With honors.

I’ll be honest — I wanted, and sort of expected, to come here today and say, “I kicked that test’s ASS.” But that’s not exactly how I feel. I feel pretty good, and I think I passed unless they fail me outright for stupidly forgetting that I had mentioned A Room of One’s Own in two sentences in one of my morning essays, and then using it as the basis for my afternoon essay. The rules of the test barred us from discussing any text more than once, but I am hoping that that means principal texts and not off-hand citations. I hope.

But I only feel pretty good. I don’t think I kicked anything’s ass.

The questions were significantly harder than the difficulty of the texts would have led one to expect, except I did sort of expect that, once I worked out a theory of who I thought was on the exam committee. My first guesses were mostly wrong, I think, but my current theory is based on the presence of a Linda Hogan book on our list, an alleged accidental admission in class combined with the prevalence of 19th century literature, and the fact that only one person on the faculty seems to be willing to admit to having read the David Lodge book. Most of the professors who volunteered to do review sessions looked at the critical works list, including the Lodge novel, and said, “Wow. Huh. Well, good luck with that.”

Anyway, if the committee is who I think they are, they are a good bunch of professors, but I was right to expect difficult questions. I did think that at least two of the questions were probably recycled from other exams because they did not feel like a good fit with our reading list, but maybe I was just blanking on which texts would work best with them. I feel very sorry for anyone who followed the bad but often-repeated advice that a former classmate of ours has been passing around since she took the exam a year or so ago, which is that you only needed to read seven texts in order to pass the exam. That was dumb advice for a lot of reasons, the most obvious being that some years the test includes a section of short-essay identification questions, and you would fail that section if you had only read seven texts. (We did not have such a section, and we have known for two weeks that we would not, which is why I stopped studying all the short poems in the last two weeks.) The other reason it is dumb advice is that the test is not the same every year, and on ours, for instance, you had to discuss a minimum of nine texts, and the essay questions were specific enough that I don’t think you could have just thrown any random nine texts into the mix and not run a significant risk of having absolutely nothing to say.

I felt morally compelled to read everything, anyway, and even though the test is over I am still feeling a little guilty for not having reread “Nature” or The Waste Land. But that moral compulsion apparently made me a freak, since hardly anyone read both Great Expectations and The Portrait of a Lady, and a whole lot of people did not read Wide Sargasso Sea or any Chaucer or Milton.

I read all of those things, but I only discussed the Henry James, and in fact I only wound up discussing one work that was not written in the nineteenth century. I wonder if the committee will fail me for being so one-dimensional. It is unlike me to be so Victorian, anyway, because as an undergrad I mostly skipped the whole nineteenth century except in survey courses; my classes were all focused on the early twentieth century, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And I’ve only taken one class on nineteenth-century lit in grad school, as well.

Another funny thing: I noticed in the review sessions that all the professors were talking about Kant, about The Critique of Pure Reason, post-Kantian this and pre-Kantian that. In four years at this university, I swear nobody has mentioned Kant, and now Kant is turning up in all the review sessions and making me go, “Oh! Yeah! Of course. That makes perfect sense.” And yes, Kant turned up in one of my essays. Maybe two of them, I can’t remember. I am very amenable to suggestion.

Anyway, here is what I wound up writing about. Committee members, I think at least one of you reads this page, so here is where you should stop reading if you want to preserve the blind grading.

The first section was a brief (one-hour) essay on British lit. Two of the questions made me one to get up and leave the room. One was about aesthetics and morality and required us to discuss three works, one was about post-colonialism (I think), and the third asked us to discuss how two British poems reflected changing attitudes toward war and violence. I chose the latter even though at first I could not think of any poems on the list that would work for the question, except for Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” But then I remembered Yeats’s “Second Coming,” which is probably my favorite poem ever because I am easy and predictable like that, and also I know it by heart. Knowing things by heart is good for the comp exam, because they like it when you quote. I know a lot of “Charge of the Light Brigade” by heart, too, as it turns out, but I did not trust my memory (honestly, I hate that poem and I wasn’t even entirely sure that it was 600 and not, say, 6,000) so I didn’t quote it. I was a little mean to Tennyson, so I hope no one on the committee is a Tennyson groupie. (I think actually there is one semi-groupie, but if so, he already knows how I feel about Tennyson and he didn’t fail me the last time around.) That was one of the easier questions once I thought of two poems that would work.

