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With my second draft, I feel like it’s less bare-boned, but it still needs a lot of work. I’m still concerned if I sound smart enough. I’m just barely cracking through 6 pages right now, so I have lots to go. I’m going to ask if I sound smart enough and where they think I can expand upon more.

My draft is very bare-bones so far. I think the vast majority of it is going to be changed in some way, especially considering I haven’t even added any sources yet. Since it’s so bare-boned, I’m mostly just concerned if I sound like I know enough about what I’m talking about. I’m going to ask about where I should put sources, and if it sounds good. I still need to work on the sexual assault aspect of my paper, and then I want to get into the queer readings of Carmilla and where that could leave her story.

For this set of readings, I wanted to focus in on Sam’s batch. I’m currently taking Brit Lit II, and rereading these sections of Jane Eyre with the focus of looking at the descriptions of women in this story and how Jane percieves herself and others was really interesting. I do love this book (though I am Rochester hater #1) but I think the reason why I love it so much is because I see a lot of myself in Jane. I am a highly insecure person most of the time and find myself comparing myself to other women in the same way Jane compares herself to Blanche. Funny enough, when my boyfriend and I met, he was in a relationship, and I found myself picking apart every aspect of myself and wondering what was so different about her and I. It’s terrible to admit, but I was genuinely so self-loathing at the time, I didn’t think I’d ever have a boyfriend, let alone him. Look at me now! (also she was a terrible person so I feel drastically less bad about it now)

I also did notice while reading for Dr. Meadowsong’s class that Jane’s story really seems to be her getting pushed from one situation to another, promptly leaving following the proposals she receives. (except……. rochester…..ew.)

The section I first started drafting was my section on the Madonna/Whore complex and its reflections in Dracula and Carmilla. I felt like I had the strongest ability to explain that, and the strongest opinions, so I thought that would be a good place to start. I’ve been in a lot of feminist circles since I was a kid, and I very strongly believe that being involved in these circles and a big literature fan has made it practically impossible for me not to notice the problems a lot of stories carry. I actually have a lot of discussions with my therapist that wind up delving into how misogyny impacts all sorts of things (most recently- pretty privilege and autism diagnoses.)

Through drafting, I’ve figured out how much I personally have to say on these topics. I tend to stay quiet on most things and just observe other people’s opinions when it comes to topics like this, but I think that observation has made me into a much more confident speaker on this topic.

I’ve been struggling with getting started weirdly enough. I get in my own brain and feel like I need to be the smartest person in the room about everything, but since I just started typing and not holding myself back, I feel much more confident and sound much smarter.

My next planned section is on the sexual assault aspects of these stories.

I want to focus a lot on Dimitrius’s readings, as his coincide a lot with the points I want to make about assault, just with different myths. I thought the comments on his readings were also very informing. The myth of Leda and the swan is very similar, in my eyes, to Lucy’s nightly attacks by Dracula in his bat form. Both women were being assaulted by someone with much more power than them, and both were incapacitated in some form.

For my outline, I chose to have a physical one on a faux “cork”board I made. I placed my topics from lightest to heaviest, ranging from religion and its impacts on the characters to sexual assault. I added the religion section during our development last week, so that one is lacking sources. I’m not typically an outline person, but I didn’t struggle a lot with developing the outline (shoutout to all my middle school teachers for deciding I needed to know how to outline)

I decided to focus mainly on Allyson-Chloe’s reading today for my blog post. I think her reading and topic are really interesting, delving into how religion affects the women involved in it. I found it really interesting as someone who was raised Catholic, as I spent a lot of my childhood surrounded by nuns and women of the church. I found out recently that nuns are on the same level as the regular church goers, and that threw off my entire perception of the authority of the church. The priests, generally, get to live fairly normally, where most nuns have to live off the bottom of the barrel donations to the church. I also grew up being told that I couldn’t do the things my male friends would without it being a sin. Those aspects really informed my reading of this, especially the parts about needing “female company”.

I decided to focus a lot on Zach’s section for the reading today, as I love Shakespeare. I think Zach has an interesting topic focusing on the use of cross dressing in Shakespeare’s plays. The two it’s used in, it’s typically played for comedic reasons, but I think there’s a much more serious undertone to it. Those girls decided to cross dress as a man for the express purpose of safety in places they weren’t used to. These women were alone and in danger if they showed up as a woman, and in one case, mourning her brother she thought died. When played in a serious way, it carries a very different connotation.

For my paper, I chose the topic of the exploitation of women in vampire stories. Specifically, I’ll be covering Dracula and Carmilla. I’m a huge nerd about vampire media of all sorts, so this was something that came to mind immediately. I’ll be aiming for the Midwest Journal of Undergraduate Research, as when I was going through the past publications I saw a lot of similar topics so I felt it a safe bet. I’m assigning the last chapter of Dracula to the class, as it covers Mina’s curse, and the death of the vampires, with only Dracula’s Brides being staked through the heart. I like to think I know a lot about vampires, but I want to know the deeper parts I may have missed reading before.

My favorite paper to write was definitely on the goblin market. I love Christina Rossetti so much, and I love goblin market, so getting to talk about it more is always something I enjoy. My least favorite was the written on the body one, as it was a very heavy topic for me.

I think my strongest and weakest lined up with my favorite and least favorite. I struggled really hard with writing about written on the body, despite thinking it was a beautiful story, I just had a hard time.

My approach to writing responses typically is just whatever I was thinking as I read. I don’t find much use in approaching it much different than I would annotate in my own book, as I still get my point across, just in a different way than others. when it comes to writing a serious analysis paper, I like to write very properly and almost pretentious sounding (because I like to sound smart)

In high school, I struggled with making my writing feel like I wrote it. it was never like me. I was extremely disconnected with writing on the whole. In college, I realized that my words, no matter how proper, matter, and I shouldn’t be afraid to make my writing sound like me.

I really love literary analysis because I love digging deeper into the thought process behind everything. I almost went into psychology, so I adore thinking deeper about readings. I also annotate books for fun, so that definitely helps.