artifice, and that the theater serves a vital role in the transmission of those truths.

Nature and Doom in Beowulf

Answer to an essay question on an exam.  Written in class, so the writing is less polished than in formal essays.

By setting the confrontations Beowulf has with the monsters first at night, then in the lake, and then in the dragon's underground lair, the author of Beowulf is at once expressing fears of those things themselves--darkness, the water, and the wilderness--and is also using those settings to externalize and express deeper psychological fears:  of the unknown and unseen (Grendel, lurking in the night), uncontrolled female power (Grendel's mother), and death (the dragon's lair is a barrow, where Beowulf does indeed meet his death).