ENGL 8181: Victorian Women Writers and Domestic Ideology

Professor Sigler

Research Project for ENGL 8181

1. Preliminary Conference

Must be completed by February 12, 2009

2. Proposal and Annotated Bibliography for Research Essay
Must be turned in to Professor Sigler's mailbox in H410 on March 26, 2009 by 2:00 pm

Requirements:

• The proposal should be typed, double-spaced and about one to one-and-a-half pages (or 300 words) in length. An annotated, working bibliography of at least ten current, scholarly sources will comprise an additional two to three pages or so (these ten sources do not include the "primary" Victorian text(s) your paper will analyze. I will be looking at the quality of your sources as well as the relevance to your project. Please be sure to look for the most current sources on your chosen topic.
• The proposal will discuss your preliminary or "working" thesis. The proposal should effectively "sell" the reader on not only the inherent interest of your topic but on your ability to follow through with your project. Generally this is done by placing your topic/thesis in the context of debate in the field (based on the research and reading you've done) and by providing the reader with at least a rough idea of how you will carry out your project (your methodology).
• I may request revision of topics I don't think will lend themselves to scholarly research, so suggest that you consult with me before you get too far into your project and let me know what you're interested in. Also consult the MLA Style Manual (6th ed.) for help with composition, documentation, and format.
• The bibliography should strictly observe the Modern Language Association (6th ed.) format for various kinds of research material in all of its ten (or more) entries. See the MLA Style Manual for how to construct a Works Cited page. No more than three of these may be scholarly Web resources; the rest must be scholarly text sources (academic books and/or articles published in academic journals or books). Be careful to choose the most relevant and current sources available.
• All of these entries must be annotated by the inclusion of two to three sentences (or approximately 100 words or so) of concise summary and analysis. That is, the annotations should summarize the focus and content of each source (What are the main arguments? What is the point of this book or article? What topics are covered?) and evaluate its usefulness for your project (How was this source helpful to you? How does it help you shape your argument? How can you use this source in your research project? Has it changed how you think about your topic?).
• UMD's library will not have many of the texts you will need for your research in this course. You will therefore need to use the interlibrary loan (ILL) service. Through this service, you can order books and articles you need that are not contained in the UMD library collection. To use the this service, go to the UMD library's on-line ILL page and fill in the required information there, but be sure to do so early as ILL generally takes at least a week to get the materials, sometimes longer.

3. Research Essay
Final (revised and corrected) essay due at the beginning of class May 7, 2009

Requirements:

• Length: 20-25 pages. Please see the class syllabus for specifics about formal requirements and policies regarding turning in work.

• Although there are several different options described below, you're encouraged to develop your own topic. Any topic you choose should apply some of the theoretical and conceptual materials from the course to explore an aspect of one (or at the most two) of the assigned texts.
  

Below are some general possibilities. These topics are very broad, however, so please adapt them to suit your interests:

1. Analyze the ways in which one of the authors we have read (e.g. Brontë, Eliot, Levy, Dixon) represents and/or interrogates scientific and technological advance. You might consider how science and art are related. Are they in conflict? Why or why not?
2. Consider how theories of progress and/or history function (or fail to function) in the work of one or at most two of the Victorian authors which we have read. How does the author construct and interrogate a notion of progress? How does s/he use rhetorical devices to try to shape the reader's response to it? To what is it compared, and why? Does it offer hope? Anxiety? Both? How does the author suggest we should read it in relation to the past?
3. Analyze the way in which a Victorian author(s) represents an encounter with a person or group of people "other" to the main character or speaker. You might consider Brontë's representations of racial or ethnic otherness in Jane Eyre, in Levy's The Romance of a Shop, or in Burnett's The Secret Garden.   You might examine depictions of class in Austen, Brontë, Gaskell, Braddon, or Burnett.   You might consider Rossetti's or Burnett's representations of gender and/or childhood.  Analyze the characterization and argue for an interpretation of its significance to the work as a whole. How are form and content related?
4. A number of works on the syllabus utilize conventions of what is often described as the "Female Gothic."  This powerful tradition of women's writing uses Gothic themes--terror, destruction, haunting, persecution, doubling--to articulate some of the restrictions, terrors and conflicts of the female experience, both physical and psychological, and to dramatize the particularly female experiences of marginalization, isolation, and women's relation to the body, birth, and death.   Discuss the uses of this tradition in a Gothic text or texts (e.g. Brontë, Braddon, Eliot, Gaskell).   What do these writers use Gothic conventions to express and or critique?
5. Choose a film version (or perhaps some key scenes in several film versions) of any work we've read and compare it to the original work in terms of characters, plot, and theme. There are many adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, or The Secret Garden, for instance.   Consider how the film re-interprets the work to reflect the cultural values of the historical period in which the film was made.   What does the adaptation revise, omit, or add, and (more importantly) why?
6. The nineteenth century was a period that developed a more sustained and self-conscious myth of childhood than any that had gone before.   Discuss the treatment of children in one or at the most two works.  Consider the importance of the subject of childhood in each work as a whole.
7. Compare or contrast a Victorian adaptation, revision, imitation or parody of one of the works we've read in relation to the "original."  You might, for example, consider Brontë's Jane Eyre alongside Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive, Louisa May Alcott's "Behind a Mask," or Burnett's The Little Princess; Carroll's Alice in Wonderland with Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses or Frances Hodgson Burnett's "Behind the White Brick," or a "New Woman" detective like Loveday Brooke or Lady Molly alongside Conan Doyle's iconic Sherlock Holmes.
8. Examine the Victorian fascination with fairy tales and fairy mythology by tracing an author's use of fairy folklore and mythology and/or of particular fairy tales as thematic elements, structural devices and/or motifs in a particular work or works (e.g. Jane Eyre, North and South, Speaking Likenesses, or The Secret Garden).   How does the writer use fairy or fairy-tale imagery to express, critique and/or subvert the social codes of the time?
9. Until late in the nineteenth century, English common law decreed that in marriage, two people became one, and that one was the husband (hence the legal term, femme covert ). Choose one (or at the most two) women writers to examine how they either support or subvert this notion of the marriage relationship.
10. Elaine Showalter describes the nineteenth-century fin de siécle as a time of "Sexual Anarchy," as "New Women" and male "decadents" and aesthetes challenged traditional Victorian laws that had governed sexual identity and behavior.  (Indeed, in April 1895, a Punch magazine satirist lamented: "A new fear my bosom vexes; / Tomorrow there may be no sexes!")  Analyze representations of this "sexual anarchy" in one or two of our late-Victorian texts (published after 1880).