Category: ENG 216 (Page 1 of 2)

ENG 216 Final Project Pitch Ideas 

Essay 1: 

For the first essay discussing the work of Robin West’s “Law and Literature,” I will identify the three structural reasons she lists in her conclusion and a bit of a brief overview of how, despite her critiques throughout the piece, for example, from feminist legal theory, that the concluding thought identifies still how essential this work is. The structural reason that I found most compelling was the first – which recognizes that “…both law and literature and feminist legal studies are interdisciplinary fields” and “Both movements are seeking to expand the contours of legal scholarship by bringing in heretofore excluded voices”(Wesr 216). 

→ From here, I want to devote a paragraph (maybe two) to unpacking why this is the most compelling to me. First, the emphasis on the interdisciplinary status of both law and literature and feminist legal studies is, I think, essential as a cover-all type lens. It offers a variety of entry points to many points of her critique, such as the use of canonical literature. I think this section would benefit from a quote from Brontë’s TWH as it highlights this untraditional way of expanding voices in the legal narrative – here, a woman who has legally no identity can illuminate and critique matters of divorce/separation, child custody, and marital abuse through literature. A piece of primary literature might work well here…

The other paragraph I had in mind was on the subjective experience of objective legal norms → I thought a quote from Bodichon might be useful in setting up the idea of women as legal objects/transfer of property and not a legal subject – coverture quote, perhaps. It could also extend to Haggard’s MMW – though it is legal satire, it is an untraditional method in calling into question women’s objectification within legal scholarship. For example, the scene where Augusta’s being questioned as if she is solely an object – the will – and that her being cannot be separated from her legal objectivity. 

As for challenges or skepticism toward West’s concluding argument, I might look to her idea that to understand the practice of narrativity, you can look through disciplines outside of the legal academy as well → this brings up that question/skepticism of how much can be done when working with texts that are canonized or portray limited voices → brings to mind her own example of Huck Finn and how we have so many of those seemingly inclusive narratives that still have yet to be centered on the voice of say an enslaved person or a woman. Here a primary source might be an interesting connection. 

Conclusion on again why law and literature studies prevail and how her first structural reason, to me, does the best job in making a straightforward course of action that allows for both feminist legal scholars and law & literature scholars to advance what areas are important to them and has the most flexibility to challenge the shortcomings of the law and how we interact with it. 

Essay 2: 

I will choose to be the director of a new student exchange program and decide whether I’ll admit women and which of the heroines would spend a semester at UNE. First, I would look at Cobbe’s essay “The Education of Women” and use her reasoning to ground my decision about whether UNE will admit women – which will be a yes. Taking quotes such as “Amount the ways in which it may be possible to effect such improvements, a high education manifestly stands foremost – a great good in itself, and needful for nearly all further steps of advance” and “ I hope to have now in some measure demonstrated – first, that some improvement is needed in the condition of young women, and that a better education is one of the stages of such improvement. Secondly, that a high education does not make women less able and willing to perform their natural duties, but better and more intelligently able and willing to do so…” (88). 

 Then use the novels to explain which heroine would most likely succeed in the 21st century, which would have the most difficulty, and why. → Here, I would most likely use the heroine of Juliet from Allan’s “Type-Writer Girl” to be the most likely to succeed in the 21st century, and I can delve into the “new woman” examples to justify. I also have a primary source from The Dictorinary of Victorian London, a poem highlighting the objections to the new woman. I can use that in contrast to Cobbe’s essay to persuade against that objection. To the heroine that would have the most difficulty, I might look to Ruth from Gaskell’s novel Ruth in that she belongs to the generation before the new woman and, with very religious and moral sentiments, might find it harder to adapt to that new woman mentality that Juliet already embraces – maybe bring up some connections to the tensions that might emerge as we see women who embraced this confining and patriarchy driven mindset that their behavior is dictated by the rules and obligations men in society put on them (i.e., Ruth who even though she does work outside the home has very internalized notions of how she should act vs. Juliet who doesn’t let men’s perception of her alter what she does). 

Conclude with restating the goal of admitting women to UNE and using another Cobbe quote…I may also pull in some of the Parliamentary debate on women’s education if I can find some and that the more significant effects on society are well worth the initial discomfort in normative roles. Then bring back the idea of the novel heroine within literature and the optimism they bring in, highlighting and emulating the reality we could bring to women’s education. 

