Week Three: Academic Manscaping

I conceived the idea for my thesis last semester after writing a paper for Dr. Galchinsky’s Victorian Lit class. My essay addressed a pair of short stories, one by Oscar Wilde, and the other by his contemporary (and confederate), Vernon Lee. I claimed that the supernatural events in Lee and Wilde’s work were a representation of repressed “queerness,” the stories’ characters closeted reflections of their creators’ outsider status. While working on my paper, I was reminded of a few short stories from the same period – Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” – stories that lent themselves to queer analysis, stories that pivoted upon premises of the supernatural. Once I made that connection, I became excited about drawing parallels between (what H.P. Lovecraft deemed) “weird” fiction and fiction with “queer” inflections. I was off to the races.

But here’s the problem: as fascinated as I am with the intersection of the “queer” and the “weird,” my search for scholarship is coming up goose eggs.

I spoke with Dr. Galchinsky a few days ago, and while he validated many of my ideas, he also pointed me in several new directions. Any scholarship on Blackwood and Machen is scarce, but queer scholarship on other writers of the period is bountiful. Thomas Hardy, William James, J. S. LeFanu and other Victorian authors have been subjects of countless efforts of queer scholarship. Galchinsky’s suggestion: perhaps discuss one of these established authors before drawing parallels to the esoteric writers I intend to address.

Later that night, in the library, I found myself unsteady beneath a wobbling tower of books, each one contributing to the “introduction” of my thesis argument. I began researching James, Doyle, Hardy, and the like, but I soon felt discouraged and overwhelmed.

I was reminded of the episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza decides to trim his chest hair. He confesses to Jerry that he’s totally depilated his body; once he began the trimming process, he couldn’t figure out where to stop. I have a terrible feeling that I’m going to find myself like George, unable to locate an appropriate stopping point, denuding myself of sanity.