When trying to decide what I wanted to write about for my midterm essay, I didn’t really have an idea beyond wanting to focus on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. While navigating the MLA database, I found multiple essays that centered around Tess, but not all of them were appropriate to use as the secondary source for my midterm. For example, “’A Good Horror Has Its Place in Art”: Hardy’s Gothic Strategy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles” focused on Hardy’s use of “’Gothic’” strategies, but didn’t seem to forward any argument beyond exploring those strategies. Another essay entitled “Thomas Hardy and the Machine: The Mechanical Deformation of Narrative Realism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles” looked at “problematic” aspects of Hardy’s narration style, but quoted way too many outside authors and their research that it made me lose sight of what the author of the essay was trying to argue. The essay I ended up choosing was titled “Rumor, Reputation, and Sensation in Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and had just the right amount of the author’s argument and outside research to back up what he was trying to argue (which was the power that rumor/hearsay had on Tess’s life). I feel confident that I picked a good essay to use as secondary source due to the author’s clear statement of his main argument, and attention to pointing out where in Tess his argument was solidified.
I had virtually no trouble identifying the writer’s main project within “Rumor, Reputation, and Sensation” due to the fact that it was very nicely stated on pages 94 and 95 of his essay. I definitely think that Williams would recognize my description of his project because I used his exact words in presenting it to my audience. By using the direct quote, I was giving Williams credit for coming up with his own thesis, but also not jumbling it by trying to paraphrase it in my own words. Even in my first draft of the midterm essay, I stated that “Williams argues that ‘rumor operates as a compelling and often covert force in this novel, undergirding a plot more often read as governed by the internal, moral dynamics of shame and the external constraints of fate’ (94)” which clearly explains what Williams’s project was within his essay (Rough Draft, 2). As far as creating an opening for his claims, I used Williams’s thesis to introduce his main point, but then went further into his essay by claiming that “Williams want[ed] readers to consider a different motivating factor as an antagonist of the novel” which opened the door for Williams’s subsequent claims about how rumor directly affected Tess’s life within the novel (Final Draft, 2). I believe that I accurately described Williams’s main thesis of his project while also making an appropriate transition to discuss his supporting claims within my final midterm paper.
While reading Williams’s essay, I had a question pop into my mind which helped me create the thesis for my midterm essay and to ultimately further Williams’s own argument. I first presented the idea of my research question on page 5 of my final draft, where I stated “Williams’s makes the claim that ‘the external, social facts of reputation come to be reflected in the felt ‘facts’ of internal sensations,’ yet he never takes a stance on which he believes is truly responsible for the demise of Tess herself (107)”. Besides the now-obvious typo, I think I set up a great framing statement for my continuation of Williams’s argument, and the research question that drove the rest of my paper: Which element of rumor was primarily responsible for Tess’s demise? I ended up being able to answer my research question throughout my essay, and ultimately I made the claim that “the internal repercussions caused by rumors were what led to Tess’s tragic ending” (Final Draft, 6). I was successfully able to not only forward Williams’s claim, but to also ask and answer my own research question that arose after reading Williams’s essay – I was definitely able to “Use writing as a strategy for developing a research question.”
