2190 Studies in Women’s Literature: Essay #2

Like your first essay, this one will be primarily analytical: you are not required to use outside sources, although you MAY. (You may NOT, however, use such non-academic sources as Wikipedia, Sparknotes, Cliffs Notes, etc: even if properly cited, these are not acceptable.) This will be a five to seven-page paper, typed and double spaced, with standard margins and a standard font (preferably Times New Roman). You should have a creative, informative title that conveys the author and title of theg text you are focusing on as well as the central concerns of your paper.

You will develop your own topic for this paper, within the boundaries of the ideas, concepts, and conflicts we have examined in our discussions of “women’s lit” throughout the semester. The question I would like you to begin with is this: What questions about gender do these books seem to raise? What questions do they leave you with? Choose one novel—or, at the most, two—and focus on some particular way in which this text conveys ideas about gender—or about femininity, specifically. It could be a phrase, an image, a significant object, an odd scene. Don’t make your topic too broad: the more focused your approach, the more detailed and in-depth your analysis, the better you’ll be able to link your analysis to the larger questions about gender raised by the novel and the class. You’re using a small, focused picture—like a miniature, a snapshot—to arrive at insights & conclusions that you can then extend to the “big picture”—our culture, that is; our assumptions about what it is to be a man or a woman, what that means and what it should mean, and why, finally it matters.

Here are a few examples:

The representation of children—or pregnancy—in Parable of the Sower.

The representation of marriage in To the Lighthouse.

Nelly’s “elf bolts” in Wuthering Heights.

Women and violence in Parable.

The idea of beauty in Look at Me.

“Shadow selves” in Look at Me.

Each of these topics provides no more than a starting point: they aren’t full-fledged paper topics at all. But they offer a place to begin digging into a text, to begin asking the kinds of questions that will eventually allow you to develop a project and—ultimately—a thesis.

Schedule of due dates:

April 9^th: Paper proposal due. This should be a one-page discussion of your ideas, the kinds of questions you are exploring aspects of the text you have chosen that interest you, that seem somehow problematic or worth exploring. What questions about gender to you think your text raises? How does it accomplish this? What ideas does this novel propose—not overtly or explicitly, but through its imagery, its plot, its characters?  I don’t expect you to have a thesis at this point: you should do a fair amount of reading, thinking, analyzing and even writing before you try to come up with a thesis. Your thesis should emerge from your close consideration and analysis OF the text; it’s not something you should impose on the text.

Apr 14 Workshop. “Mountain of notes.” Details TBA.

Apr 23 Draft workshop, essay #2. You should bring a typed draft to class that is at least 4 pages long.