by Judy Lee
It has come to that time of the year when leaves change, kettle streams blow, and I re-scour Tobias Wolff’s Old School to reminisce about the times I once scribbled at my proverbial wooden desk and wondered what would come out on the other side. Were my aspirations mystical? Would I be anointed? Would my inked papers receive their stamps of approval by tea-spilling, Montblanc-wielding, Walton-reciting comrades and contenders alike?
I was seventeen when I decided to devote my first four years of adulthood to Emily Dickinson-themed parties, tea mugs in class, and at least one student every semester who proposed watching Dead Poets Society instead of studying for final exams. We English majors are strange creatures. To most people, English is possibly the most puzzling major second only to Philosophy. We willingly devote ourselves to a degree where our only guarantee is a lifetime of shattered expectations and disenchanted denunciation for every novel written after the late twentieth century. We are misjudged, but we are not misunderstood. I can attest to a genuine air of haughtiness surrounding us, thicker than cigarette smoke and fierier than my writing teacher’s Stephen King jokes as we roamed our campus together..
You may think I despised majoring in English. I didn’t. Most of the time I loved it. My problem wasn’t that I was really an ‘oddball’ or a ‘misfit’ or, the worst, ‘not like other English majors.’ My problem was I thought there were English majors and English Majors—those who choose the study of English language and literature, and those who embody its every aforementioned trope—and that in order to be the first I had to master the second. If I couldn’t, the next best thing was to pretend.
We English majors are united by one thing, and sometimes one thing only: our love of language, story, imagination. There doesn’t have to be anything more. But somehow because I preferred Zadie Smith, Ishiguro, and Donna Tartt over Bronte, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (who, I know, yes, I never read) I gave myself license to point my finger at people who genuinely wear proudly distinguishable markings of a classic (as in, loving the “classics”) English Major. And yet writing this essay is probably the most English major-y thing I could do.
Why, we might wonder, do we only attack ourselves (the students) with our quips and scoffs, and not the scholars? One minute in their office is enough to know all our professors, too, once had their leather-satchel Moleskine days. They, too, sat in our hard wooden seats. We can respect rather than mock their hardcover anthologies, their framed quotations, their foggy Stratford-Upon-Selfies. Why? Is it our reverence for their expertise? Is it the insatiable thirst for their approval, tested by the double underlines, thick circles, and indecipherable scribbles in the margins of our literary analysis essays? Is it that they’ve taken their choice to a level of commitment beyond our own—the glorious Master’s or PhD—a beacon of hope for what our futures can entail, a plan B if our Pulitzers and New Yorker submissions fail? Are we so quick to label ourselves before others can do it for us, releasing our shield before their sword?
I think it’s simpler. I think the fear is not only ours. It swallows up every student who walks into their first major seminar with the same overwhelming question: did I choose wrong?
It’s that voice of doubt shaking our shoulders at every course consultation, every department meet-and-greet. That feeling of walking into your first American Lit class and fake-laughing along at the Whitman witticisms, wishing you’d done your research. Somehow the simple joys you found in your public library aren’t enough. Words and stories can transcend time, but only a select few will grant you a membership to those elite cherrywood doors of the Literary, the Well-Read. So learn a few names, memorize a few quotes, shuffle them around every three classes. That should get you through your first year of Modernist poetry.
We forget that English majors are the greatest experts of the English Major trope. We mock and celebrate Dead Poets Society because we ourselves know how best to mock us. If you’re not (or never have been) an English major and you’re reading this, you can relax. We know we love Dead Poets Society. Some of us love Harry Potter. And some of us love J. Alfred Prufrock. Some of us love all three. There is a variety of subspecies among us you can choose from.
My friend, another writer, loves Dubliners. I couldn’t get past the first paragraph of the opening story. I love Melville’s symbolism but I can’t love ten pages of cetology. I love Hugo’s characters but I can’t love lists of the household expenses of an episcopal palace. I don’t know (yet) what I think of Hemingway. I don’t care much for the “art” of bullfighting but there’s something poetic to be pulled from the quote nonetheless. There always seems to be, with quotes. An “artist in danger of death?” A “degree of brilliance” left to “the fighter’s honor?” Homeric. Worthy of a wooden frame and embroidery. I may never enjoy (or agree with) Hemingway in calling it an art. But at the very least I can find truth in the beauty of his words. That’s one trick I’ll keep from those hallowed classrooms.
So maybe I was never Wolff’s anonymous hero of self-destruction, looking from the outside. Maybe I was more like Tartt’s self-proclaimed suburban refugee, with only the fantasies of belonging to that ‘narrow, unhesitating, relentless’ world we invent for that fictive inner circle we think we long to penetrate. Maybe we English Majors long not for separation and snobbery, but a warm welcome from our own kind. Maybe, just maybe, we long for the same thing as any other student (oh, the horror!): somewhere in those mad four years to call home.
About the Author
Born in Seoul, raised in Vancouver and Abu Dhabi, Judy Lee is a writer and multidisciplinary artist seeking to engage with her unique cultural identity while bringing voice to those wrestling with their own. Other themes in her work include family relationships, ambition, art and beauty.
