“To this day, it sends chills down the spines of readers… reminding them of the divine power of fate and how one wrong choice can result in the entirety of your life being changed for the worse.”
From my first essay on Literary Darkness, in reference to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Ask a business major, and they’ll say that a degree in English is a do-nothing, know-nothing degree where everything you say goes and you get an A for it. Having done the program, I’ve found out that it’s partly true. In many of my English classes, the bulk of the grade was either a midterm paper/final essay combination or just doing the bare minimum and showing up to class. From the business perspective, having a worthy career is all about intake: you see the numbers, you look at the trends, you make conclusions and you make bank. Saving the economy, one dividend at a time.
However, despite its notable lack of anything money-related, English is much more difficult in the sense that you are totally free. There’s nothing you can do because you can do everything. With that in mind, you need to know a lot–it’s the only way you’ll be able to do even a little. There’s no particular way to do it, I know many people have tried to narrow things down, pick specific subjects within a work, focus on the totality of a work, study theory…
Or you can do what I did, and choose the alternative: you can totally just not choose.
It started in my rhetoric class, freshman year. I was new to college with the next four years ahead of me and an assignment loaded up on my laptop. We were expected to write an encomium, a short piece praising something. Should be easy!
Nope. I thought about it quite a bit; I wanted to write something I felt confident about, but also something I could research. At the same time, however, I didn’t want to write something that anyone else was going to write about, even if they were coming up with really good ideas. I wrestled with it for a while, slept on it, thought extensively about it, authors, public figures, people in my life, books, poems, plays… It was starting to keep me up at night. Finally, I looked over the rubric and was inspired to make a difficult, revolutionary decision:
Screw it. “Encomium: Chairs.” It was well-received.
That feeling of success was addictive. After all, it was the first time in my academic career that I’d gone my own way with my ideas and written something I could have a lot of fun with. It was a radicalizing force, one that I would carefully tend to over the course of my undergraduate degree. I tried to put it into place over time, rebelling against essay conventions here and there as I could, but it was never anything substantial. I wouldn’t get that chance until a year later, when I took Early British Literature and Culture.
This class was particularly of note for me, since I was going to read all the great works from all the great authors. I heard we were going to read Frankenstein, and Pride and Prejudice, and all sorts of different things that were held in high regard; I was terrified. Am I gonna have to read all this? I kept asking myself over and over again as I read through the syllabus obsessively, hoping that that one extra Coleridge poem was just a floater in my eye that would go away at some point. The longer I stared, and the drier my eyes got, the more I realized that this was going to be a lot of work.
I’d take a glance or two–I was generous. Percy Shelley, Mary Robinson, and William Blake all had stories to tell at the beginning of the semester, and I tuned in from time to time. On the whole, however, it was all cursory. I had too many other things on my plate. I had four(ish) classes to worry about and I was about to maybe work on a literary journal with another girl in my class. I was a busy, busy man… even though I kinda wasn’t at the same time. And when it came time to think about midterms, I ran into a familiar problem: I was given a choice.
We were given several prompts: something about David Copperfield, a bigger question about Pride and Prejudice, there was probably something about “Ozymandias,” but none of them stuck out. There was just something missing from each of them. Once again, I tossed and turned, switching from prompt to prompt, until I remembered my favorite secret about academia: throw caution to the wind and do whatever the hell you want. I sent an email to the professor: “I have another idea for the midterm essay.” I explained my idea and sent it, getting her approval the next day: it was final. I was going to write about everything.
It gave me a fantastic excuse to hone in on some of the crucial elements of the texts we’d read. I started to draw comparisons between each of the works, thinking about what I could include and what I couldn’t. I started to put everything I could into two camps: these works had specific images in the text that made them scary, like ghouls, ghosts, goblins… but these works had more conceptual fears: poverty, unhappiness, illness, eternity… I assigned them names: textual and metatextual darkness. I wrote the essay in about two days, barely able to put it down as I found myself more and more interested in what I was talking about. I was talking about how terrifying Pride and Prejudice actually was because Elizabeth is racing against time to get married and save herself and her family from poverty due to her Victorian society, I was talking about Blake’s poetry and how religious fears played into my idea of metatextual darkness, and how “Ghost Beach” was textual because there were literally ghosts on a beach (and a dead sailor under the sand)! A paper full of murder, bloodshed, and spooky words like “skull” and “gloom,” and I was having the time of my life. I pulled together the final draft and emailed it in, feeling a pang of excitement and nervousness.
Soon after, once it was graded, the nervousness had washed away completely, leaving only the purest excitement I’d ever felt in its stead. My professor had emailed back a grade, 98, with some comments attached in which she said the words that made the exception my rule:
“You are on the way to inventing an entirely new category of literary analysis.”
Cool!
I honestly didn’t know how to react. I was mostly just shocked that I’d come up with anything. I couldn’t stop thinking–and still do, honestly–that someone else had to have written about it before (“Sorry, Gérard Genette,” she’d written), but at the very least, she was telling me that breaking the rules that governed how to write was not only okay, but it was going to be the best thing I could possibly do throughout my career. Simultaneously it was confirmation that theory isn’t born from prompts or numbers. There’s no universal rule, no tutorial, just chaos and noise from which order is to be brought. And God, it was nice to have made some peace and quiet of my own.