▼ In this paper, I discuss the success which Kenneth Branagh achieved by his approach to updating the play Much Ado About Nothing onto film in 1993. Modern audiences are often uncomfortable with the Shakespearean portrayal of male and female relations and their inequalities. Thus, some directors, in an attempt to avoid completely changing Shakespeare’s text or narrative, use the old-fashioned dynamic between men and women on purpose. Branagh’s reading of the play urged him to highlight these gender dynamics by specific characterization. He purposefully uses a contrast of presentational and representational acting in his two major couples (Claudio and Hero, Benedick and Beatrice) to guide the audience from feeling uncomfortable, towards viewing the inherent violence in the play as comedy. Benedick and Beatrice represent relatable characters as they stubbornly pretend hatred and then later, let their insecurities down and realize their love for one another. In contrast, Claudio constantly acts foolishly, doubting everything and becoming ruled by his temper (which results in serious violence), and Hero is insanely quiet, without an opinion, and apparently, unable to defend herself in the face of public repudiation. As viewers come to understand these aspects of characterization, they view the entire Hero-Claudio dynamic as theatrical and comedic, and rely on Beatrice and Benedick for the true representation of love. Advisors/Committee Members: Wikander, Matthew.

▼ Decades of scholarly research have portrayed Emily Dickinson as living a strikingly reserved personal and social life, distributing her poetry not through publication but through handwritten correspondence. In this paper, however, I examine recent critical scholarship on Emily Dickinson’s letters to few close friends that reveal her to be a politically aware citizen. I pair this with a reading of the three poems: “Blazing in Gold, and quenching in purple” (02/29/1864), “Flowers – Well – if anybody” (03/02/1864), and “These are the days when Birds come back” (03/11/1864), published anonymously in a Union-driven newspaper entitled the Drum Beat alongside other contemporary poetry in February and March 1864. This Drum Beat publication shows that, at the crucial historical moment of the Civil War, the notoriously private and unpublished poet’s work did, in fact, appear in a public venue, and begs readers to examine the significance of the three specific poems within their original context. While scholars have published legitimate and commonly-accepted readings of these works that emphasize their poetic form and their themes of nature, religion and death, these readings have, for the most part, been consistently non war-related. This paper adds to the recent and exciting scholarship of Dickinson’s political awareness. Through close attention to the poems and their context, I argue that these poems serve as Emily Dickinson’s public response to the Civil War. Advisors/Committee Members: Lundquist, Dr. Sara.

▼ Critics approaching Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790?) have often described the Devils appearing in the work to be creatures that exemplify creative energy. This creative energy is seen by David V. Erdman as part of Blake’s revolutionary sympathies and by Northrop Frye as part of a mythical representation of actively procreative forces. I wish to explore how the Devils seen in MHH function as exemplary of a relation between existing texts such as those of the Bible or “Swedenborg’s volumes” (MHH 19) and the minds of those who are inspired to create new works from them. The Devils featured throughout MHH do not exist merely to destroy or negate existing texts in order to make way for new ones, nor do they wish to subjugate the minds of those who adhere to such documents to a status beneath that of themselves. Rather, the Devils enact their fiery energies upon religious texts or minds, altering them in an act of renewal that does not destroy but empowers the mind or text, treating it as if it were a medium for creating new art. I explore various examples of this devilish energy as illustrating of a creative vision that involves a dynamic relationship between a text and the human mind’s experience of it. In particular, I focus on how this type of vision is illustrated on plates four, six, seven, twenty-one, and twenty-two through twenty-four. I argue the Devils in MHH are personifications of creative energy that represents an idealistic merging of mind and text in imagination. Advisors/Committee Members: Mooney, Joshua.

▼ Scholars have attempted to decode Lucy Snowe's motivations as the cryptic narrator of Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette (1853) for decades; these concerns usually focus on Lucy Snowe's fate as an unmarried woman. I feel they have left large gaps concerning other main female characters in the novel, and so I propose that rather than focusing exclusively on Lucy to deduce Bronte's reasons for employing such a cagey narrator, it is important to keep Lucy's fellow single women in mind when analyzing the novel's depiction and perception of marriage. By closely examining passages which deal with both Paulina Home and Ginevra Fawnshawe, I argue that Bronte offers three models of middle-class femininity and then deconstructs them in order to better display their flaws. Central to all these discussions is a focus on Bronte's repeated use of ambiguity to complicate and draw out her narrative. I propose that Lucy's place as an outsider to the marriage plot is what affords her the ability to critique her peers, even as she herself refuses to act out the prescribed spinster narrative. This reading will hopefully add a new take on the subject of marriage in Villette particularly, and mid-Victorian literature more widely, particularly in novels written by female authors. Advisors/Committee Members: Gregory, Dr. Melissa.