Quote: “O pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerning,/ To overload a woman’s brain and cram our girls with learning,/ You’ll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,/ To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing./ Leave one or two nice girls before the sex your system smothers,/ Or what on earth will poor men do for sweethearts, wives, and mothers?” (lines 25-30). 

Comment: What immediately sparked my interest at the end of this poem, which calls into question the very idea of this “new woman” that we have discussed in class, is the fact that regardless of how much people might have liked the concept of women branching out educationally, at the end of the day, the role they were still supposed to play was the “sweethearts, wives, and mothers”. Connecting this to Grant Allan’s The Type-Writer Girl, I thought that the effort to make Juliet find her Romeo and ultimately lose him – partly due to her agency over the situation – can highlight this critique of what this poem refers to. Juliet is strong-willed, educated, intelligent, and adventurous but could be viewed as acquiring ‘masculine’ qualities. However, Allan makes it clear that she can love, be romantic and want the same idealized notions of the past, yet it is not the thing her worth is inextricably linked to and the cause of her ruin if it is not obtained. 

Question: I’m not sure if this poem’s notion of the “new woman” could play into some of the themes and symbolic nature evident in the painting The Awakening Conscience, but I do think there might be something to be said about the power in framing the woman as the decision maker over her own affairs, whether that is literally a romantic/adulterous affair or just the way she wants her adult life to play out. I wonder whether or not the work of West might be able to fit in here with the idea of how many new topics challenge cannons and established rhetorics, much like the new woman at the turn of the century and perhaps the law and literature movement in the 1970s and especially in the more progressive ideas of today surrounding CRT, intersectionality, etc. 

Dictionary of Victorian London Primary Text and Visual

Textual: A Poem “The Woman of the Future” (1884)

In line with our discussions of Education Acts and the essay by Cobbe as well as the novel The Type-Writer Girl, this piece seems to highlight the anxieties and uncertainties of the “new woman” phenomenon but also a deeper jab at the education of women in general. While reading, I found many exact references in the Allan novel, such as Homer, Girton College, Stuart Mills, and the types of conversations educated women have at dinner. The idea also plays into how worried the greater society was if women were to take on masculine qualities and the concept of “unsexing” if priorities shift from solely domestic to the outside world. I felt it illustrates the very idea that Allan was trying to showcase with his heroine Juliet and the dispelling of these negative connotations with a well-liked, reflective, and optimistic woman like Juliet. 

Visual: “Fallen Woman” depicted in art – The Awakening Conscience – William Holman Hunt 1851-53 (https://victorianweb.org/painting/whh/replete/P10.html) 

Here we see a depiction of an adulterous woman or the mistress to the man in the image rising out of his lap to look out the window with this very mesmerized look on her face. With religious themes, she realizes the errors of her ways, so I felt this connected to our class’s novel Ruth. In Ruth, the moral and religious sentiments throughout made the ideas of how to seek a new form of justice for the ‘fallen woman’ – one of self-redemption, mercy, and kindness seem achievable. This painting, in contrast to some of the other visual depictions of the fallen woman being kicked out of her home, desolate on the street, or even, in some cases, committed suicide, feels apt to promote the same kind of reconceptualization evident in Gaskell’s novel. One other point that stuck out to me was the emphasis on the woman seeking her own ‘awakening’ and having the agency to act on her own moral or ethical views – to be able to leave a relationship with a typically very stark power dynamic of the mistress holding none and start anew.

Quote: “First, feminists tend to employ narrative and autobiography in feminist legal scholarship in part because the injuries which are the subject matter of a good bit of that scholarship have been so thoroughly ‘privatized’ that there is no societal understanding of their nature, their prevalence, their effects, or their history. Narrative and anecdote is one sometimes effective way to communicate both the nature and extent of these injuries: more quantitative measures quite literally “don’t tell the story.” The impulse to tell stories to try to communicate the nature of overly privatized, silenced, and hidden injuries is largely a response to felt necessity in the face of widespread ignorance and incomprehension” (West 208). 

Comment: I found this idea incredibly interesting in that the very concept of not knowing something so deeming it irrelevant or unneeded is facing criticism as legal and other scholars simply try to uncover hidden truths. It made me think of when lawyers and scholars in the 1970s first had to explain that sex discrimination was a thing and, therefore, equal rights and the 14th Amendment should be applicable in those scenarios. What comes to mind for me is Fronteriro v. Richardson (1973), where female members of the US Army were not receiving certain benefits that males could, and the scenario, in general, is something that was so little seen or spoken about that the legal narrative had first to prove that this is discrimination and differentiation based on sex and that allowed for some validity in the case. If someone does not understand the situational context of a scenario so far from their own reality, it seems like common sense to invoke storytelling because what better way to learn and expand your perspectives than through a medium conducive to absorbing others’ experiences? 

