Category: Senior Seminar Project

Jane Eyre and Poems

I thought I was done with Jane Eyre. I hate Rochester, and that was the least romantic book I have ever read. I am really excited to talk about in class. I have a lot of thoughts on how Jane really lacked a lot of agency as a child, but even as an adult was told what to do. She makes choices, but it seems to be what was expected of her. I think of her proposal with John, and how she didn’t want to marry him, but almost convinced herself to. I was screaming at the book, “YOU HAVE MONEY! YOU DON’T HAVE TO MARRY ANYONE.” Anyway, today shall be interesting. This book makes me mad.

As for the poems, I found them very interesting, and I also have a lot of thoughts to share with Isabella. I really enjoyed the one about the period going away. It was so bittersweet. Your period is with you from childhood until you’re almost 50. It is essentially the equivalent of a childhood toy leaving you, except you don’t get to decide when it says goodbye. I can’t think of something that defines a girl more than getting her period (Sorry, I know trans women don’t get periods, but I am talking about the cisgender experience and do not discount trans women). I think of how many cultures celebrate getting it, but no one really talks about when it leaves. I think there has to be a little goodbye ritual to what was essentially your marker into adulthood.

MJ + Demetrius’s reading

It is no secret that I almost chose to write about vampires. However, I love the pieces that MJ chose to put up. I know she is also comparing Dracula, and I can see how she can do it. The women in these novels always seem to need to sacrifice something, whether their bodies, their children, or their dreams. Women in vampire stories are generally the people who are losing out because the men never really have to give something up. The men normally continue living a very similar lifestyle up to that point. The women are asked to give up so much more. Actually, they are not asked; they are expected. I have already talked to MJ about this theme of sacrificing. We had a pretty decent conversation, and I talked about how Claudia in Interview with the Vampire was always treated as a child rather than an individual. In her case, the sacrifice came from her autonomy. It is pretty similar to the women MJ wants to study.

I did love Demetrius’s readings. It also does not help that I am in British Literature 2, and Yeat’s poem was what we were supposed to be studying. I’m ready to send him a picture of my worksheet with a full analysis of what I think is the poem’s scansion. I know that I am not the greatest at it, but I feel like I can offer a little bit of insight. As I stated, that poem had a lot of spondees in it. I think the continuous addition of masculine feet can say something about men inserting themselves where they are not wanted. There are also so many lines with extra syllables that can be taken as a little pun. Here is an “extra one,” but no one actually wants it, also the feeling that it makes the lines feel too compacted. It feels forced when reading it out loud. Oh I loved this poem. It was very fun

Paper Organization

I never mind doing outlines, but I do recognize that I am a little inflexible once I make them. It is normally because I am handing it in to an authority figure, and then I get worried about straying to far from my outline. Normally, there is a grade attached to how well I followed my original plan, so it freaks me out when I want to change something, but I feel like I’ve already locked in my answer. However, playing around with the flashcards felt amazing. It was a very freeing experience. There is something about being able to move your idea, or even disregard them that makes me feel more in control about writing this paper.

I did not submit a flashcard outline just because I was not home during this period. I submitted a slide show because there is still the freedom to move it around to match what I would like to put on my cork board. The slideshow is also more in depth than my flashcards, but that is because I could control how much space was taken up.

I did realize that I was still missing quite a bit of the original plan, which was to research certain poets and certain ideas. However, as I was outlining, I realized I had a lot of work already in the ideas. I am trying not to make my paper too long, so I may skip that research. However, I do feel that William Blake’s poems could still make it in. I am keeping my fingers crossed for that one. This part will be more of a work in progress, but I am excited to see where it goes.

Kate’s Readings

When I was reading her excerpts for Stone Butch Blues, I thought of the documentary “Paris is Burning.” The interaction between our narrator and those around her is very similar. They take her underneath their wings, but they are also the first to tear her down. When she was flirting with Monica and fails, the way Al tries to forces our narrator into hitting her is similar to being taught to fight by a father figure. Al won’t hit Monica for Jess because then Jess will never learn how to stand up for herself. However, it is important for Jess to learn how to defend herself because she won’t always be with accepting people. It a cycle.

In the documentary, “Paris is Burning,” the figures talk about how they read each other in the ballroom scene. However, this is considered an act of protection because it is so important to pass in this real world. They say the goal is for these women to be able to leave the ballroom and board a train without being clocked for their gender nonconformity. This ritual of tearing someone down because of the consequences in the ballroom is just the loss of a trophy, but the consequences in the real world are death. This world might seem like they eat their young, but it is all done in the effort to teach and preserve the youth.

