The end of a great journey is near (calm down, there is still the final dissertation to write!), the face-to-face classes at UCC are over and now all that remains is to express the best of myself as a student and as a lover of literature in the final dissertation. It has been both a long but short journey. Short because there have been relatively few months of classes and long because in these months I have grown as a person and as a student of literature. Growth, in any of its aspects, is gratifying and only by looking back do you realise all the traces you have left imprinted along the way.
I started the MA without knowing very well what to expect, as I didn’t know if the academic experience was going to be very different from my home country (yes, it has been different and thank goodness because that’s why I left, to learn new things). What I did know was my literary tastes and I hoped to be able to delve more deeply into them at UCC, as I am mainly interested in English language literature. But I have always kept my horizons open because you never know what you must discover or what new things you have to learn. That happened to me, for example, in my final dissertation, where I brought together something I already loved: the novel Jane Eyre and something completely new: ecocriticism and ecofeminism. I loved the fusion of the two and so I am open to new experiences. Without realising it, I was given a chance to experiment and, above all, to discover my path as a student and where it could lead me, or rather to the destination it would lead me to my final dissertation.
But what is this opportunity you were given for such experimentation? Nothing more and nothing less than the creation of a blog for the subject Contemporary Research. I must admit that the idea scared me a bit at first, as I have never written one, nor have I ever opened a website. Although, as I said, I didn’t want to be afraid of anything, I was here to learn, I had flown from Spain for a purpose. It wasn’t just the subject of blogging that made me dizzy, there were other things, such as, for example, the subject Theories of Modernity. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with it and I liked it, but I had seen a lot of that theory during my degree, although not as deeply and, evidently, there were completely new things that caught me completely off guard (you’ll see why later). Although, if I already knew it all, there would have been no point in starting an MA.
Back to the blog, I had to start my research journey and I had to do it in October, I had barely been going to school for a month, I didn’t even have a name for the blog! So, I decided to start with the foundations, with the basis of all my tastes: the Brontë sisters and I titled the blog Gondal Stories. I don’t know if it was fate, but that same October the film Emily directed by Frances O’Connor was released. At least I had a start, I could start from what I knew I loved, what better way than to introduce myself to my new university? I say so in the beginning of the post dedicated to the film, entitled Emily: “What better way to open this blog than by talking about the author who inspired its name? This week I decided to immerse myself in the world of Gondal first-hand but visiting it with the guidance of its goddess: Emily Brontë. I went to the cinema to watch the film Emily, a biopic of the famous author, directed by Frances O’Connor. I went expectantly to the cinema because what was the film going to present to me? What could the film tell me about Emily Brontë?”. I also took the opportunity to do a little comparison exercise (I don’t know if I have ever mentioned it before, but I have a degree in General and Comparative Literature): “carrying out typical children’s pranks, in fact, these pranks are the same ones we see in Wuthering Heights: the two go to spy through a window on the lives of the neighbours, until they end up being discovered and the neighbours go to talk to Mr. Brontë. I couldn’t help but see Cathy and Heathcliff looking through the Lintons’ window until they too are discovered. Emily, when she’s with her brother, is Cathy: free, childish, wild. Of course, the characters of Wuthering Heights are present in several of the protagonists: in Emily, in Branwell and in William Weightman. Who is this last character? He really existed, he was a helper in Mr. Brontë’s church, but, in the film, he is also Emily’s French teacher and lover (in reality, he is romantically related to Anne Brontë, although they never had a relationship)”. It also led me to reflect a little on what fiction is and what role it can play, since these are questions that every literary scholar has asked himself/herself: “And it is that having so little information about Emily’s life, it is not surprising that fictional licenses are taken, after all we have a historical character entangled in invented realities, in fiction. We do have truths, but we have intersections of fictions and truths sprinkled with invention. It is easy to play with the historical and we, the readers, like to contemplate it. The story is in the past and we do not always remember it completely (or it does not reach us completely), that is, there are gaps that we must fill in: did this person really say that? What happened next? How exactly did it happen? The emptiness of these questions is what fiction drinks from, where it camps to fill those gaps. Everything can be broken, rebuilt, and reread. Both literature and history drink from the same source: language. What literature tells is what could happen, and history tells what has happened, as Aristotle points out. Fiction rescues history, famous people so that they are not forgotten, gives the possibility of rebuilding society and culture”. What I find most interesting is that I end the post with a reflection on the gothic elements in Brontë’s narrative, as these aspects appear more throughout my career in the MA. Don’t worry, we’ll be seeing them, but, for the moment, I leave you with the first mini-reflection I did on the subject: “Emily decides to embody her mother and does it in such a sublime way that she gets the other participants (and even the film’s viewers) to be overwhelmed and notice the terror and disbelief in her flesh. It is a scene in which Emily looks like a medium, but what we are seeing is a manifestation of gothic and occult elements in her imagination, as we can well see in her only novel and in all her poetic production”.
