External Validation, at Last!

Last Monday, I finished my last paper of the quarter/year and turned it in . The class was Victorian Novel with a professor I admire, and I partly applied to my university to be able to work with her. Consequently, I had a lot invested in the outcome of this paper.

For my reactions to make sense, you need to know a little about the professor. She is a New Historicist critic, which I aspire to be, and has done some very respected work on little girls in Victorian Literature, specifically on the relationship between girls and adult male writers. In a nonpedophilic way, it's a more interesting subject than you might think at first. Consider Lewis Carrol and young Alice Liddell, for instance. Anyway, this professor is very critical and very British, which means her reactions to my classroom work have been difficult to read. If you are familiar with the stereotypical British temperment, you know what I mean. She condescendingly guffaws and snorts at almost anything anyone says in class and pushes her own interpretations of the material with such understatement that one is never quite sure what she thinks about his or her ideas, despite her blustering. Yet irrespective of this, she comes off as perfectly charming and delightful, even when she disagrees with you; however, she can be vicious to written work, which I learned to my grief earlier in the quarter when she ripped apart a previous paper with a pencil-sized scythe.

You see, the class was set up so that we had to write, in addition to weekly response papers and a class presentation, two seminar papers of 8-10 pages instead of one paper of 20-30 pages, as is normal. The professor explained this by saying it allowed us to engage more than one of the novels from the class if we were so inclined. In addition, conference papers are rarely over that length, and she stressed that our papers should approximate conference-style papers. This seems easy, right? I should be able to write 8-10 pages in a day with no problem, right? Wrong. After years of writing lengthy seminar papers, I found it difficult to write a short paper that still contained sufficient depth, flare, and response to critical discourse, and as I indicated, my first attempt to do so for this class achieved disasterous results.

Consequently, I waited tremulously for the return of this last paper. Part of me craved to see the results with a desire that bordered on unstable, but part of me denied the very existence of the offending document. I wanted desperately to do well in this class above all others because it's my area, and I felt a need to prove myself on this paper. When I picked it up recently, my hands trembled and my stomach lurched as I grasped the pages and glimpsed the prof's pencil scrawl covering the entire right-hand margin of the first page. But lo and behold, she was all praise of it and my work in general in her end comments. Well, not ALL praise. She made some typically scathing margin comments that I need to look at more closely, but her end comments were almost wholly positive! I can't properly express how elated I was when I read her glowing remarks. My knees almost buckled... although maybe that was from my bike ride beforehand. But seriously, I shouted alleluias to the fountain in the building's courtyard and sprinted back and forth in front of it with childlike glee. I'm sure I looked pretty foolish, but I didn't care. Besides, there was no one to see.

Such is the life of the graduate student. Most people don't understand it exactly. They can identify with this feeling, but not the context. I often wonder about my choice to remove myself from "the real world" and pursue a life in the academy, but days like this make it worth it. Perhaps I'll stick with this Ph.D. thing after all.