A model midterm essay, Part IV: Dickens

Nat Iosbaker has generously agreed to let me post his answer to the Dickens question on the midterm. Nat’s answer is fascinating on several counts. Most noticeably, his first paragraphs eschew the question posed by the prompt: though he later engages with the logic of Great Expectations, he begins his argument by building from Larry’s notes during lecture about the context of the novel’s production. Nat’s analysis is closer to the work you would find in a history class than in a literature class, though it clearly borrows from both disciplines.

This is a daring move, particularly as a by-the-books-ier grader could have slammed him for not directly answering the question. But this intellectual bravura also means that his essay is likelier to succeed big if it succeeds at all: he is writing in a way drastically different than the other 60-odd essays I graded last week, and that distinction from the crowd looks really good.

Note also that when Nat gets into the close reading of the two endings, he refers closely to psycho-social and thematic patterns that emerge over the course of the novel. He doesn’t quote from the text or engage with the details of its language—my only significant problem with his answer—but he engages closely with what the text is about.

Here is the question he was answering:

Referring to the organic logic of Great Expectations, argue for the effectiveness of the second ending (pp. 481-484). Then, in the same essay, argue for the effectiveness of the first ending (pp. 508-509).

And here is Nat’s answer:

The alternate endings of Great Expectations change the marketability of the book and allow Dickens to continue pleasing audiences and publishers.

Dickens wrote serial novels. Novels created over the span of a year or so that published chapters or sections of the story at intervals. Great Expectations was written in between 1860 and 1861. Common characteristics of serial novels included: having small climaxes in every chapter, so that the audience would read the next published chapter; having plot twists towards the very end of the chapter, once again for the readers benefit; and the chapters could not be extremely long, because of space and printing constraints for the publisher, too much writing for the reader, and not enough time for the writer, Dickens, to produce an extensive amount of material in the time needed to write, edit, and send in the chapter to the publisher. Every aspect of the serial novels, like Great Expectations, was for the entertainment of the reader. The deep analysis that so many scholars work on is worthwhile and obviously needed. But such critical readings were likely overlooked by most readers, unable to analyze the traits of one chapter and contain it until the next section published and then add that to previous readings. Whatever Dickens did was most likely influenced by his editors, publishers, and readers.

Dickens’ first ending to Great Expectations is not made for fairy tales. It is slow and fairly uneventful. The first ending benefits reality. Joe and Biddy are married and have children. Satis house is destroyed and most likely to be sold. Estella’s relationships, created under the pretense to destroy the men in them, were abusive and are over. Everything is as expected. The first ending does not make the assumption that things always work out. This is seen earlier in the book as well, with Magwitch’s capture and death, the loss of Pip’s inheritance, the life of Miss Havisham, and the death of Mrs. Joe. The book follows a pattern of reality; a pattern of hopes and disappointments, much like life.

The second ending is brief, condensed, full of assumptions (hopes), and has a happier ending. The length of the alternate ending would indicate that initial ending is what Dickens put more time and analytical thinking into, because he is not one for brevity or light language.* The stages from Pip’s stay at his original home, to his journey to Satis house, to his meeting Estella, to his leaving with Estella is the condensed version where the reader does not have to arrive at many conclusions, but just has to read and let the mysteries come to them. This can be seen even in Estella coming to Pip and not making the reader go through a journey to reach a conclusion. This ending is also full of assumptions by both characters and readers. Estella assumes Pip has a child and the reader is lead to assume that the two eventually get married and live a fairly peaceful life. The quickness of the writing and the pace at which conclusions are arrived at only add onto the fact that the alternate ending was rushed to get to press.

Though both endings are in the style of realism, Dickens completed and sent in an alternate ending to be published to cheer the audience up. The endings only difference is which makes the audience read Dickens’ next book and which would make the publisher print the next book. There is a reason Dickens [ac]cumulated a wealth of what would now be six and a half million dollars, he knew exactly what twist needed to happen where, when a character would die, when a character would live, and when a happy ending is necessary.

* Editor’s note: in fact, it is the published ending—Dickens’s second—that is the longer of the two.

What is analysis?

In the instructions for answering the Dickens midterm essay, we wrote

Support [your essay's] thesis by closely reading (see “How to Close Read Fiction”) several SHORT, important quotations. Remember that close reading (focusing on the significance of details, words, images) is not the same as translating (recounting the story in your own words).

Many writers succeeded wonderfully in using the language of Great Expectations to develop a close reading of the text, but not all did. Here, then, is a short primer on the difference between textual analysis and illustrative quotation.