My journey in the MA continues and as I wanted and expected, I started to get to know authors and points of view in literature that I had never known before, and this was thanks to the Research Seminars that we had to attend. At my home university there were also seminars, but I don’t feel that there is the same level of commitment as at UCC. The first Research Seminar I attended was with Rita Kelly, an Irish author I didn’t know, and I had the pleasure of listening to her talk about the magic of writing (I especially enjoyed that, as I’m an unconfessed writer). According to my entry Rita Kelly and the magic of creating dedicated to her I state: “All this made me realize one thing: we are all made of stories, regardless of whether we are writers or not. Each person has lived moments (and will live them) worthy of the composition of a poem, where the feelings and the inner world of that person will be able to dance on the verses. As Kelly said during the seminar: if we don’t turn everything, we imagine into something, it will become a ghost. It is quite true that the world is full of these little ghosts, spirits of works of art alive in our hearts but aborted in inaction. It is sad that a museum burns when it has not yet given birth to all that the world must see”. It is also partly related to what we were talking about earlier: the power of fiction and how we use it.
This seminar was more of an apprenticeship and a personal exploration, the second one I attended was very different, but not worse. I liked it because I did learn something completely new, as it was a subject I had hardly ever heard of: the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (the post I dedicate to it is entitled Something as simple as commemorating), explained by Heather Laird: “By commemoration is meant an action of solemnly remembering someone or something that happened, but it is the concept of “decolonization” that raises the most controversy, as it has been a topic of debate and review for the last century. When reading this term, we all have in mind the general idea of the process of independence of a territory that was related to a foreign territory and dominated in a social, economic, and political sense (something like this can be applied to the establishment of the Irish Free State). As I noted at the beginning, this term has been studied by many thinkers such as Franz Fanon or Edward Said, but it remains a concept, as Heather Laird said, typical of the academic environment”. To which I drew a personal conclusion: “Even so, I believe that the subject of decolonization and the vision of the other (otherness) was rarely explored. Perhaps in countries like Spain it is not given so much importance because we were not in a position of victims, but we were the ones who colonized and today they still commemorate the dates on which we began to colonize (how ironic, in this case it is commemorated in honor of the memory of a country that invaded and colonized), but there are the same concepts applied from another point of view. It was very pleasing to hear how Ireland became a free state and as a result of that, as well as apprehending a deeper meaning of the words “commemorate” and “decolonize””.
My learning journey doesn’t stop here: remember I mentioned the subject Theories of Modernity? Well, thanks to this subject I discovered a philosophical current that I had never heard of before: Transhumanism. Apart from being a very interesting class, as the debates that opened were intense, I decided to do some research on my own. I even asked my partner, who is an engineer, to help me look at it from various perspectives. It gave me negative impressions, but that didn’t stop me from spending my free time doing more research. In my blog post Transhumanism: the philosophy of hope? we perceive several of the fears that assailed me when I read about this philosophical current: “My concern and fear grew exponentially as I gathered new information. In one of my forays into the world of Transhumanism, I discovered the existence of Grinders: people who make body modifications (by inserting chips) at home without the supervision of a professional. This can lead to disastrous consequences such as infections, as any item placed under the skin is susceptible to creating an infection. This reminded me of the dangers of cosmetic surgery when performed in clandestine clinics for lack of the necessary monetary power, because in doing so, patients are left with serious deformities or die directly. The same happens with grinders: not being able to afford these new advances, they prefer to do it themselves at home with DIY (Do It Yourself) kits. (…) It wouldn’t seem such a bad idea if we saw it as a resource to help people and make their lives easier, after all, devices such as pacemakers already exist, there are also prosthetic arms and bionic legs. But if these prosthetics are already expensive and ordinary people can rarely afford them, what makes us think that the chips (and whatever comes next) created by Musk’s company are going to be affordable?” and “Many fears arise with this new philosophy, among them, as we have seen, that our health will become a business (we can affirm that it already is, just look at the health system in the USA). Other fears include the desire to merge technology with the human being: we started with chips under the skin to open doors, we continue with a chip in the brain to be able to telecommunicate, but what will be the next device in our body? The list can grow because the human yearning is not going to stop here. We could end up looking more like a machine than a human being, losing all resemblance to what we have always been, both physically and morally”.
