139.239: 2023
Assessment 3: Essay 2
Topic: Nineteenth Century Literature
Due date: 5 October, midnight
Length: 1200 words
Proportion of Course Mark: 25%
Extensions: Please message the Course Coordinator in advance of the due-date if you seek an extension, which will be granted in most circumstances.
Task:
Write a critical essay on one of the topics provided below, taking careful note of the instructions that follow.
Instructions:
· Write a critical essay in response to ONE of the following questions.
· You are required to refer to TWO scholarly, peer-reviewed critical essays/chapters in shaping and defending your argument.
· Your essay must offer an argument in response to your chosen question. (Try using the following prompt in your introduction: “In this essay I will argue …”). You can then remove this phrase on revision, ensuring your argument claim is still clearly asserted in a thesis statement in your introduction.
· Careful close analysis of your chosen text must form. the backbone of your essay. Do not make vague generalisations about social conditions in the nineteenth century unless they are directly relevant to the argument you are making about a specific text.
· Plot summary should be avoided unless this aids the development of your argument or helps to ‘situate’ passages from the text that you choose to analyse.
· Please clearly indicate which question you are responding to by giving the number of that question at the start of your essay.
ESSAY TOPICS
1: Selected nineteenth-century poetry
(a) Writing about “The Cry of the Children,” Caroline Levine states: “Taking on gender and class, domesticity and nationhood, politics and religion, patriarchy and paternalism, a divided nation and an absent God, Barrett Browning mounts an argument for immediate resolutions to deep and unjust inequalities.”
Closely analysing the poem, discuss how Barret Browning “tak[es] on” at least three of the concerns listed by Levine.
(b) “Webster's Eulalie speaks for herself in the debate over prostitution and female inequality. The most scandalous of female Others [a prostitute] claims her right to self-assessment and self-representation and, in so doing, promotes and participates in the wide-spread demand by women in later Victorian Britain for cultural and political self-representation” (Susan Brown).
Do you agree with this assessment of “A Castaway”? Why/Why not? Defend your answer via an argument that closely analyses the poem.
(c) “In choosing the dramatic monologue the author disassociates himself from the life being expressed. It is no longer the poet's inner life which is the central focus but that of the speaker” (Elizabeth V. Gemmette).
Closely analyse at least one nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, introduced in this course, to make a case in response to Gemmette’s claim.
(d) Matthew Campbell suggests that the speakers in dramatic monologues “reveal more than they wish to say.”
Do you think this is an accurate description of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”? Defend your answer via an argument that closely analyses the poem.
(e) In “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”, the speaker “is repressed as the negation of all that is white and valuable; thus she is raped, disallowed the human emotion of grief, denied subjectivity, allowed only the state of being subjected, and denied therefore the double role of agent. But by killing her own child she rebels against this repression, and by flaunting her blackness she uses that very negation as a means of establishing agency” (E. Warwick Slinn).
Do you agree with this assessment of “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”? Why/Why not? Defend your answer via an argument that closely analyses the poem.
2. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(a)
“[St John Rivers] is only a more subtle moral bully than Mr Brocklehurst and his missionary vocation is an excuse for making others submit to his will and forcing them to make sacrifices too” (Q.D. Leavis).
“Altogether the autobiography of Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition” (Elizabeth Rigby).
Use one or both of these comments as the starting point for an argumentative essay that addresses the ways in which Jane Eyre offers a critique of (forms of) nineteenth-century Christianity.
NOTE: Please do not use your essay as a forum for discussing alternative forms of Christian belief that you may hold, or as these may be evident in our own time – your focus needs to be on close reading of the novel and the ways in which Christianity is represented therein.
(b)
“[Jane Eyre’s] romantic plot is imbricated by Empire … [as] the Mason money is derived from a Jamaican plantation. It is the money produced from slave labour that finances Rochester’s ‘roving’ around Europe, the maintenance of Thornfield and, eventually, his impeccable life with Jane” (Deirdre David).
Charlotte Brontë uses “references to relations between Europeans and races subjected to the might of European imperialism […] to represent various configurations of power in British society: female subordination in sexual relationships, female insurrection and rage against male domination, and the oppressive class position of the female without family ties and a middle-class income” (Susan Meyer).
Drawing on at least one of these quotations, provide an argument to suggest the ways in which Jane Eyre engages with issues to do with imperialism/colonisation, suggesting how these might relate to “various configurations of power in British society.”
(c) “Bertha is Jane’s alter ego” (Maurianne Adams).
Write an essay in which you make a case for the significance of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre.
(d)
“[At the end of the novel Rochester] is devitalized; the fire of his passion burnt to ash; the quick of his nature paralyzed. […] It is not a lover he requires, but a mother who can offer him the gift of life. And it is this function which Jane will gratefully assume” (Helene Moglen).
Rochester to Jane: “you glowed in the cool moonlight last night when you mutinied against fate, and claimed your rank as my equal” (Jane Eyre, Chapter 23).
Use one or both of these quotations as the starting point for an essay in which you consider the portrayal of both Jane and Rochester, and their interactions, offering an argument about relationships of power (in terms of gender and class, say) as these are portrayed in the novel.