Illustrative quotation:

At the end of GE, Pip marries Estella: “I saw the shadow of no parting from her” (484).

This kind of bald quotation doesn’t help your reader understand where the evidence for this argument comes from: how do you read marriage implied here?

Textual analysis:

The last line of GE—”I saw the shadow of no parting from her”—suggests at least three readings.

First, Pip sees—though only in a shadowy way—that he and Estella are unlikely to separate again: this may imply marriage, though it more likely implies a lifelong friendship, as that between him and Biddy. We should note that it is not quite sufficient that Pip sees no shadow parting: Pip has a history of not seeing things of consequence until rather too late. Second, he perhaps sees “the shadow of ‘No’ parting from her”: he proposed marriage to her and she answered in a way consistent with the Estella we have known since Chapter 8.

A third reading, however, seems most likely. The “shadow of no parting” alludes to Pip’s Chapter 38 epiphany that Estella has been raised “to wreak Miss Havisham’s revenge on men”: “I saw in this, the distinct shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden from the sun” (302–03). In the last line of the novel, Pip sees not “the shadow of no parting” but “the shadow of no parting”: sitting in the ruins of Satis House, Estella has finally lifted from herself the shadow of Havisham’s vengeance. Estella may never marry Pip, and, indeed, she may part from him two minutes after the last scene concludes; however, we know that she has at least and at last parted from Havisham and that she has beaten a lifetime’s training and indoctrination at about the same moment Pip has.

This second reading is a good deal longer, of course. This is you have two pages to answer this sort of question: we assume that it will take a good deal of space to thoroughly pick apart the levels of meaning in Dickens’s language.

Notes on the Dickens midterm essays

I was responsible for grading most of the essays answering the tricky question about the effectiveness of the two endings of Great Expectations. In the course of grading these essays I’ve seen a few analytical weaknesses you might work to correct as you draft future essays—particularly Essay 4, in which you must write at further length about the ending of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake.

1. Realism

Many essays anchor their critiques of the effectiveness of Dickens’s two endings on their comparative realism. Writers often point to the original ending—in which Estella and Pip remain romantically if not emotionally estranged—as the more realistic of the two, on the basis of several arguments. For example, it seems somewhat unlikely that Pip and Estella would run into each other in the ruins of Satis House. This is a novelistic coincidence, though, on which more anon. The two strongest arguments against the realism of the published ending are likely these:

• Estella’s character seems unlikely to change after one bad marriage;
• Pip seems unlikely to retain a fiery passion for a girl he fell in love with after three decades of rejection

However, if we were to throw out all the elements of GE that are unrealistic, we’d have little left. Consider:

• Magwitch’s fidelity to a small boy with whom he exchanges some dozen words over twelve hours—the man is a criminal, but he is loyal to a boy?
• Miss Havisham. Is a woman with so strong a will likely to be so easily crushed by a man she scarcely knows?
• Pip sitting in a coach behind Magwitch’s convict-courier.
• A good half-dozen of the characters, who seem drawn from no world I recognize. Have you ever met a Mrs Joe? An Uncle Pumblechook?

The list could go on.

Larry suggested in lecture that GE is generally thought of as a work of Realism, but Dickens’s Realism differs markedly from the idea of realism that we have today.

Most nineteenth-century novels lean on coincidence: Jane Eyre, to give one example, would be quite a different novel were Jane not to accidentally land in the company of her estranged cousins. To a nineteenth-century writer, coincidence and unrealism were simply marks of the divine: God—or the author—would necessarily arrange things so that they reached a meaningful conclusion.

Would we argue that Swan Lake is unrealistic? We would argue, instead, that the themes of Matthew Bourne’s choreography do not loyally represent our experience of the world. (Though that would be a hard argument to make.)

2. Tone

Several essays argue for the effectiveness of endings on the basis of the appropriate tone of one (typically the unpublished ending) and the inappropriate tone of the other.

Many of these arguments observe that the tone of GE is generally “pessimistic.”

Here is why this argument does not move me.

First, the assignment asks writers to base their analysis on the organic logic of the novel. Although the tone of the novel is certainly significant, its tone is not clearly connected to its logic. To make the connection you would need to argue that the tone is connected to the themes and structure of the novel.

Second, “tone” is such a vague concept that it cannot be written about clearly. What is tone? How is it conveyed? Will every reader experience the same tone in the novel? And then there are problems of description. For example, what does it mean to suggest that GE has a “pessimistic tone”? What does pessimism mean, and how does Dickens’s pessimism differ from the general? Writing about the tone of a novel is perhaps as vague as writing about the tone of a symphony: both works clearly have a tone, but writing about that tone requires an admirable specificity of expression.

