The Quirky Creative Critiques

"Pressured by his father and mocked by his peers, 15-year-old Tiuri competes to become a Knight of Dagonaut--just as the kingdom faces a dark threat." The series description for the Netflix original The Letter for the King  sounds promising. As the show gets underway, viewers quickly learn that Tiuri is different from the other novices, displaying both a strong sense of honor and the first stirrings of magic. During the Novices' initiation, Tiuri breaks tradition in order to respond to a desperate call for help beyond the chapel doors. His response leads him to a dying knight, who hands him a letter that must go to the king to prevent Prince Viridian from taking over and unleashing unfathomable darkness upon the world. (For a more in-depth summary, view the Rotten Tomatoes page  here ; Wikipedia page here ) The first few episodes are riveting. The story's magic system is interesting, featuring a spooky scene in which Prince Viridian roasts a victim over a fire and...

November 2019, "English Lit I" Shakespeare’s Feminism Jessica McDermitt              King Lear  is unique among Shakespeare’s works in that it casts a trio of sisters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, as main characters alongside their father, the titular King Lear. In a male-dominated literary scene, this is unusual and raises questions about feminist themes in the work. One element of a feminist work is female characters who act for themselves, rather than being told what to do—characters who break female stereotypes of submission and marginalization and take control of their own lives. In  King Lear , Goneril and Regan challenge traditional ideas of femininity, while Cordelia remains within expected gender norms, and it is only through moral commentary on the sisters’ actions that readers understand Shakespeare’s negative portrayal of the feminist elements.        ...

October 2019, "English Lit I" The Hero According to Old English Poets Jessica McDermitt Much Old English poetry has been lost, but a few epic poems survive. One of these is  Beowulf,  which follows its titular hero as he battles a series of menacing monsters. Another is “Judith,” an Anglo-Saxon interpretation of a Hebrew book in which an Israelite heroine saves her people from the Babylonians. Each story advances its own definition of heroism. Both works define heroism in martial terms, but due to differing origins, heroism in  Beowulf  entails solitude and boldness, while heroism in “Judith” involves companionship and prudence. In both stories, heroes’ actions define heroism as the ability to engage in military combat. In  Beowulf,  the titular hero first appears while recruiting warriors to destroy the monster Grendel, for which his “doings / were praised over and over again” (lines 855-56). Throughout the story, characters are praised for ...

November 2018, "Humanities 301" Conform or Die Jessica McDermitt Seventy years after the French Revolution, Charles Dickens published the first part of  A Tale of Two Cities . The novel is a work of historical fiction that explores the French Revolution and the philosophy behind it, encapsulated in the revolutionary motto “liberty, equality, fraternity.” In sharp contrast to American ideology, which French thinkers attempted to draw from, French revolutionary ideology twisted the meanings of the words. To them, liberty, equality, and fraternity meant complete uniformity, achieved at any cost.  A Tale of Two Cities  explores this distortion, especially through a group of characters who take on the same name, “Jacques,” in order to identify themselves more fully with revolutionary ideology. Throughout the novel, these characters’ actions illuminate the French Revolution’s conflation of equality and fraternity with conformity, which eventually leads to the destru...

April 2019, "Humanities 302" Secret Illness, Hidden Deformities Jessica McDermitt Shaken by an encounter with the depth of human evil displayed in the World Wars, many writers and thinkers of the 20 th  century turned from God and began to explore nihilism, complete disbelief in meaning and purpose. Literature reflects this shift. However, not all writers succumbed to the pull of nihilism. Flannery O’Connor is one of these authors. In 1955, she published “Good Country People,” a short story about a woman with an artificial leg who is taken advantage of by a hypocritical Bible salesman. In her story, O’Connor explores the inconsistencies inherent in nihilism through her characters’ worldviews and actions. Throughout “Good Country People,” O’Connor uses references to sight and blindness, illness, and hollowness to emphasize the inconsistency, contradictions, and hypocrisy in her characters’ worldviews. O’Connor often uses the motif of blindness and sight to highlig...

April 2019, "Women's Literature" Isolation in  Jane Eyre  and  Wide Sargasso Sea Jessica McDermitt One hundred twenty years after the publication of Charlotte Bronte’s  Jane Eyre , Jean Rhys published  Wide Sargasso Sea . The novel chronicles the life of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic from  Jane Eyre —although, in this adaptation, Bertha is renamed Antoinette Mason.   Across the two novels, Jane and Antoinette share many remarkable similarities, including significant social isolation throughout their lives. Notably, both women marry Mr. Rochester, who appears in both novels, despite consistent patterns of abuse and manipulation. The women are attracted to him because he offers companionship, status, and love, which neither has experienced before. In both  Jane Eyre  and  Wide Sargasso Sea,  Jane Eyre’s and Antoinette Mason’s histories of intense social isolation inform their interactions with Mr. Rochester. ...