Author: admin

For this stage of drafting, I like that I added a lot more primary source and analysis of my text. I am concerned about reaching my page count and expanding my ideas, but I feel good about the amount of ideas/points I have gathered and that I know I will be able to say a lot about them. For feedback, I want reviewers to let me know about the clarity of my argument, the effectiveness of my use of primary source, and what more I could say about the primary source. I have about 10 more pages to complete for my final draft but I feel good about the progress I have made so far and the sources I have been gathering.

For my first draft, I am so far feeling much more confident than I was during the initial drafting phases. I completed around 2 pages, which is only a fraction of the final total, but it is much more than I had a week ago. I feel like I was able to further refine and develop my argument, and I adapted it to also be a response to modern feminist readers, as opposed to only reviewers from the 1800s who are long gone by now. I have some concerns about my opening, but I look forward to peer review and receiving outside perspectives which might have a fresh take on my writing. Next, I am going to work on the different topics of my argument in relation to Bronte’s depictions of beauty, class, education, and how Jane is an “infiltrator” of the upper class through her circumstances and opportunities.

When reading this week for our discussion, I was very interested in the “Cancer Game Board” from the graphic novel chosen by Jules. I thought that it served as a painfully accurate representation of health anxiety for women and how women are underrepresented/underserved in society in terms of health, wellness, science. There is no end or winning to the game, or any sense to be made of playing it, it is just a cycle of worrying, finding reassurance (in research, from the doctor, outside sources etc.), and then heightened worrying with the discovery of yet another risk factor that could have been preventable, or maybe not preventable at all, or something the narrator had not known of previously. It spoke a lot to me about how women’s health is treated in society; health trials/studies for women are not performed as often as they are for men, products and medications for women (period products, hormones, birth control etc.) have harmful impacts on health and especially reproductive organs, many different risk factors can be attributed to one disease, and so on- it feels as though there is no escaping or avoiding these risk factors as a woman, which is captured by the board game’s circular nature and lack of an ending.

To be honest, drafting has not been going well. I did make great progress on my outline and feel well going forward with my paper, but I have not found the time to dedicate to drafting (other than class time) in between readings for this class and assignments/readings for my other classes. I look forward to being able to work independently tomorrow and I am planning to just start building off of my outline and adding in evidence where I see fit. I also feel like I kind of got the short end of the stick in going last for discussion readings, since I know other people who are far ahead of me in their papers who received feedback from peers one or two weeks ago, but inevitably someone is going to go last anyway and everyone gets their fair share of time. Although I do enjoy reading what my classmates are working with and giving them feedback, I genuinely feel like it is taking time away from my own paper and reading my own texts, and I don’t know how to balance reading nearly 100 pages of other’s texts, chapters of our class text, as well as rereading my own text and secondary sources, and inevitably this leads to me skimming through readings or skipping them completely because I feel overwhelmed. I feel like a lot of this for me has been waiting for approval from either my instructor or my classmates, because I lack confidence in my ideas and I am feeling like I am lacking structure in the process of putting this paper together.

For my annotation, I mainly focused on the selected poem by Dimitris called “Leda,” which seemed to be an allusion to the Greek myth of Leda and the swan (Zeus). I was especially interested in this one because, despite the poem being titled “Leda,” there is no Leda or woman mentioned or depicted in the poem. The main subject of the poem is the red winged swan, who is acting upon the indirect object, the lily. I found this a really poignant way of communicating the objectification of women, as well as the understanding of scale of power and fear; in this metaphor a person is like a flower, and a god is like a large and powerful bird. The lily is being acted upon/subjugated/opening up, alluding to an unwanted or uninvited sexual/nonconsensual encounter being depicted in the Greek myth.

When creating an outline, I prefer a traditionally formatted outline using bullet points typed on docs. After going to class today and seeing a friend’s outline, I realized I was overthinking it, and I just went to work drawing out my different points from my paper proposal to put on my calendar, and then into different sections for my outline. While writing, I realized that I had a lot more to say than I realized, and that my topic can essentially be broken down into how Bronte critiques the different expectations that society had for Victorian society, through the vessel of the plain, boring governess who likes to write and read. I realized that I need to seek out more secondary sources in building my knowledge of Victorian society and women during this time period. It was difficult for me not having a more structured, outline “template,” and I feel like I could have benefit more from this structure, but I also realize that this is a really long paper and we are all doing different things, so a traditional template like I am imagining might not be the most effective way to go about things. Eventually, what made it easy is to just go off of my paper proposal and make the outline simple/straight forward.

