Thinking About Theses

“Oh, I don’t know,” I told my tutor. “I like riots, especially ones involving sledgehammers. Also, um, Thomas Wolfe. I don’t mind Dreiser. Dickens. Victorians. The Romantics?”

“Romantics? Okay. You could write about…Wordsworth. And the Luddites! Wordsworth in relation to the Luddites.”

I looked over at her through narrowed eyes. She was stirring her coffee. As far as I could tell, she was serious about the Luddites.

“Um, I haven’t read, you know, a lot of Wordsworth, but I’m not sure he wrote about the Luddites.”

“Exactly,” my tutor said, nodding her head significantly and leaning back in her chair. “Exactly.”

Because this is the tail end of my junior year, and because I am concentrating in History and Literature, where theses are de rigeur, my tutor and I have been discussing potential thesis topics. Although many of my classmates have submitted thesis-research grant applications in which they use the word “agency” a lot, I have only gotten as far as free-associating about nineteenth-century machine breakers.

“You know, the Luddites used to pound down mill doors with this giant hammer they called ‘Enoch,’” I told my tutor. “They named it after one of the guys who built power looms, and as they smashed they’d chant, ‘Enoch made it!/ Enoch will break it’ in time with the hammers. I think that’s pretty lyrical, don’t you? Maybe I could write about rioters’ chants: history and literature. And sledgehammers.” My tutor looked thoughtful, although she may just have been trying to suppress her disdain.

Despite my enthusiasm for the concept of thesis-writing (and the concept of six months of academically-sanctioned self-involvement is very appealing), the process of choosing a thesis topic has proven more difficult than I had anticipated. No one topic seems very appealing for more than five minutes. Dreiser, for instance, is all too easily dismissed by Dorothy Parker’s acidly apt couplet, “Theodore Dreiser/ Should ought to write nicer.” And is affection for a cleverly-named sledgehammer really sufficient basis for a months-long project? Catholic (in the sense of ‘peripatetic’) interests have proved to be a liability in my search for a topic.

And then, based upon my second-hand understanding of introductory psych classes, I began to think that perhaps I was subconsciously resistant to beginning a thesis. One of the major virtues of a senior thesis, I think, is that it distracts you from the fact that you’re almost done with college. In my youth, whenever I was struck by a foot cramp, my father would tell me to pinch my lip. Although this seems counterproductive and potentially masochistic, the trick works: The lip pain distracts you from the foot pain. The thesis process works in the same way: the immediate pain of the thesis distracts you from the deeper and less-easily-resolved pain of graduation. But perhaps I was too busy denying the existence of the metaphorical foot pain of impending graduation to execute the metaphorically distracting lip-pinch of beginning a thesis.

This is not to say that I haven’t been looking forward to senior year, which, after all, seems to have a lot to recommend it: Roommates returned from sojourns abroad! Being 21—finally! Senior Bar! The right—nay, responsibility—to radiate a mature disdain for overeager first-years in section! The acquisition of business suits and of stockings and of shiny, pointy-toed pumps! My own bedroom! After the housing lottery, my roommate had to forcibly restrain me from visiting our new room with a tape measure. I had wanted to better envision how I would position the furniture.

But senior year also has a major liability: its being one’s last year of college and thus one’s last real year of socially acceptable immaturity. Seen in this light, all of the advantages of senior year are double-edged. Being able to drink legally means the state thinks you’re an adult; the disdain for first-years is tinged with envy for their lack of cynicism; those business suits will need to be worn to interviews somewhere. The single bedroom prefigures adult isolation: gone is the forced, riotous intimacy we enjoyed in the Yard.

And as I sat with my tutor, thinking about the Luddites and about what I would smash, were I hefting an outsized sledgehammer named Enoch, the thesis process began to seem as ominous and inescapable as adulthood itself. It became the apple from the tree of knowledge that prefigures the expulsion from Paradise. (One of the advantages of a liberal-arts education is that it permits you to self-dramatize extravagantly.)

I heaved a dramatic sigh; my tutor looked up from her coffee.

“Luddites,” I said. “Wordsworth. Clinging to a lost innocence.”

“That’s the standard line on Romanticism,” she said, and turned to her scone.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.