You don't know until you are there...

14 October 2025: Spent a lot of today revisiting and chopping down my SSAWW paper. I finished a decent draft over the summer, but then set it aside until today. (I had planned for 20 minutes, but I am on a panel of four, so I needed to chop, chop, chop.)

Last weekend, I sent the session chair the information he requested, including an abstract. 

Reading the paper today, I realized that abstract doesn't really fit the paper. It's too broad, too generic. It doesn't say what the paper is actually about. But of course that's because I wrote it before I wrote the essay. 

So, I just emailed him with a new version.

This is a good lesson for my students: you shouldn't waste too much time on introductions or an exact thesis early on. You don't know what you are going to argue until you make the argument. Then you revise, revise, revise.

Feeling pretty good about it, but it is a weird little essay. 

Almost done...

6 May 2025: A couple of days ago, I titled my post "Almost there..." I want to argue that today's post, titled "Almost done..." sounds the same, but it actually means something different in my head. In the first post, I was talking about an idea--almost having it down. I (think I) finally got it--yesterday.

Today "Almost done..." refers to a decent complete draft of the paper. I have a couple of places where I need to write another sentence or two, but I think I can knock them out on Sunday. (Tomorrow is booked from start to finish with other stuff.)

If I can knock those sentences out, that'll be the last item on my weekly "to do" list: a complete draft. (Yes, those lists are back, and that's okay.) 

It does feel a bit weird to be pressuring myself to have a solid, polished draft of this thing done in the next week or so. The conference is in November and I don't know yet if I'll have 15 or 20 minutes. But the one thing I know is that if I can get things done ahead of time--before the semester starts--I'll be happier. 

Almost there...

4 June 2025: I am in a phase of drafting my SSAWW paper where the nuanced version central idea is starting to come together. (I have a thesis, but usually there’s a more specific one lurking, waiting to emerge.) A piece just clicked into place a couple of hours ago—about a lack of authorial intention—that feels promising. There’s just one more piece, I think, and I am on the verge. 

It’s a cool place to be. The frustrating is slowly receding and the next step—a complete first draft—is coming up, Lord willing.

SSAWW 2025!

22 April 2025: (Once again trying to start the day with a positive post!) I realized this morning that I hadn't stopped to really feel good about an email I got yesterday: my abstract for SSAWW 2025 was accepted. I am delighted to get to work on a weird little paper about a YA book inspired by "The Yellow Wallpaper." It should be a fun summer project. And SSAWW is in Philadelphia, one of my favorite conference cities (with a nearby Vogel bonus). 

New (little) project...

10 January 2025: With the exception of opening convocation, today was a kind of quiet day, which worked out just fine. Did some more preparation for Monday (and beyond), filed/sorted/tossed a lot of papers from last semester, and ran some errands. 

I also got (a bit more) started on a new research project: a proposal for SSAWW in Philadelphia in November. It feels good to jump into a new (small) project. The rhythms of the process--having an idea, searching for sources, tracking them down, getting a sense of the conversation, finding ways into it--are pleasantly familiar and quietly exciting. Nerdy as heck, but I am who I am. 

"full of boredom..."

26 February 2023: "Herland, as a piece of utopian fiction, sits neatly at the intersection of these two insights, framed as an ethnographic account which despite its interesting premise is full of boredom for its protagonists as well as for (some of) its readers" (Awkward-Rich 339).

This passage made me laugh; I am one of those readers who found Herland pretty boring, even as I acknowledge its importance. Awkward-Rich (what a name!) does make a cool argument here--that boredom is part of the point--but I appreciated also feeling seen in my boredom.

Speaking of boredom, someone seems to be feeling better today, though not thoroughly entertained by me typing notes...

Work Cited

Awkward-Rich, Cameron. “The Fiction of Ethnography in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 2 [129], July 2016, pp. 331–50. EBSCOhost.

Fern, Feminism, and ENGL 360

I spent a few hours today finishing an abstract on Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. In the abstract, I argue in part that Fern was (obviously) severely constrained in her writing of the book by widely accepted notions of feminine propriety. While looking through my notes, I came across this excerpt from an 1854 (I think) review of the book from The New York Times that confirms what she was working against:

If Fanny Fern were a man—a man who believed that the gratification of revenge were a proper occupation for one who has been abused, and that those who have injured us are fair game, Ruth Hall would be a natural and excusable book. But we confess that we cannot understand how a delicate, suffering woman can hunt down even her persecutors so remorselessly. We cannot think so highly of [such] an author's womanly gentleness. (qtd in Warren 124)

Please notice what this reviewer is saying: Fern could have written this if she were a man, but she’s not, so she shouldn’t have. How dare she seek revenge against those who wronged her? That’s for men to do. Women who are victimized should just sit there (gently) and take it. Because Fern didn’t just take it, we can’t think that much of her.

All the classic moves of suppressing women’s voices are here: shame, suggestions of a lack of feminity, and silencing. And this is in The New York Times, a mainstream publication in the nineteenth century, too.  Because Fern was awesome, though, she wouldn’t be silenced.

Anyway, this evening, while reflecting on both my abstract and the semester I’ve just completed, I wish I could share this review with some students who just took my ENGL 360: Literature and the Sexes class. For the most part, they did great work, but I was quite discouraged by how many of them were still, at the semester’s end, defending the nineteenth-century patriarchy (and, by extension, its effects which linger to this day). I also can’t believe that some of them still saw the course as engaging in some “male bashing.” It’s as if the clichés about feminism have morphed into clichéd responses from students when confronted by feminist thought.

On day, I could (and did) spend 30 minutes trying my best to eloquently explain how one might be even a bit understanding of Edna’s actions in The Awakening only to have some otherwise bright students say, “Yeah, well, she’s still a bad mother and I hate her.” On another day, I could offer the idea that John, the narrator’s husband in “The Yellow Wall-paper” doesn’t have to be an outright villain for the story to be horrifying. In fact, his rather ordinary (for his time) attitudes about his wife, her health, and his authority over  her make the story more horrifying. And somehow, the only thing some students hear is “John is a great husband!” and proceed to explain why in their final exam essays. “All he wants,” (and I am paraphrasing here from a composite of entirely too many essays that argued this point) “is for his wife to get better. It’s not his fault. And in fact, he’s right. She was sick! Who wouldn’t want a husband like that?”

It’s enough to make one a bit depressed. And I get so tired of the clichéd responses. Give me the benefit of the doubt, folks. Feminism doesn’t equal man-hate. In fact, it does a service to men who are also victims of the patriarchy (one of Gilman’s recurrent arguments). I’m not just making this stuff up or (and these words make any English professor want to scream!) “reading into everything.” So to return to the point above: artifacts like this New York Times review serve to remind us how incredibly pervasive and pernicious patriarchal attitudes were (and are). I’ll add it to my bag of tricks, so to speak, and soldier on.

Work Cited

Warren, Joyce W. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992.