It's true that you can train your mind to look for certain patterns, ask certain questions and think more critically about genre, style, narrative chocies, etc. There are key themes that occur throughout literature (and life): public versus private modes of behavior, the search for and construction of identity, individual vs. society, questions about the function of text, and of interpretation and misreading. But when it comes down to it, what makes a great thesis is the mind making a connection when you're staring out into space. Magnitudes of brilliance aside, it's really not all that different from the scene in A Beautiful Mind when John Nash sees patterns in the people around him in a bar. You've been poring over the material and made lots of lists--every time the word "chaunged," "exchaunge," or transfigure comes up in a book, for example--but nothing makes sense until the brain goes 'Aha!'
Of course, sometimes it never does. Then you write a paper that is mostly trite and boring, hoping that your painstaking research and your brain-bashing come across anyway.
Try explaining this way of coming up with theses to a high school student.
I don't. I demystify as much as possible with all the above tricks about themes and patterns and word usage. But I understand why so many of my students struggle writing papers or coming up with theses (although it is so incredibly easy to come up with ideas for them...easy to do for others...). I think (don't tell them!) that I'm going to go a tad easier on the grading this coming year. I was a hard ass last year, and they came to respect me for it, but...when I think of some of the work my students have done this last year, I remember my own (much less accomplished) writing at the same time in high school, and am so proud of them.
Now back to my own paper. Here is the introduction, first paragraph, and conclusion, for those of you willing to struggle through the Middle English quotes.
* * *
‘The yerde is bet that bowen wole and wynde’:
(The stick is best that will bow and wind...rather than the one that breaks)
Worldly Mutability and Spiritual Constancy in Troilus and Criseyde
The end of Troilus and Criseyde seems to advise young lovers to reject the mutable world for immutable heaven:
And of youre herte up casteth the visage
To thilke God that after his ymage
Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire
This world that passeth soon as floures faire. (v.1838-41)
Yet this is less of a rejection than an acknowledgment that the world is lesser than heaven, transient but at times beautiful as “flowers fair.” All things in the created universe are subject to time and thus to change; empires fall and are built again. Troilus and Criseyde, in its celebration of romantic love and its depiction of love’s tragedy, recognizes that change is often part of a greater cycle of creation and destruction. Only God and, through him, heaven are constant. But while constancy of faith in God is the spiritual ideal, fixity of purpose, when affected by the mutable circumstances of the temporal world, can become entrapment, leading to stagnation or death. Within the confines of a poem, fixity of language shuts down meaning, and stories can become repetitive, flat, and eventually obsolete. Chaucer’s poem demonstrates the necessity of flexibility in a world in which external forces can overturn man’s attempts at immutability and immortality.
The most physical representation of entrapment comes in the form of characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Procne, Philomela, Niobe and Myrrha all enter Troilus and Criseyde as part of the natural world, the animals, plants or objects they have been metamorphosed into. Identifying these non-human objects by the women’s names provides a strong sense that the women themselves are still trapped within the forms, still reliving their respective tragedies:
The swalowe Proigne, with a sorrowful lay,
Whan morwen com, gan make hire waymentynge
Whi she forshapen was; and evere lay
Pandare abedde, half in a slomberynge,
Til she so neigh hym made hire cherterynge
How Tereus gan forth hire suster take. (ii.64-69)
Procne (“Proigne”), as a swallow, can fly but cannot escape her tragedy, of which she has become a perpetual reminder. The nightingale recalls Philomela, the victim of rape; sweating marble recalls the unceasing sorrow of Niobe; and the myrrh tree’s oils recall the tears of Myrrha. Ironically, the transformations have caused these women to become fixed symbols, often for the tragedies they hoped to escape. So too will Criseyde’s name become a symbol for falseness in love, and the real motives of the person Criseyde will cease to exist.
The paradox of mutability is inherently due to perspective. This includes not just that what one person views as fortune another views as misfortune—as when the narrator refers to Troilus’ first sorrow (falling in love) as “Blissed” (i.308)—but the concept that humans’ limited perspective might not see that the mutability is part of the natural scheme of things. “[When] Chaucer’s characters, including ‘Boece,’ the type of the prisoner of Fortune, complain of nature or the stars or Fortune as the determinant of their plight, they are wrong, and simply do not have a large enough vision to get at the real causes. … [T]he failure to perceive causes beyond the natural scheme and Fortune is that ignorance of providence which is pagan and can be damning” (Barney 448). Seen from a distance—of emotion on Pandarus’ part, of time on the author’s and reader’s, and of spiritual ascendance on Troilus’—mutability itself is part of a cycle that is fixed, like fortune’s wheel. What Troilus and later both lovers view as disaster is perhaps winter in the cycle of their lives, and necessary for spring to come again.
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