Victorian Literature & Globalization // Essay 1
Due Tuesday, October 13th, at the beginning of class, in hard copy
From the syllabus:
Two analytical essays. (4-5 pages, normal-looking font) Conventional essays for an
English Lit. class. In other words: these are sharp, sustained, and formal engagements with one or more texts covered in class. I will hand out prompts for these papers but you are free, always, to break from my strictures and compose your own questions and topics and then formulate clear hypotheses about them. These analytical efforts should be grounded in close and sustained acts of reading.
Further directions:
Do not begin thinking about this paper the night before it’s due. Please construct a wellorganized, revised, proofread essay of no fewer than four full pages on one of the following topics.
You may also create your own topic, or (perhaps best of all) take a swerve on one of the topics
I’ve provided, turning it toward your own intellectual purpose. Remember that a successful essay will make a point or interlocked series of points (i.e. an argument), then use evidence (close, local readings of specific moments in the text, logical transitions, and sound analysis) to argue in support of those points.
Note: If your paper does not have an argument, it will be returned ungraded; if your paper does not deal actively with specifics of the text itself, it will be returned ungraded.
Tips on writing:
Eliminate all extraneous words. Argue fearlessly. Support creatively. Edit mercilessly. Shine your prose to a glistening polish. The soul of writing is in active verbs. Mark Twain: “If you catch an adverb, kill it.”
ADDITIONAL TIP: READ CLOSELY
Show how your points work at the level of the individual sentence and/or paragraph: get your
hands dirty with the actual text. Grammar, word choice, metaphors and images – these are how literary critics make their money. Analyze them!

Possible topics: Please note that these are provocations for essays; you should not answer every sub-question, but instead use these topics as a jumping off point as you create your own (creative, argumentative, well-supported) analytical attack. Remember to be specific about everything. Please see me if you have any questions at all – I’m here to help. Any text we’ve read to this point in the term is available for analysis. No matter how small or large.
1.
The Economist, Prince Albert, and Punch all variously describe a kind of optimism about the forward direction of historical time, history’s “endless progression” toward “modernity.” Analyze “Ulysses” and/or “The Charge of the
Light Brigade,” both by Tennyson, in the context of these optimistic or even jingoistic notions of progress toward inevitable victory.
2.
Perform a rhetorical analysis of “Queen Victoria’s Little Wars” in relation to one or of our readings about Victorian mid-century pride: Prince Albert’s Speech, say, or Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” In what sense are the apparent paradoxes of Victorian notions of progress – it was the world’s first liberal-democratic empire—evident in those texts?
Advanced essays will engage arguments by Said, Jameson, and/or Wallerstein.
3.
In what sense is The Moonstone a novel about globalization, in the terms offered us by Wallerstein, Said, and
Jameson? This is a broad topic that you will have to narrow, by concentrating on one or several specific elements of those theories.
4.
For example: Fredric Jameson refers to the inability of individuals to coordinate, in mental terms, their own subjective experience as individuals with the broader networked world into which they are linked, even if they are not aware of it. Use Jameson’s argument as the starting point for the close analysis of any single text we’ve read – you might consider Mayhew, Barrett-Browning, or (of course) Collins.
5.
What is the real crime in The Moonstone? Consider this question in its fullest dimensions. Then narrow.
6.
Many of our Victorian industrialization readings are also concerned with the boundary that separates human life from life forms that are allegedly nonhuman, subhuman, or animal. Engels and Mayhew especially so. Write an essay evaluating one or several of our readings with attention to the rhetorical and political – that is, ideological-- distinction between “humans” and “nonhumans”: what qualities seem to separate the one from the other? (And for advanced thinkers: how do those separations break down or become complicated?)
7.
Many readers of The Moonstone report feeling “unsympathetic” toward some or even all of the story’s narrators.
Leaving that too-easy question behind, take on a harder one: How is “sympathy” itself (Blake calls it “interest”) made into a problem central to the novel’s own structure? This is an essay about how the narrative form of the novel depends on the management of readerly sympathy (or unsympathy).
8.
Using close rhetorical analysis, make an argument that compares the model of progress articulated in Prince Albert’s speech to the temporal structure of The Moonstone. Is The Moonstone a novel of development? Does progress happen in the novel? Note that these are not yes or no questions.
9.
Our early texts like Prince Albert and Punch all formulate Victorian ideologies of “modernity” that have to do with
“modernity’s” ability to usher in heightened capacities for manners, commerce, peace, and “reason.” Who are the
The Moonstone’s most modern characters in this sense, and what does the novel seem to think about them?
10.
Relatedly: write an essay engaging the issue of narrative structure in The Moonstone. Who frames our access to the novel’s events, and how? Are these narrators disinterested spectators, or do they have a stake in the action? What lenses or filters shape our experience of the novel’s tale?
11.
Or more specifically: what role do servants play in The Moonstone? Professionals? Members of a bourgeois family?
Colonial subjects? How does rank or social status effect the relative relationships among the characters – or (for the bold) our relationship to them, as readers?
12.
Concentrating on one or two of our primary texts, write an essay that examines the role that gender difference (or stereotyping) plays. For The Moonstone, this might concern the differences among women, and how the novel judges between different versions of femininity; so too it might consider how “submitting” to marriage (as Clack calls it) replays the problems of imperialism the novel seems most explicitly to be about. For Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it might concern the choice of pronouns in her poem, as a woman writer both connects and differentiates herself from the (presumably male) audience of policy-makers she addresses.
13.
The Moonstone and Julia Verinder both have a “flaw” in their “heart”: consider this parallelism in light, perhaps, of one or several of our readings on empire and globalization: Marx, Marx and Engels, Said, Jameson, Wallerstein.
14.
PLEASE DEVISE ALTERNATE TOPICS IF YOU WISH. Really. Let us know how we can help.