I can’t deny that this MA has managed to awaken my curiosity in many aspects, as well as to experience with passion what I had to read or what we saw in class. What is it that awakened this passion in me? The Victorian Modernities subject (what a surprise!), especially the novels The Woman in White and The House of the Seven Gables, because, apart from belonging to the Victorian period, they include horror, mysteries, haunted houses, heroines and a long etcetera. In fact, thanks to these two works I considered doing my final dissertation on Victorian ghost stories, but life took me in a different direction (you’ll see it at the end, I don’t want to spoil it). Still, they are two milestones that have marked my experience in the MA. I decided to compare the figure of Anne Catherick with that of Alice, the protagonist of a Spanish novel (Los renglones torcidos de Dios), to study madness in literature: “In the case of Anne Catherick, it is argued throughout that the young girl has had some kind of mental deficiency since she was a child, claiming that she has a hard time learning. But she does not end up in the asylum because of her condition, but because someone wants to silence her. We have, then, a woman who does not have the level of madness (so to speak) that the other characters insist on showing us and, in addition, Anne is silenced because she has information that can harm other people. It is important to add that she is cunning, for it is not until near the end of the novel that she is discovered, for she acts in an ingenious way.
With the protagonist of Los renglones torcidos de Dios, we have a story with similarities, but with some differences. Alicia, the protagonist, is locked up in the asylum (to enter she pretends to suffer from paranoia) of her own free will alleging that she must investigate a crime (she is a private detective), but little by little the viewer doubts whether she is really a private detective or if she is really a woman who suffers from paranoia. What cannot be disputed is that she is an extremely intelligent woman capable of dividing the medical staff (between those who believe her to be ill and those who do not), what is more, she manages to convince the medical jury that she deserves to be discharged”.
I also reflected on haunted houses, both in literature and cinema, and I liked the subject so much that I decided to talk about it in the mini conferences on April 6: “In this way, we can see in these houses a reflection of their inhabitants or their lives, as in The House of the Seven Gables or The Haunting House of Hill House. Also, what they have in common is the way they describe these houses, for in these descriptions we can clearly see a personification of the house as if it were a living entity. When talking about this in class, I could not help but think of the movie we have already mentioned: Monster House. This movie seems to me a great example to illustrate everything we talked about in that class”.
After this tour, we practically reached the end of the trip. We can already see that light at the end of the tunnel, a light that has been fed by all the things lived in this MA. A pavement that has been built for everything learned and the reflections that have been born from it. When doing a review of the acquired knowledge, it was time to ask yourself the following question: what do I want to do my final dissertation about? And, despite having considered various options, already exposed in this portfolio, my head returned to what had initially aroused curiosity: ecocriticism. “So, after several talks with another lecturer and after rethinking the main idea several times… Eureka! I came up with a topic close to what I wanted: an ecocritical analysis of the novels Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, focusing, above all, on the nature/culture dichotomy. I would like to give you a small outline of what I plan to do. I know that some things will change when it comes to putting it into practice, especially the approach to the concept of “the sublime”, because I think I will have to focus on other rewritings and not only on Burke’s.” and “This brings me to two other points I would like to address: how descriptions of nature are used to characterise the characters and whether the gender of the authors influences these descriptions, since the sublime is a rather generic concept. I intend to study the relationship between nature and gender and to discern whether these descriptions are related to the fact that the authors are women. To do so, I will rely on ecofeminism. In the case of Wuthering Heights, we find in the novel an infinity of metaphors related to gender oppression and narratives of male domination. We see this in Heathcliff, who subjects anyone who stands before him to his yoke. But also in Cathy Linton, an impetuous and independent woman who fights for her place. The point is to investigate how Brontë uses this narrative”.