3. The reader’s pleasure

Several essays remarked on the varied pleasures a good ending can afford a reader. In particular, two versions of this argument have appeared with some regularity:

• The reader would like an ending that is pleasurable or satisfying, either because the ending fits the cliché of a comfortable genre (e.g. romance) or because the ending is interesting in that it rejects the cliché.
• The reader who is faced with an ambiguous ending has the pleasure of imagining an ending that is appropriate or interesting.

The writer, I suppose, must confront this question of how best to satisfy the reader who is paying in time and money for the experience of the book. As a literary scholar, however, you must eschew the simple pleasures of the cliché for a far richer pleasure: why, of all the satisfying or unsatisfying endings Dickens could have written, did he choose this one?

It is a bit of a cheat, I fear, to write simply that an ambiguous ending lets the reader fill in the blanks as she or he will. The reductio of this argument goes something like this: if we wanted the pleasure of filling in blanks we would write our own novels.

Instead, ambiguity is an intent. Why would Dickens craft an ending that leaves his themes unresolved and his characters’ arcs incomplete? Another way of thinking of this question goes something like this: is ambiguity itself a theme of GE? After all, the source of Pip’s wealth is ambiguous for several hundred pages; the reason for his love of Estella remains ambiguous throughout the novel.

Next: what is closure? Who decides whether a text achieves closure? What does closure come from? Is closure anything more than a cliché? Do we say that a narrative achieves closure when it has resolved the story in the way such texts historically have resolved such stories? What does it mean for a story to be resolved? We know that Wemmick marries Miss Skiffins and Herbert, Clara, and Joe, Biddy; but we also know that marriages are often miserable failures: consider the Pockets—the whole lot of them; consider Mrs Joe. How does a marriage provide any more closure than a character’s uncertain singleness?

Citing Dickens

As your quote or paraphrase passages from Great Expectations, please be careful to cite the appropriate page number. Citations should be formatted in this way:

Sleeping for the first time at Satis House, Pip dreams that his expectations have evaporated and that he must, instead, marry Herbert Pocket’s betrothed Clara (258).

Note that the citation needs no further information—we know who the author is—and that it is fully contained within the sentence.

Syllabus for the coming 7 days, revised

Incorporating Larry’s emendations, the next week of work looks like this:

Discussion—Thursday, July 9
Great Expectations

Lecture—Friday, July 10
Quiz: Great Expectations

Lecture—Monday, July 13
Due: Essay 2, draft 2
Due: Essay 3, draft 1

Discussion—Tuesday, July 14
Due: Midterm

Lecture—Wednesday, July 15
Quiz: The Comedy of Errors

The crush of work has not been alleviated: it has merely been shifted to the weekend. This is no especial kindness.

Two notes on working thoughtfully this weekend:

Use caffeine smartly. Unfocused writers write unfocused essays. The pharmacology of caffeine is pretty straightforward: caffeine has no meaningful effect on whether or not you are sleepy, though it can dull the feeling of sleepiness. Its significant effect is that, taken in controlled doses, it helps you control when you are focused.

The caffeine you drink in a sip of coffee reaches peak efficacy at 30–45 minutes. As soon as you get past this peak you begin to feel tired, even though the caffeine stays in your bloodstream around 24 hours. You want to sip coffee slowly over the course of a 6- or 8-hour period. Because coffee is disgusting as all get out once it grows cold, this means you will want a few small cups of hot coffee or a thermal mug that will keep coffee warm for hours.

For me, a Thermos Nissan coffee mug is as important as nearly any other learning tool.

Revise. You cannot write a paper; you can only rewrite a paper.

That might look like an epigram, but I mean it earnestly: there is not a single paragraph in the 160 pages (so far) of my dissertation that has not been rewritten from the ground up. I have to write two or three dumb things for every reasonably intelligent thing I have to say.

By rewriting an essay, you do something central to the development of your argument: you take the conclusion of the first draft of your argument and you are able to begin with it as a premise. When you reach a new conclusion, that new conclusion will be by definition more sophisticated.

Another way of thinking about it is simply as a competition. How many of your colleagues are drafting and then rewriting the essays for the midterm? If you draft and then rewrite, you will at least be ahead of them in the quality and subtlety of your work.

Midterm: Part V, example 3

Here is the third example of a strong answer to Part V of the midterm, this one provided by Ruby. Thank you, Ruby!