Researching for a Research Paper

I underestimated how much time it would take to gather ten sources. What I thought would be a quick assignment turned into a 7-hour day. I think the reason I thought it wouldn’t be so hard is because I feel like my topic is pretty well researched. Was I wrong? No. In fact, there were multiple sources that I could have chosen. The problem was sorting through and figuring out which ones I really liked.

For the first couple of hours, I was looking at “Paradise Lost” critiques. At the fourth hour, I felt that I had read four papers that had all basically said the same thing. It got really repetitive, so I switched course and started looking for papers on women in religious settings. It helped me to feel like I was doing something different. I do wish I had more research on Bible critiques, but I felt that some of the ones I was looking at were a little too off topic to pick. If I have time, I will probably do another search on a different database.

If you were to ask me how much I know about this topic, I would say that I know a little more than the average person. I was, and still am, Catholic. I grew up learning about the religion in school, and when I transferred to a public school, I attended CCD. It was fun, and I do have faith in God, but I am also very aware that the way the Church operates can come across as disingenuous. As someone who believes in God, I do not believe that the Church is above criticism. Like any institution, it can be filled with people who do not have its best interests at heart, which is why I chose this topic. Pullman’s critiques of organized religion are not heretical. It is set in a fictionalized world that aims to critique the problems that he saw in the way religion treated women. It’s important to acknowledge faults and figure out solutions. I don’t know much about the criticisms of Pullman’s work other than the Church disapproves, but I am not fully looking into it in an effort to make my thoughts my own. Instead, I am looking at critiques of the works that inspired him.

Class Discussion 1-4

TW: Eating disorders

This week two of my classmates chose to post readings about the relationship between food, women, and body image. There is something so personal about the way people interact with societal expectations. While reading them, I thought of my own experiences growing up. Megan posted “The Famine Mystique,” and the article discusses how women unintentionally pass on certain body expectations to their daughters. I remember being 13 and my mother telling that when she was my age, she only weighed a 110 lbs compared to my 125lbs. Did she mean any harm in it? No. But I could see the disappointment in her eyes whenever I never matched up to the image in her head.

Society expects so much out of women when it comes to their weight, it is scary. I was recently rewatching the whole of Project Runway, and for 15 seasons, there were only stick-skinny models. In a couple of challenges where the designers had to dress normal women, there would always be someone who would blame their bad design on the women’s body weight. It would always be something like, “I am just not used to designing for women with curves,” but I would sit there and think, she is just a normal-sized woman. What do you mean you don’t know how to design for her? It was jarring because these people wanted to be the next big fashion designer, but here they are admitting they could not, would not, design for the average woman. The judges would rightfully chew out these designers, but that never changed the fact that these bad designers are not alone in their thinking.

It took until Project Runway Season 14 for a designer to focus solely on plus-sized women. However, this is not just one simple problem. So many parts contribute to eating disorders, and the culture that surrounds them. I remember when Tumblr used to have so many people posting about how cool it was to have anorexia. I remember my friends following those accounts because it was 2010, and our parents weren’t monitoring our internet use. Eating disorders are so appealing to people who feel out of control because their body is the only thing they can control. It was why my friends, ages 10-16, felt they needed to shove their fingers down their throats. When I look back at those years, all I want to do is cuddle those kids and tell them it will be okay. They will get to the other side, and I wish I were a better friend to them. Eating disorders are so complex, and while they do affect everyone, there is so much pressure on young girls to stay skinny. These readings felt like coming back to reading about my teen years all over again.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

I chose to research and analyze Philip Pullman’s Lyra Silvertongue. As a kid, it was fascinating to have your soul on the outside of your body, and for it to it to be the opposite of your gender. If you are female, you are normally going to have a male daemon. With its deeply religious tones, the movie pulled me into its world, only to be devastated when I found out there would be no sequels because the Church deemed it to be heretical. When the TV show came out over a decade later, I was happy to live in a time when its critiques could be heard without hindrance. Now as an adult, who has read the books, I find myself in love with this universe where two scared children hold hands and hope for the best. The afterlife that comes out of their adventure is beautiful and worth analyzing.

As a member of the Catholic church, I recognize that my religion is not always amazing. Like any institution, it deserves to be critiqued for its misgivings and celebrated for its accomplishments. The reason I want to analyze Lyra in particular is that she grows up with all of these biases that I find happen when girls are raised in a very religious setting. It is interesting that normally girls like this go one of three ways: they either uphold the glass ceiling, they rebel within the confines of the system, or they leave the system all together. Lyra goes through all of this and a little more.

In addition to this text, I will be reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, as this work heavily influenced Pullman, and reviewing William Blake’s poetry. I want to get as many references as I can and see how Pullman either subverts or perpetuates stereotypes. As for the readings, I will submit some key passages that include background information and gender expectations.