Question:  In the following section where West states, “If people do not know what it means, what it feels like, and what it does to be slapped on the face at home by someone you once trusted to love and cherish you, then for heaven’s sake tell them”(West 210) – I found myself connecting back to some of our class work. Would something like Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to an extent, highlight that line of legal narrativity – though devoid of actual legal institutions as they offered no recourse at the time – it still made an effort to humanize the situation and offer a glimpse into a place where usually private and kept secrete we can empathize and critique. Those who, especially during Brontë’s time, did not fit the narrative implicitly recognized by the legal community were not the subject of legal narratives. Could the connection be made or expanded upon that in Brontë’s time of critique, this idea of coverture or the upholding the ideal marriage in law while ignoring the realities translates today into what West points out as the “typicality” of the human development story that holds foundationally the men runs the professional side while women the domestic? 

Quote:  “As Sydney Smith remarked, “A woman’s love for her offspring hardly depends on her ignorance of Greek, nor need we apprehend that she will forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.” A priori, the thing is not probable, and actually we see that a very different doctrine holds good. Few of us, I think, would fail to cite in their own circles the best cultivated women as precisely those whose homes are the happiest, who exercise therein that spirit of order and love of beauty, and, above all, that sense of the sacredness of even the smallest duties, which comes of true culture of mind”(82)

Comment: I understand that in order to get these ideas across to an audience who is already skeptical and probably deeply threatened by the changes in women’s status following the previous Acts such as Married Women’s Property that there would need to be an argument formulated around those traditional roles of women. Trying to dispel the counterargument that education would make women bad wives or mothers or less devoted to their domestic sphere. To us now, we might think it’s ridiculous to continue associating women with those things as their only true relevance in society – I do see how much effort it would take to even get people to listen and expand the ideas of where women can be in relation to men’s traditional roles. There is a summative paragraph on page 88 that lays out I also felt was interesting, and it expands upon the “natural duties” of women and how education won’t change a woman’s innate being or challenge the role of men. 

Question: 

As this was written in 1862, a few years before the Education Act in 1870, I felt that Cobbe was addressing higher education in terms of university – but does not mention the idea of young girls having access to elementary education. Cobbe’s also mentioned briefly that this was accessible for higher class women, mostly or perhaps women who, from circumstance, already had some exposure to education, just not formally. I wondered if this was part of the growing rhetoric surrounding class division in education and if elementary schools were the better place to begin exploring the ability of the public, possibly free, secular education. 

Quote: “It will be obvious, as the learned Attorney-General has said, that the whole case really lies between two points. Is the document on the back of Augusta Smithers a sufficient will to carry the property? and, if so, is the unsupported story of that lady as to the execution of the document to be believed? Now, what does the law understand by the term ‘Will’? Surly it understands some writing that expresses the wish or will of a person as to the disposition of his property after his decease? This writing must be excited with certain formalities, but if it is so executed by a person not laboring under any mental or other disability, is it indefeasible, except by the subsequent execution of a fresh testamentary document, or by its destruction or attempted destruction…or by marriage”. 

Comment: This quote and the courtroom scenes made me think of the concept we worked with in ENG 206 of legal narratology and what this class has been working on with reading case law versus statutes and noticing the stylistic differences. In this Haggard story, especially, I found myself thinking about how he weaved in legal commentary and phrases to this dramatic courtroom finale, where we read through all the questions of the case, the story of how it came to be, and the evidence from other statutes. Augusta being a novelist is what stuck out to me in the sense of narratology because the whole series of events that lead to the tattoo of the will is an adventure/romance story – that also relies on the sole testimony of Augusta, who acts as witness and document. The choices here of how to relay her story, full of seeking justice, sacrifice, and bravery, all add to the arguments surrounding both her character as the center of this case and the permissibility of the will. 