Ruby’s essay offers a model of an evidence-rich analytical argument that fits in just one page. Notice that her first two paragraphs lay out detailed evidence from the production and the script, but that the last paragraph of each ties that evidence back into Ruby’s main argument. The third paragraph, then, dwells at greater length on that argument and its consequences for our interpretation of the text.

William Brown changed the last scene of the play, Act V Scene I, by giving the Indian boy back to the mortal world. It is related to the theme of imagination vs. logic because Brown is making a statement that true imagination cannot survive with human interference. The removal of the boy rekindles Oberon and Titania’s love for each other because with the boy’s presence threatened to tear the King and Queen apart, which would end the world of imagination. Brown, by adding the Indian boy’s last appearance, wants to explicitly show that by returning him to the mortal world, the fairy world will end with a ‘happily ever after.’

In the book, Oberon is able to take the boy from Titania and it is assumed that Oberon keeps the boy since that is the last time the boy is mentioned, but the play is not so; in the play, while all are dancing, the Indian boy enters the stage full of merriment, lights, and music and sadly looks upon happy Titania and Oberon dancing. He is then quietly ushered away by the fairies. This contrasts the stage setup of when Titania and Oberon are fighting over the Indian boy with no music or dancing and simple lighting. By doing this, Brown emphasizes his point that the happiness and existence of the fairy world is interrupted with human presence.

This interpretation is valid because the imaginative world can improve the logical world with its interference[;] examples are Helena and Demetrius falling in love and Hermia and Lysander falling in love again, but interference of the logical world into the imaginative world only causes mayhem, for example, Oberon and Titania quarreling over the Indian boy. The play interestingly showed this by creating a merry scene of dancing once the Indian boy was forgotten by the Queen and King of the fairy world, and the boy then being removed.

Midterm: Part V, example 2

This second sample answer to the A Midsummer Night’s Dream review prompt on the midterm was written by Cydney. (Thanks for letting me share this, Cydney!)

Cydney comes to two of the same conclusions as Rebekah, whose example is below:

1. She reads the Bergomask dance as a site of interpretive significance;
2. She argues that Brown’s interpretation of the script diverges from Larry’s.

Cydney’s essay differs from Bekah’s in that she draws evidence to support her argument from close analysis of only the dance.

Take a close look at her second paragraph: she analyzes the dance in three completely different ways:

• as an atmospheric element that changes the experience of the audience and counteracts the pedantry of all the speechmaking in Act V,
• as a visible resolution of the social fractiousness of Act I,
• and as a philosophical claim that humans have substantive authority over their own lives and don’t need to lean on supernatural explanations.

Analyzing one piece of evidence in three drastically different ways is a pretty solid way to do well in a short essay like this, and like the essays you will be writing for the final exam. What matters is that your evidence is detailed and relevant, and that your analysis moves smoothly between the specifics of the artwork and the abstractions of its meaning.

William Brown, the director of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” intended for the play to focus on the comedy and triviality of relationships rather than the world of imagination that most audiences and scholars dissect as the purpose. It is through the abridged ending and exaggerated stage directions that Brown reveals his own interpretation of the play[:] that it is a comedic commentary on how easily people can be manipulated, and a revelation on how intrusive societies can be concerning the lives of others.

In the Shakespeare version, Oberon and Titania, played by Michael Huftile and Carey Cannon, are king and queen of the fairy world [and] summarize the night with Puck by their side[;] but[,] in the production, the finalizing exit involves the entire cast performing a dance before Puck closes out. The effect of this alteration is three fold: For one, the dance is more theatrical than dialogue, which dramatizes far more than words. Secondly, the dance is a huge contrast to the conflict at the start of the play, which provides humor because the lives of the lovers were so easily distorted. Thirdly, having all characters dance at the end rids the play of the privilege that the fairies hold as the only ones who are able penetrate the borders of the magical world, thus reducing the authority that the fairies have over the rest of the world but instead shows how everyone has changed from start to finish. The lovers have all gone from quarrel to resolutions through magical manipulation, and this is meant to be much more comical in production form when it is displayed how easily the fairies can oversee and alter the lives of the lovers. This is precisely Brown’s intent when he sacrifices lines of the play for performance, he knows the gestures will make it all the more humorous, and the theatrics will convey more than words.

[Brackets] indicate slight grammatical emendations.

Midterm: Part V, example 1

I have asked a few students who wrote especially strong answers to Part V of the midterm if they would be willing to share those answers as examples of particularly successful exam essays.

