Lessons from Essay Season

The first month of January 2021 is over, and so is the mid-winter essay season, which finished when I submitted my last essay at 04:24am last Thursday. 

Before I am swept under the wave of this semester's academic teaching, I thought it would be helpful to construct a brief summary of the essays I have just completed, followed by the lessons I learnt whilst writing them. I had one essay for each of the three modules that I took last semester, which were as follows:

1) "To what extent did early modern English men and women 'rest in peace?'" (Module: Death, Dying and the Dead in Early Modern England)

There was a strong selection of varied and fascinating essay titles for this one, so I found it difficult to choose. Although this question initially seemed too broad, I was fond of the scope this left to research different channels and place emphasis on comparative analyses. As it turns out this was entirely the right decision, because I was able to compare detailed archaeological evidence of dissected skeletons along with literary evidence such as Robert Southey's poem 'The Surgeon's Warning'. As a student studying both English Literature and History, I am very fond of interdisciplinary approaches so I really enjoyed being able to bring this into my history essay. My thesis and conclusion consisted of the obvious answer that early modern English men and women rested in peace to a limited extent, and also highlighted the impact of wealth disparities as the most significant factor influencing disruption of the dead. I explored this in three paragraphs, the first regarding the treatment of the dead by medical professionals; the second detailing the resurrectionist trade and the third discussing the role of political and demonstrative exhumations, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

The research for this essay was indeed fascinating, and as usual with my history essays took up twice the amount of time that the actual writing did. The writing itself was highly enjoyable and not particularly strenuous; simply a matter of combining the relevant pieces of evidence into the structure I had created to support my thesis.

2) "In what ways are women confined to the periphery in Old English literature?" (Module: Monsters, Misery & Miracles)

This researching of this essay led me down all sorts of delightful rabbit holes, such as the historiography of early medieval scholarship, the role of subterranean spaces in Old English literature, keening women and Anglo-Saxon trees. It was a challenging essay in many ways, not only due to the combination of linguistic and literary analysis required to answer the question that was very different to any literature essay I have ever written before. My exploration of the 'toxic masculinity at the heart of the [Early Medievalist] field' (Elmes and Thomas) also led me to question my values and interpretations of many of the sources I had encountered so far in early medieval studies. 

The essay was once again separated into three paragraphs; the first on the confinement of women to the natural periphery; the second on the confinement of women to the spiritual periphery and the last on the confinement of women to the social periphery. Each of these topics are extensively broad and so it was difficult to do each one justice with only a paragraph. However, through the breadth of my analysis I was able to demonstrate that the confinement of women to the periphery is not only a highly diverse phenomenon, but also an intentional literary feature that serves the narratives of heroic poetry. Aspects of the essay that particularly fascinated me were the female characters' dominance of the liminal space between life and death, the debate surrounding the definition of the hapax legomenon 'herheard' in 'The Wife's Lament', and the relation between linguistic evidence and archaeological evidence. Once again, I was delighted by the opportunity to combine both linguistic, literary and archaeological evidence to support my thesis. 

This was an essay that challenged me in the best way possible, and taught me as much about my researching and essay writing techniques as it did about women in Old English literature. 

3) "What is the significance of memory in two Modernist texts?" (Module: Modernisms)

Last but not least, we have my least favourite essay of the bunch. This is partially due to my aversion to modernist literature, and partially do to my poor selection of an essay question. There were several options given which focused more explicitly on the interaction between modernist texts and their historical context, and as a result would have been much better suited to my areas of strength. For some reason, I committed to this question and only realised that I had perhaps made an error when it was too late to start another one. The essay could have been worse, but it certainly sits in the shadow of the other two which I very much enjoyed writing. Instead of leaving me feeling energised and inspired, as most essays do, this one felt more like a chore and took slightly longer to complete than it would have done otherwise. I explored the interactions between memory and sensory experience; memory and object association; memory on human behaviour, and memory on relationships in Trifles by Susan Glaspell and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I did find the correlation between these interesting, particularly due to their relevance to the psychological, political and epistemological contexts of the early twentieth century. 

It could have been worse, but it could have been better. This essay felt like a game of chess where a fault in the first move impacts the rest of the game. 

My intention in taking the modernisms module was to provide variation in my main area of interest, which it certainly did. I am glad that I tasted it, and confirmed that I was not keen on the flavour, so that I can now crawl back to my Early Medievalist hovel. 

Lessons Learnt

• Pay close attention to which essay question I select.
• Allow time to pursue research 'rabbit holes' that occur during the research process. These often add depth to my argument and also refine my argument. It is okay to change the focus of my essay if I find something more suitable and/or interesting during this.
• Writing the first draft of the essay in bullet points, with each bullet marking the start of a new sentence, is a particularly helpful way to develop a sound structure with no repetitive rambling.

Sources

Elmes, Melissa, and Carla Thomas. “Editors' Note.” The Heroic Age: A Journey of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, www.heroicage.org/issues/19/editorsnote.php.