Question: I found the section regarding the romance or affections between Augusta and Eustace interesting in why the opponents felt so strongly about it blurring the motive of Augusta’s action of self-sacrifice to tattoo the will. Is there any deeper meaning besides looking for any other possible angle to question the will’s legitimacy? I also thought the feelings of the public aligning with what the Judge deemed heroic behavior interesting; I might have anticipated some views that she is just looking for money or status, perhaps questions regarding her character since she would have allowed a tattoo, with all the connotations it brings, unless there was something in it for her. I think that is representative of the other side’s questions since there is such a large inheritance at stake, and they are recently engaged. 

Quote: “And do you mean to tell me,” said Eustace, astounded, “that you allowed him to have his confounded will tattooed upon your neck?” “Yes,” answered Augusta, “I did; and what is more, Mr. Meeson, I think that you ought to be very much obliged to me; for I dare say that I shall often be sorry for it.” “I am very much obliged,” answered Eustace, “I had no right to expect such a thing, and, in short, I do not know what to say. I should never have thought that any woman was capable of such a sacrifice for – for a comparative stranger” (chapter 14)

Comment: I thought this passage, especially the end, raised some interesting insights into the idea of the will being physically marked on Augusta’s body and how Eustace identifies it as a sacrifice that a woman would not usually make. I would think that anyone who consents to get a tattoo they don’t really want will feel some sense of regret — but the fact that it is a wealthy man, who didn’t treat her well before faced death, now has his life physically inflicted upon her forever makes this situation tricky for me to decide how to feel about it. On the one hand, I thought of her actions as the unattached heroine who chooses her own life, can maintain agency even on a deserted island, and turn her actions into something good and life-altering for Eustance. However, remembering the tone of this story and the intent of the audiences of its time, a woman’s body, her literal flesh, has become a canvas on which men can run their lives. A will is an incredibly permanent document, and the permanence of a tattoo correlating with this legal document could be taken as a permanent place of a woman. 

Question: We spoke in class about the legal audience that Haggard would have considered while writing this work and that many of the characters and disputes would have been familiar to that profession – some of his exaggerated situations and subtle humor, therefore, would be recognized. Is Augusta herself supposed to be satirical as the author who becomes famous and well-respected among higher society, refuses marriage proposals, and sets off alone to a new place? Would her character perhaps represent an exaggeration of what that society would typically expect? 

Quote: “The old idea, once a harlot always a harlot, possesses the public mind. Proceeding from this premiss, people argue that every woman taken from the streets through the agency of penitentiaries, is a woman snatched from an otherwise interminable life of sin, whereas I have shown that the prostitute class is constantly changing and shifting, that in the natural course of events, and by the mere efflux of time the women composing it become reabsorbed into the great mass of our population…how to render the prostitute less depraved in mind and body, to cause her return as soon as possible to a decent mode of living, to teach her by degrees, and as occasion offers, self-restraint and self-denial, to build her up, in short…is the problem to be solved”.

Comment: This way of thinking strikes me as very progressive and in the same line as Mr. Benson’s thought process when grappling with how to deal with Ruth’s situation when she first came into their care – with more of a religious sentiment to it, but similar. In the Lock piece, it references the Contagious Disease Act would require women to undergo examinations for venereal diseases or be placed through legal custody in a “Certified Hospital” for 1-3 months and, if they didn’t comply, faced imprisonment for upwards of 3 months with possible hard labor. I feel this highlights the element of those disjoined laws, made in the abstract, facing public scrutiny as they do not effectively deal with the realities. Acton mentions many of the same issues Ruth faced, though not in the same manner as prostitution, but at this time, not far off. She had engaged in premarital relations, had an illegitimate son, and was dealing with the same kind of issues this piece mentions when attempting to be a member of society.

Question: The Act itself seems to offer an interesting interpretation of women and the law as it allows for women to appeal to the legal system if they feel their detainment is illegitimate based on their circumstances, such as not having a disease any longer, yet at the same time, allows them zero bodily autonomy. Their body becomes an interest of the law, and refusal to be taken results in prison. Again, the question of what behaviors deemed women criminals arise in both the novels we have read seems to apply here as well. I wondered if we could speak more on this idea of prostitution versus the ‘common prostitute’ as we had started to discuss this in class and how varying levels of actions labeled prostitution could influence Acts like this one. As for “The Lock Asylum” piece, I wondered if we could also unpack this statement, “After my visit to the Lock Asylum, I ventured to suggest…a doubt whether this and kindred institutions were adapting themselves to the wants of the day…” – would this really have encapsulated the wants of society or the wants of the idealistic rendition of society.