To Not Belong Is To Be Invisible

I spent most of Saturday working back and forth on both my Short Story essay and my Continental Philosophy paper. I sent a revision of each thesis to the people that will be marking each paper. Sean Smith got back to me right away about my Nietzsche paper and approved my thesis. As for Andrew Lesk, he didn’t return my email about the Gabrielle Roy essay until that night. He told me that the first half of my thesis is fine but he couldn’t understand what I was getting at in the second half, which reads:

“The contrast between Eveline’s hills and the prairie in relation to the conflicting emotions of exile and belonging gives psychological meaning to the geographical features of each place. Behind the hills are kept secrets and curiosity, while the open prairie nurtures openness, but also familiarity. Feeling a sense of belonging to these two locations at once gives power to the distance between them, thus creating a desire to travel beyond either place.”

Not only did he say he didn’t understand it, but he stressed that as a teacher he has developed the ability to find meaning that isn’t readily apparent and yet he still couldn’t figure out what I meant.
            I found his response frustrating because it didn’t give me much to go on. I guess he wants it to be so simple that a child could understand it. Back to the drawing board.

            I rewrote the thesis and sent it back to him just before bedtime. Here’s the revised thesis:

“In the story “My Almighty Grandmother” from Gabrielle Roy’s The Road Past Altamont and in the titular story from the same collection, a Manitoba family continues to be deeply involved with the landscape they left behind in Quebec. The family matriarch is embittered by her exile on the prairie, and her daughter Eveline is haunted by a longing for the lost hills, despite having lived a good and long life in Manitoba. Eveline’s daughter Christine feels an emotional, psychological and spiritual affinity with the open plains. The geographical features of Eveline’s hills and Christine’s prairie reflect the personalities of each character. The hills are described as being withholding and evocative of curiosity, while Eveline is shown to be secretive and curious. Christine is open and starkly honest, which is also how she describes the prairies. Each character in these stories is defined by where they feel that they belong and yet the family to which they belong has about it the characteristic of being travelers who belong nowhere. They are present but not described in the earlier story while in the latter they are simply spoken of as being gone. To not belong then is to be invisible.”