To be completely honest: I just find the idea of writing an honors thesis – a paper built off of and fashioned around months of exciting, extensive research – incredibly electrifying. It might be naïve of me, as I’ve yet to even write an academic paper that surpasses a length of fifteen pages, but I can’t help imagining how holding that finished thesis in your hands must be the most satisfying feeling, and the most thrilling feeling, well worth all of the effort – and all of the hours! – it took you to get to the moment itself.
I’m an international student. I took four British A-Levels: Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and – my favorite – English Language & Literature, the last of which is a qualification for which I was required to write a …show more content…
It’s sort of like playing detective, and I’ve loved mysteries for as long as I can remember: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew were all veritable staples of the literary canon that defined my childhood.
I think that, were I accepted into the honors program, I might actually enjoy looking at a couple of other texts I loved as a child: C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, for example, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I mean, I thought these books were fantastic when I was younger! Upon re-reading them, however, I have discovered, instead, that they are all fantastically xenophobic. Consider, for example, the following exchange between Mary, the protagonist of The Secret Garden, and Mary’s maidservant Martha:
“It is different in India,” said Mistress Mary disdainfully. […]
“Eh! I can see it’s different,” she answered almost sympathetically. “I dare say it’s because there’s such a lot o’ blacks there instead o’ respectable white people. When I heard you was comin’ from India I thought you was a black …show more content…
The Secret Garden, for instance, was written in 1910 whilst the Indian subcontinent was still under British control. That a piece of literature produced in that time purports that “blacks,” Indians, and all non-white racial “Others” are inferior to “respectable white people” is therefore hardly shocking, as these rank among the very notions upon which the British Empire itself was predicated. I am shocked that I never registered any of the xenophobic subtext and text as a child, however, and would certainly be interested in examining how often, and in what forms, bigoted rhetoric manifests itself and justifies its presence in children’s literature produced during the European colonial period. It could also be interesting, I think, to consider how – if such views are in fact still propagated – racist implications might pepper contemporary children’s books differently. We, after all, do not live in an age like Samuel Laing’s, who, in his 1862 Lecture on the Indo-European Languages and Races, unabashedly affirmed
I’m an international student. I took four British A-Levels: Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and – my favorite – English Language & Literature, the last of which is a qualification for which I was required to write a …show more content…
It’s sort of like playing detective, and I’ve loved mysteries for as long as I can remember: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew were all veritable staples of the literary canon that defined my childhood.
I think that, were I accepted into the honors program, I might actually enjoy looking at a couple of other texts I loved as a child: C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, for example, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I mean, I thought these books were fantastic when I was younger! Upon re-reading them, however, I have discovered, instead, that they are all fantastically xenophobic. Consider, for example, the following exchange between Mary, the protagonist of The Secret Garden, and Mary’s maidservant Martha:
“It is different in India,” said Mistress Mary disdainfully. […]
“Eh! I can see it’s different,” she answered almost sympathetically. “I dare say it’s because there’s such a lot o’ blacks there instead o’ respectable white people. When I heard you was comin’ from India I thought you was a black …show more content…
The Secret Garden, for instance, was written in 1910 whilst the Indian subcontinent was still under British control. That a piece of literature produced in that time purports that “blacks,” Indians, and all non-white racial “Others” are inferior to “respectable white people” is therefore hardly shocking, as these rank among the very notions upon which the British Empire itself was predicated. I am shocked that I never registered any of the xenophobic subtext and text as a child, however, and would certainly be interested in examining how often, and in what forms, bigoted rhetoric manifests itself and justifies its presence in children’s literature produced during the European colonial period. It could also be interesting, I think, to consider how – if such views are in fact still propagated – racist implications might pepper contemporary children’s books differently. We, after all, do not live in an age like Samuel Laing’s, who, in his 1862 Lecture on the Indo-European Languages and Races, unabashedly affirmed