My writing process has made significant strides during my time as an undergraduate student and I am currently in the midst of a project that is testing all of my skills and has me learning new ones. My Honors thesis is titled “Unearthing the Hidden Transcript in Greta Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’ (2019),” and in it I analyze the ways in which director Greta Gerwig takes passages from Louisa May Alcott’s novel of the same name and expands them, showing that for a woman to thrive in a male-dominated society, she must have community and connection with other women. I could get more into my project, but I’m not spoiling my work before the poster symposium (March 7 from 1:30-3:30 p.m. in the Howard Performing Arts Center, be there or be square), where I will be thoroughly glad to yap away. Besides, this article isn’t about the project itself. It’s about what I’ve learned thus far in my thesis journey—and I’m far from being finished.
Lately, I’ve been calling this thing my first-born child. It’s been an entire year of thinking of ideas, creating a point, doing research for secondary sources, (stressfully) writing a thesis proposal, defending said proposal in front of the Honors Council and finally beginning to actually write this paper that’s going to be more than 20 pages long at this point. Now that I’m in the thick of writing, it feels like I’m going into labor after a year of carrying it. I’ve been texting my friends, telling them, “I love her so much but she’s driving me crazy.”
The difference between the me who started writing the proposal at the end of September last year and the me who’s writing my rough draft is almost night and day. I think that this is due to a newfound sense of pride in my knowledge and what I’ve learned in my literature classes throughout the years. Because of this lovely little thing called patriarchy and oppression, many women tend to have this ingrained behavioral pattern of underselling their talents. When we receive compliments, our reaction is to talk ourselves and our work down, saying things like “Well, I could’ve done better at [insert area]” and “My classmate is so much better at this than I am.” Up until last semester, this was a common trend for me. Then, I grew to realize how much I adore what I’m researching and that I should own it. I’ve learned so much and deserve to take pride in my accomplishments! (I literally wrote over 10 pages in a week; are you kidding?)
Then there are the smaller things: the elements that make up a paragraph in a literary analysis paper, how to cite quotes in the paper (which I’ve apparently been getting wrong over the past three years), how topic sentences help two paragraphs hold hands and how it’s way better to make some things “later problems” (something that I’ve been healthily adapting to other areas of my life).
There’s a passage in “Little Women” that describes Jo March as going into a type of vortex when she writes. Not eating, barely sleeping and emerging from the attic where she locks herself away for days looking disheveled and a downright mess. At the end of it all, however, she has words on a page that mean something, coupled with the determination to not be forgotten by the world around her. And, you know, I can relate.
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