My English Lit Essay Problem Is I Still Just Want To Talk About What Happened
I’ve been camped out at the rickety wooden table by the window of my campus coffee shop for two hours, and my oat latte has gone cold, thick skin of curdled milk floating on top. The pre-med kid next to me keeps tapping their pen against an organic chemistry textbook so hard my notebook shakes every three seconds. I’m supposed to be outlining my essay on Beloved, but I’m just staring at the feedback I got on my last essay, scrawled in blue ink in the margin: Good close reading of passages, but where’s your conceptual argument? Push past what the text says to a bigger idea.
I don’t know how to do that. That’s the thing no one really says out loud, right? Half of us are walking around lit classes nodding when people talk about hauntology and liminality and neoliberal constructions of intimacy, and we have no clue how to stuff any of that into an essay that doesn’t sound like we’re just copying terms from Wikipedia to impress the prof.
I got into lit because I liked being inside books, full stop. When I was 12 I’d sneak my mom’s copy of a popular drama novel and read under the covers with a flashlight, not because I wanted to analyze anything, just because I cared what happened to the people in the story. Now, every essay I turn in is supposed to have this big, shiny conceptual argument, and I’m still over here stuck on the little throwaway lines no one else seems to notice. Last seminar, we were talking about Sethe’s relationship with her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, and I raised my hand and said “I just think it’s sad that Baby Suggs never got to keep any of her own kids, so she just loved all the other kids in the neighborhood instead,” and the room went quiet for like three whole seconds before the guy in the vintage flannel jumped in to talk about how Morrison uses collective maternity to disrupt the individualism of liberal humanist discourse. I sank down into the frayed seminar couch and didn’t raise my hand again the whole class.
It’s not that I don’t get what conceptual means, I think. It’s just that when I try to do it, it feels like wearing someone else’s shoes that are two sizes too big. Last semester I wrote an essay on The Great Gatsby and dropped “liminal space” into the intro because everyone in my workshop wouldn’t stop talking about liminal space. I looked it up, I made it fit, I dropped it in, and my prof underlined the whole sentence and wrote do you actually believe this? in the margins. She was right. I didn’t. I didn’t care about liminal space between East and West Egg. I cared that Gatsby stood in his yard staring at a green light across the water, and that it made me think of the time I drove three hours to see my high school boyfriend after we broke up, just sat outside his apartment building staring at his lit window because I didn’t have the guts to knock. That’s what I cared about, but that’s not a concept, right? That’s just my stupid old memory.
I went to the writing center once, back when I was still desperate enough to ask for help. The tutor was a senior lit major who wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a tote bag that said I <3 Critical Theory, and she asked me what I wanted to write about for my To Kill a Mockingbird midterm. I told her I thought it was weird that Atticus never cries, never talks about how bad the trial made him feel, even when his kid is right there asking. She leaned forward and said, “Great observation! What conceptual framework are you tying that to?” My mind went completely blank. The only thing I could think of to say was “Toxic masculinity?” because that’s the only conceptual term I can ever pull out of thin air when I’m put on the spot. She clapped a little and said “Perfect! Now build that out.” But I didn’t actually think it was toxic masculinity. I thought it was that Atticus grew up in a small Southern town where no one talks about the ugly stuff that hurts, same as my dad, who still has never said a single word about his older brother who died in a car crash when he was 19. That’s what I saw in Atticus, but that’s not a conceptual argument. That’s just my dad. I forced the toxic masculinity thing anyway, got a C+, and the prof wrote “underdeveloped, unoriginal” at the top.
My roommate, she’s a lit major too, gets all A’s, writes essays that make the prof gush. I glanced at her last essay once when she left it on the kitchen counter, and I swear, there were more references to old dead philosophers than there were lines from the actual book she was supposed to be writing about. It was all concept, all the time, and I couldn’t even follow half the sentences. But the prof loved it, wrote “brilliant conceptual intervention” in the comments. So I get confused sometimes: are you just supposed to forget the book and talk about concepts now? That feels wrong, but that’s what gets you good grades, right?
I don’t have some big fix for this, by the way. I didn’t suddenly have an epiphany last week that fixed everything. My essay’s due in three days, I’m still staring at a blank document most of the time, and I still don’t know if I can write something that’s conceptual enough to get a B, let alone an A.
Five minutes ago I deleted the whole intro I wrote this morning, the one that started “In this essay I will argue that Toni Morrison’s Beloved uses the domestic sphere as a conceptual framework to interrogate the embodied legacy of intergenerational trauma.” That’s all bullshit. I don’t even know what “conceptual framework” means when I write it like that, all stiff and fancy. I just typed a new first line: Sethe doesn’t sleep in a bed for most of Beloved, not because she doesn’t have one, but because the weight of the scar across her back makes it too painful to lie down the way other people do.
I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know if it’s conceptual enough. I might get a C again, I might have to retake the class to keep my major, I might leave here with a degree that doesn’t get me a fancy job because I’m too bad at writing essays to get good grades. But this new first line is true. It’s the thing I’ve been staring at in my notebook for two weeks, the little line I scribbled in the margins when I read that part of the book that made my chest hurt. That’s more than I can say for any of the fancy fake intros I’ve written before.
The pre-med kid just packed up their textbook and left. The coffee shop is playing that one Taylor Swift song everyone likes, and the sun is going down outside the window. I’m gonna keep typing. We’ll see what happens.
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