This first example, written by Bekah, has two huge things going for it:

1. Bekah identifies a concrete interpretive problem: William Brown and American Players Theatre veered away from Shakespeare’s text by moving the changeling boy from the woods to Athens.
2. To answer this question, her analysis looks to another key piece of evidence from the performance—the Bergomask dance—and comes up with a startling but persuasive answer: Brown and APT offer a social rather than a literary interpretation of the play.

As you prepare to write three important essays for the final exam—an essay on visual art, an essay on Frenzy, another essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream—think about using Bekah’s essay as a model: identify, in some detail, two related pieces of evidence from the artwork that suggests what the artist’s hidden meaning might be.

Thank you, Bekah, for sharing this essay with us!

William Brown throws in an interesting twist by choosing for the Indian boy to come back at the end. When everyone is participating in the Bergomask dance (Greek influence) the Indian boy reappears. Brown’s analysis of this scene mirrors his interpretation of the entire play, inclusiveness. The Indian boy really does not have a place to belong. He is on the borderline between the fairies and the human world. By putting him in the last scene Brown meshes the two worlds together.

The Bergomask dance takes place when Oberon and Titania, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena are in their white wedding attire. They are seated in the audience and have just finished watching the play. At first, only David Daniel (Snout) and Andrew Truschinski (Flute) are dancing, then the cast of the Pyramus and Thisby. Following that, Brown chooses James Ridge, Egeus, to ask for a dance from Tiffany Scott, insinuating the famous daddy-daughter dance. They are joined by the other couples and in perfect harmony both working class and royalty are on stage. This complements the interpretation Brown is trying to convey of the closeness within family. The wedding atmosphere, a time for celebration is more enjoyable by taking out the aspect of class distinctions. Christopher Peltier’s entrance as the Indian boy only further emphasizes this point. One of the workers takes him in the circle and teaches him the dance. He has been removed from the fairy world and replanted in the human world. The common cliché “the only time people come together are for weddings and funerals,” proves true. It changes the atmosphere and relationships, and Maureen Janson, the choreographer, conveys the change visually by the dance. Greek culture is synonymous with family ties. A similar dance was seen in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Two vastly different cultures were tied as one, problems arose, but at the wedding everything came together. The same instance Brown depicted on stage, with this scene. They were not all family, but, at the end, the audience could feel the closeness.

Brown’s fundamental meaning of the play is troubles occur, by fault of the fairies, or fault of your own, but, in the end, everything can be brought back together with something as basic as a wedding. Brown’s interpretation is very interesting. Instead of dwelling on the power of imagination or love, it focuses on the power of family and how strong it really is.

Where those 9.6 points come from

Grading essays—actually committing a letter to the page—has always been the hardest part of being a TA for me. As an instructor, I care about whether you students are learning the material and becoming smarter people: trying to rank you against some invisible Ideal Student is absurd and counterproductive. Cattle get graded; human beings shouldn’t be.

But, of course, grading is integral to the way our academic system works, so I’ve bought into it out of necessity and tried to adopt practices that are both fair to the students and respectful to the material. As an earlier post describes, I graded Part V of the midterm the way I would grade any other UW–Madison writing assignment; actually, I graded an almost identical assignment this past fall in English 162 (about an American Players Theatre performance of The Merchant of Venice).

Still, when members of the writing staff added up the midterm scores, we all found something amiss: the grades we were seeing didn’t reflect our experiences of you as students.

It could be that we didn’t explain the essay assignments very well. It could be that we expected a little more from you than was reasonable. It’s also possible that you didn’t have the time you needed to do an excellent job writing these essays.

Whatever the reason, the writing staff decided to re-norm Parts II, IV, and V of the midterm—the most difficult essays, I think. We decided that the mean grade for each of these parts should be a C: 15/20. Rather than curve the grade—which would help students in certain grade ranges disproportionately more than students in other grade ranges—we chose to boost all students’ grades equally in order to reach the new average:

	Unadjusted average	Adjusted average	Adjustment
Part II	13.0/20	15.0/20	2.0
Part IV	9.7/20	15.0/20	5.3
Part V	12.7/20	15.0/20	2.3

As you can see from this midterm grade distribution graph, the addition of 9.6 points preserves the relationship between scores but moves every midterm a full letter up the scale:

Email from Larry: Midterm grade boost

Each member of class will have 9.6 points added to the TOTAL number of points on the exam, not to each part of the exam. If before you had 80, now you’ll have 89.6.