Reason Breeds Insanity

I am going to start using this space to knock around my ideas for my research projects for class, too, so if it doesn’t interest you, stop reading now.

Victorian: I am writing about Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I am tentatively calling my paper Undressing Tess. So far, what I know is that in the Victorian Age, clothing signifies a person’s class, their gender, their occupation, and can also signify a woman’s status as fallen. In Tess, the main character, Tess, is a lower-class woman whose family is actually in the line of an aristocratic family. Tess, however through the manipulation of her family and their desire for upward mobility, is a fallen woman, so her status is mutated. She is outcast. Tess’s child, while he should be swaddled, is a symbol of Tess’s connection to nature. She undresses in the field to feed him. She never actually has an “acceptable” clothing until the end when she is married to the man who fathered her child. All this, of course, is complicated by the love triangle between she and the two men: Alec and Angel, the baby’s death, and the murder of Alec. At the end of the story when Tess dies, she lies upon the altar stone at Stonehenge, returning to her natural significance. In many ways, the story is cyclic, and Tess’s clothing reminds of her status at each cog of the wheel.

Contemporary Brit: I am writing about Miss Jean Brodie and the role of fascism and the homosocial/lesbian continuum with the pack of girls. I am not sure how this paper is going to flesh out, but I think it will have something to do with the elitism experienced by the girls in the Brodie pack and their training in the fine arts. How does that compare with Hoggart and Williams and their desire to keep the fine art fine? How does it relate to the fact that fascism was a movement of the people? How does that relate to schooling post-war in Britain? What does it mean that Spark is looking back on all this from a twenty year, post-war vantage point? How can this all work together to make one cohesive argument about the character who becomes a nun?

I am not sure about my school stuff right now. Maybe I should have aimed higher and tried to get into a more “impressive school.” Would there be so much B.S. there? I need to take French.

I am going to try blogging about my seminar papers so that I can get a better grip on the topics and stuff that I want to cover in them. I also think this may help me to avoid the last minute procrastination that I am so accustomed to. I NEED to make sure that I DO NOT do my papers at the last minute. I need to get a decent GPA and actually have some papers that I can send out to journals and conferences. Then I need to spend my summer sending things out. I finished my bibliography tonight. I am not sure how this paper is going to form, but I am excited to get the materials listed in a coherent space so that I can have them to read through. I am looking forward to investigating exactly what Tess’s clothes mean in her relationship to her status/her class/her body, etc. I plan to reread Tess over the weekend as well as get the two Hollander books from the library.Here is my Bib:

Burman, Barbara and Caroel Turbin. Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

Butler, Lance St. John. Ed. Alternative Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.

Cavallaro, Dani and Alexandra Warwick. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and Body. New York: Berg, 1998.

Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Dalziel, Pamela and Michael Millgate. Thomas Hardy’s Studies, Specimens and Notebook. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Gatrell, Simon. “Dress, Body, and Psyche in ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’: Tess of the D’Ubervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge.” The Thomas Hardy Journal 22 (Autumn 2006): 143-58.

Guerard, Albert J. “Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Ed. Ian P. Watt. The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ser. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.

Hollander, Ann. Feeding the Eye: Essays. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.

—–. Seeing Through Clothes. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Kim, Ui Rak. “Marxist Criticism, A Working Class, and Alienation in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Journal of English Language and Literature 46.4 (Winter 2000): 1061-72.

LaValley, Albert J. Ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Collections of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Michie, Elsie B. “Dressing Up: Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30.1 (2002): 305-23.

Silverman, Kaja. “History, Figuration, and Female Subjectivity in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles.’” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18.1 (Autumn 1984): 5-28.

Williams, Merryn. “Hardy and Social Class.” Tess of the D’Ubervilles: Thomas Hardy. Ed. Peter Widdowson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. 24-32.

Worth, Rachel. “Rural Laboring Dress, 1850-1900: Some Problems of Representation.” Fashion Theory 3.3 (September 1999): 323-42.

—–. “Thomas Hardy and Rural Dress.” Costume: Journal of the Costume Society 29 (1995): 55-67.

My next research goal is to begin gathering for Miss JB. I am not sure even what tact I want to take for that book. The lesbian thing seems like it is too easy, but so little has been written on this book that it is unreal. I may end up comparing this to another Muriel Spark book. I am re-reading Miss JB tomorrow to prepare for my presentation with Hailey and maybe that will help me get a better grip on my research for that.