For this week’s post, I will be reacting to the selected readings of His Dark Materials chosen by Allyson-Chloe. I have not read this series before, but I was truly hooked by these passages and got a good idea of the plot, even with limited reading. The concept of “daemons” as these familiar-beings representing the soul is very intriguing and opens up a lot of possibilities for a discussion on bodies, free will/autonomy, freedom of emotion/expression, as well as religion. The dramatic irony/hidden mission bestowed upon Lyra also made me think of her level of autonomy/how she is manipulated by the adults around her, who has respect for her agency/access to knowledge, and what knowledge do they allow her to access (Mrs. Coulter? Lord Asriel?). Although there was not a lot of interactions with Pantalaimon and Lyra, I think that it would also be worth looking into Lyra’s relationship with her daemon/soul vs other characters in the story, or analyzing the body of her daemon as well as herself.

To find most of my results, I was using the search term “jane eyre” or “jane eyre feminist.” I found the most useful resources using JSTOR, and I found a few on Humanities Source and MLA Bibliography but I found that these websites did not have as many useful sources as JSTOR. What was the most difficult for me was finding secondary sources that weren’t about Jane Eyre but rather on the subject of feminist media or analyzing similar themes/constructs in another text. (which, now that I am writing it feels like I was only supposed to find secondary sources on Jane Eyre, but I thought it would help me to draw upon ideas from other theories/arguments that did not involve Jane Eyre). I wish I was able to find sources from the Victorian/Georgian era of critics/reviewers, but one of the secondary sources I found did have quotes from these people and I could potentially track those sources down through that article. From my research, I have determined that there is an endless amount of discourse on Jane Eyre dating back to when it was published. There are people arguing in defense of Jane/Bronte, in critique of Jane/Bronte, and many different analyses of all different parts of the text. This reduced my fear of sounding redundant or repeating what many have said before, as now I know I am just joining in on the never-ending discourse of this text and I feel challenged by all these different ideas to come up with unique ones of my own.

I want to analyze these lines from Taz’s passage of “A Thousand Splendid Suns”; “Nana said, “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.” I thought that the framing of Nana’s baby dad’s decision to frame her as a culprit as a “compass needle” was very interesting. The speaker frames men’s disregard for women/use of power in the patriarchy (in this context, when deflecting blame/accusing a woman of something) as something instinctual or automatic or machine-like. The inclusion of these lines by the author help to illustrate the oppressive patriarchal society which Nana and Miriam are subject to through metaphor. In terms of women’s bodies, these lines illustrate how women are the first choice victim of men when it comes not only to deflection of blame, but also abusive power dynamics, especially those involving sex/pregnancy and thus dishonor. Men are never to be dishonored, but women are seen as easily disposable. Jalil has multiple wives, but he still dishonors himself and his families by committing adultery with a housekeeper. He has many housekeepers, so he can send Nana away and find a new one, never having to face the consequences for his dishonor, while she must bear the responsibility of a child and the consequences of the dishonor, showing how Jalil’s power and status as a wealthy man enables him to continue his life as normal, while Nana must bear the burden of responsibility and exile.

The topic I am interested in is examining how Charlotte Bronte uses her character, Jane Eyre, as a vessel against patriarchal/Regency society through the depiction of Jane as plain, dull, wearing dark or plain clothes, etc., and the depiction of her intellect, passion, and defiance in the face of a society that is trying to make her a “marriageable” woman. Jane knows she is not a top candidate to be a wife; she is an orphan, she has little to no family inheritance or property, she is much too independent and interested in things like writing, reading, drawing, and so on. All of these details are deliberately a reflection of Bronte and her/Jane’s rebellion against the society they exist in. I chose the Oswald Review because on our shared spreadsheet, I saw that Jane Eyre is a previous subject of papers accepted by this journal and that they also publish a lot of feminist related research or literature review. I assigned my classmates several excerpts throughout the entirety of the text where Jane is describing her own appearance, describing the appearances of other characters (mainly women), or where she is asserting herself/her autonomy by embracing her decisions (such as when being punished by Mr. Brocklehurst, or when returning to Rochester and reflecting on her rejection of St. John). I have worked with this text several times in my education and have previously written a paper on Jane’s struggle/assertion of personal autonomy, despite the many different paths her life could have taken had she sacrificed her free will (I no longer have access to this paper). I want to learn more about the significance of Bronte’s deliberate writing of Jane in the context of when the story takes place or was written.