The second question focused on American literature, and again we had to choose one of three, and I immediately ditched the one about the American family because for some reason I just did not feel like discussing As I Lay Dying, and then I ditched the one about man and nature because I thought it wanted me to discuss Solar Storms and I suddenly could not remember anyone’s name. And then I realized that the one about the nineteenth-century American fascination with the fallen woman was perfect for something I had thought about just this Tuesday, when I read an essay discussing The Scarlet Letter as an exploration of the struggle between America’s Emersonian ideals and its Puritanical origins. I disagreed with some parts of the essay (mostly because I don’t think Hester is pure Emersonian any more than Dimmesdale is pure Puritan), but then in a review session about Portrait of a Lady, the professor mentioned someone’s (Bloom’s?) theory that the book is basically a re-exploration of Hawthorne, and specifically an examination of that same Puritan/Emerson dichotomy. And then I thought of how a fallen woman is really the perfect focal point for that conflict, and then I thought of a way to discuss Isabel Archer as “fallen” in spite of her chastity, and bam, that was a really fun essay to write.

The third question left me at kind of a loss. It was a comparative British/American essay, and one option wanted us to discuss notions of masculinity in Sam Shepherd’s True West and I could not remember the brothers’ names, and another wanted a discussion of race or otherness and I suddenly totally blanked on Wide Sargasso Sea, so I chose one about class and status in the two countries, and I focused on something that struck me for the first time last year when I read Jane Eyre and Frederick Douglass’s narrative back-to-back: the fact that both books are full of the phrase “my master,” how different the connotations of that term are in each work, and the fact that Jane Eyre was published in 1847, and Douglass’s narrative in 1845. So I talked about British class structures and how they infuse Jane’s weird balance of submissiveness and its opposite, and then I said some stuff about Douglass that was probably dumb, but you know what, at this point the printer in the computer lab had broken four times, the IT techs and our advisor were standing around talking in outside voices about six feet from my work station, and Word had crashed on me eleventy million times. I did my best.

Finally, after lunch, we got what are usually the theory questions, except we had these four weird choices that were not theory so much as they were … weird. (They were “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” James’s “The Art of Fiction,” Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Lodge’s Nice Work, which is a novel.) We did get a question I’d expected, which was to discuss the way our four selections addressed the role and purpose of literature. We also got one about Lodge’s discussion of several theoretical schools, and then we got the one that I wanted, which was to take one of those four works and apply it to two texts which we had not previously discussed, which allowed me to write an essay I’d thought of at four a.m. earlier this week, discussing Emily Dickinson as the exception that proves Woolf’s rule (not so much about the room of one’s own as about isolation, education, and the lack of an established literary language for women), and Mark Twain’s fictional Emmeline Grangerford as Woolf’s worst nightmare.

Yes. I did. I discussed “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d.,” with a straight face on my comphrensive exam. Actually I talked about her as an example of the Victorian “scribblers” whom Twain was satirizing, but still. Emmeline Grangerford. Go, grad school.

Anyway. It’s over. And I did file for graduation, so unless I fail, I am all done and I’ll be graduating on May 22. I’m still a little shell-shocked, because I was starting to think I’d just do this forever.

The Scarlet Letter. I quit. I have read enough. I am now forgetting basic plot elements, so that means my brain is full and I am not reading or even reviewing anything else between now and Friday morning. Fuck it; if I have not learned enough to pass this exam in the last four years, I am not going to learn it in the next two days.

I ditched the audio version of this and skimmed the text for scenes and images and lines I wanted to remember, and then I totally forgot them an hour later. Pearl is a brat. All the men are hateful. Demi Moore sure was pretty, though.

Can it be Friday now? Pretty please?

Today I will tie up the loose ends. Almost everything is crossed off my list. I am still listening to The Scarlet Letter on audio, but I’ve reread it very recently so I don’t really need the review. Right now I am selecting my main texts, the ones that I hope I will get to use because I have details and even some passages memorized.

I have reread every single thing on the list except for Emerson’s “Nature” and a few short poems that were just not sticking with me no matter how many times I read them. (“In Praise of Limestone” and “Ode to a Nightengale,” I am looking at you.) I feel guilty for not reading and understanding and committing to memory every single thing on the list, but you know, most of the people taking the exam did not read Great Expectations or Wide Sargasso Sea or Portrait of a Lady. Most of them did not reread the Milton or the Chaucer. I think I will be fine.

I will be fine, right?

Selected poems. I realize that this makes me a big cheeseball, but I love “The Second Coming.” It gives me chills every time I read it. I also know it by heart so I will probably be discussing it on the exam.

I like “Easter 1916″ and “Sailing to Byzantium” a lot, as well, but “Leda and the Swan” is just nightmarish and I am not going to talk about it on the exam lest I have a mid-exam panic attack caused by the thought of being raped by a giant bird.