A Reflection on past papers

In high school, I wrote whatever teachers told me to write about. While there was some creativity in there, that does not change the fact that it was written for a specific audience and had to be censored quite a bit. It felt awkward to talk about sexuality, oppression, and gender in my papers about dystopian novels. There was always a level of having to keep thoughts down because they were too outlandish to put in a paper.

In college, I have found that as long as I can prove my thesis, I can write about anything. Even if the topics can be uncomfortable, there is no limit to what I can write about. It has been the most freeing part of writing papers in college. I think it has made me a little bit more of a conspiracy theorist, but it has been so fun. Some of my favorite papers are from Shakespeare’s class because they pushed me to explore ancient texts and to find what makes them interesting to me. Other papers for classes like Gender and Sexuality have been extraordinarily fun to write because they forced me to confront so many of my own biases and write from other people’s perspectives. College papers have been the most fun to write because the answers are always in front of you, but you have to be smart enough to put the pieces together.

Gen-AI assignment

Honestly, I really loved that article, and it was a pretty good read. It reminded me a little of the Netflix Series, The Haunting of Hill House, when James said, “Women writers were particularly invested in the figure of the ghost as an apt metaphor for women’s ‘spectral’ existence in Victorian society, powerless and peripheral, but also idealized and morally elevated” (204). Nelly Vance, may you rest in peace. She was the Bent Neck lady from her younger self’s nightmares, and she was also the symbol of death when her husband died. When she dies, she realizes that she was the person who haunted her childhood. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in the whole world. It was a recurring symbol that no one in her life was really listening to her plight until it was too late.

On to the actual assignment, I used ChatGPT to summarize the paragraph here:

In “Menopause and Hysteria in Victorian Medical Texts and Rhoda Broughton’s ‘Mrs. Smith of Longmains’,” Louise Benson James examines how nineteenth-century medical discourse connected menopause with hysteria and female psychological instability, and how these ideas appear in literature. She explains that Victorian physicians often treated menopause as a dangerous “crisis” in a woman’s life, when changes in the reproductive system were believed to cause nervous disorders, emotional instability, or hysteria. James then analyzes how these medical assumptions are reflected in Rhoda Broughton’s short story Mrs. Smith of Longmains, whose middle-aged narrator experiences visions that might initially seem like symptoms of hysteria. However, the story ultimately reveals that the narrator’s visions are genuine rather than pathological. Through this twist, the text challenges Victorian medical authority and questions the tendency to pathologize women’s bodily experiences. James argues that Broughton’s story both reflects contemporary anxieties about menopause and subtly critiques the cultural and medical assumptions that labeled older women as irrational or unstable.

Was it good? Sure. Did it cover all the basics? Yes. Would I say that this beats out reading the article itself? No.

The thing about this summary is that I already read the article before being asked to run it through generative AI. Where I felt the summary was a little vague, I already had context for it. This is also a shortened summary of what it had given me. Some of the original blurb, which was about 2 pages longer, gave some information about what the author had written in the past. If I had not read the article, I would have assumed those pieces were in it, but they were not. Some of what the AI had given me was not at all what I had asked about. Other parts were pretty accurate, but when I played around a bit, I found that it would lie to me about what was in the article or correct itself when I found a mistake. Again, I would only catch it because I had already read the article.

Would I use it as a tool? I mean, it did a pretty good job on a one-paragraph summary, but other than that, probably not. It explained the concept pretty well, but it is hard to feel like I can trust it when it lies to me when I ask questions. Personally, I would maybe ask for a summary once before reading as a precursor, but otherwise, I don’t think AI is at the point where it can read and analyze academic work correctly.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

The cancer talk wrecked me while I was reading it. From page 100 onward, I was hooked. The stark contrast between the sections, when the narrator is hit with the sentence, “Then you won’t be surprised to hear she’s got cancer?” to them talking about what gravity feels like, to the bare conversation that follows afterwards, broke me (Winterson 100). I remember when my great-aunt died of cancer, and the way that nothing feels real in that moment. The whole world fell silent in that moment, and seeing the narrator experience the same thing felt very realistic.

When the narrator returns to reality, the conversation is stripped of descriptors like “he said” and “she said,” and all the reader gets are the facts. It is like a very realistic description of dissociation while dealing with something hard, in the minute you are only focused on getting to the next moment vs trying not break down and scream. The narrator in the scene puts the reader at a distance, which feels very fitting as they now have to reevaluate their whole future, which is now going to look very different. The life they planned with Louise can not be the same. For the narrator, this diagnosis changes the whole world, and they do not invite the reader to watch the dreams fade. Instead, they choose to panic in private, yet the reader feels the grief at losing the future with them. They have to let go of Louise to save her, but letting her go also means sending her back to a life she does not want. To save her is to imprison her, but to free her is to doom life. An impossible choice, but one that is easy to see why the narrator chooses to leave.