Final essay questions

Due: Friday, Dec. 12 at 4 p.m.

Choose one of the following questions and write a 5-7 page paper. You may write on Moby-Dick, Washington Square, Pudd’nhead Wilson, or The Awakening. You should feel free to devise your own topic, as long as you run it by me first. Because some of these topics were ones we touched on in class, be sure to include evidence other than/in addition to those passages we discussed together.

1. Track and analyze an element of Melville’s religious imagery in Moby-Dick. You might focus on a single character’s spiritual development over time (Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck); a singe set of religious images (such as the Jonah story or resurrection images); or compare scenes of worship, literal or figurative.

2. Analyze an example of “passive action” in either The Awakening or Washington Square. What kind of action, for example, is Catherine’s refusal to decide or Edna’s drifting out to sea? How do those central “events” fit with larger questions of agency in the novels?

3. Discuss an example of an “awakening” in one of the four novels. Prime examples would be the revelations experienced by Captain Ahab, Catherine Sloper, Tom Driscoll, or Edna Pontellier, but you may choose a secondary character as well. What do these characters awake from? The awakenings do not necessarily turn out well for the characters in a conventional sense; why not? If you choose this essay be sure not to focus on plot summary but to make a particular argument about the nature of the awakening.

4. Analyze financial imagery in Washington Square. How do issues of actual finances (inheritance, fortune-hunting) relate to the various images of investment, gambling, and profit?

5. Analyze the role of internationalism in any of the four novels. Moby-Dick, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and The Awakening all focus not just on racial or ethnic difference, but on national difference. How do these authors use characters from other nations (or, in the case of Chopin’s Creoles, “foreigners” who live within U.S. national borders and American culture)? What does it mean to be “American” in the face of other languages, cultures, and national ideals?

6. Washington Square is a novel with a resolutely constrained setting, except for Catherine’s year-long journey to Europe with her father. Analyze James’s use of setting, and the ways that the characters themselves use physical setting, from an alpine peak to a public park to a parlor, strategically.

7. Roxy’s baby-switching and Tom’s subsequent adoption seem raise questions not only about race, but kinship in Pudd’nhead Wilson. What does it mean to be a parent or a son in this novel? Does Twin privilege biological definitions of kinship, or does he define kinship in another way? How do the characters themselves define their family relationships?

8. Many of the characters in Washington Square imagine themselves as literary characters or as participating in a literary plot; why? How do characters’ literary imaginations affect their actions in the novel? What is it like to be a character? If one imagines oneself or one’s companions as characters, what are the implications for larger ideas of personhood?

9. Examine ideas of childhood, children and childbearing in The Awakening. Edna Pontellier’s children seem to be an afterthought, while Mme. Ratignole’s children and pregnancy seem largely to provide symbolic definition of her own idealized womanhood. What role do these marginalized children play? What is the relationship between actual children and the various symbolic images of childhood and rebirth in the novel?