Selected poems. When I said the other day that I don’t care for the romantics as poets, I should have made an exception for Wordsworth. The lyrical ballads and some of the sonnets are really beautiful, once again the type of poetry that works into your head without any conscious attempt at memorization.

But I really don’t want to talk about Wordsworth on my test.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Another book that I know practically by heart so I did not reread it. Never mind that I haven’t studied it in class since high school; I read this book about eleven times between age eight and twelve, and I truly do know whole paragraphs and the entire story backward and forward. I have used Huck Finn in multiple essays during grad school, and every time I use it, I wind up quoting the text blind and then going back to check my citations and get the page numbers. I am not worried about Huck Finn.

This morning I woke up with an idea for tying Emmeline Grangerford (the dead girl who wrote “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” and drew the pictures with names like “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas”) in with some of the madwomen in attics in a few of our other works. Maybe I’ll get a question that will let me do that. I love poor Emmeline and I think I am more sympathetic to her than Mark Twain was. (Although I am not as sympathetic as Huck is.)

Selected poems. This one could get me in trouble. A week ago I was still mixing up Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams (who is not on our list, but who I studied a whole bunch in college). Today I am deciding that “The Idea of Order at Key West” is one of my foundational texts for the exam, simply because I can easily discuss it in connection with several other works that I know well. I am not sure I ever studied that poem in a class so I am kind of winging it here.

Fortunately it is one of those hauntingly beautiful poems with lines that you can’t help committing to memory even after only one or two readings. Those poems are my friends right now.

Beloved. Another one I did not so much reread, mostly because Jeremy borrowed my copy and appears to have lost it. But I know this book cold, and last night I attended an excellent study session that covered this one, and the professor gave a reading that was entirely different than any I have encountered before, but really amazingly compelling. So not only do I remember the novel very well, but now I have a fresh take on it, so I am good to go here.

The Great Gatsby. Another one I can quote at will. I reread this last spring so for the exam I just skimmed it, pulled some scenes and quotes, and attended a discussion session. Bring on the Gatsby. If I can just remember that Daisy is not a heroin addict or a lesbian in this version, I am golden.

As I Lay Dying. The bookclub discussed this one this month (why yes, I am exploiting the book club to help me study for my test, shut up) but I did not actually reread it, because I reread it in December. I skimmed. Skimming counts. I know this one pretty well; it’s one of the texts I can actually quote if I need to.

Some essays. I think I mentioned a few days ago that I actually like Emerson. Maybe I said that over yonder. He is not exactly a barrel of fun and excitement, however. It took me a month to slog my way through “The Poet” again, but “Self-Reliance” is really good and makes for a surprisingly effective audiobook. You know, just in case you ever need to take a roadtrip through the desert.

I never got to “Nature,” and in a review session last night I asked if anyone thought I should power ahead with my reread. The whole class looked horrified and the professor leading the study session made such a face that he convinced me. I am not rereading “Nature.” Take that, transcendentalists!

Selected Poems. I used to love T.S. Eliot. In the eighties, all undergraduate English majors loved T.S. Eliot. We were little J. Alfred Prufrock groupies. We were sure that if only we could understand “The Waste Land,” we would understand everything.

I think I must be too old for “The Waste Land,” because this time around I could not stop rolling my eyes and thing, “God, I get it, you’re brilliant, now shut up.” Which is not usually my reaction to literature. Usually I am pretty wowed by brilliance and I only want the stupid poets to shut up. Do you think perhaps I am approaching burnout? I think maybe I am.

Anyway, Eliot is also on that list of poets whom I am choosing to ignore. I am totally going to fail this exam.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. I love this just as much as I loved it last year. This was one of the books I forced on my poor husband during a road trip last week, and he liked it, too. The book club will begin discussing this one next week. It is a great read, and although it probably does not reveal much that is new information about slavery to a reader now, I still consider it an important read if only to see how political discourse has been watered down and tamed and made more polite since Douglass wrote.

Selected Poems. This one also falls under the too-much-poetry-this-week list, which is unfortunate because I used to really love John Donne. We got all of my least favorite poems (I am a weirdo, I like the holy sonnets best, and “The Flea” really grosses me out) and I have been uninspired to try to find any connections between Donne and the other works on the list. Since I have seen the exam format (although not the actual questions) and I know that it is all going to be intertextual analysis, and in all cases we will have a choice of texts to discuss, I am tossing John Donne on my literary discard pile. Thanks for everything.