Honors 394 Final Reflection
I was pleasantly surprised this quarter by how much material our Honors 394 class was able to cover (especially considering all of the interruptions due to snow!) “A thousand plus years in ten weeks,” as our professor, Catherine Connors put it, and yet we somehow found the time to go in depth in each of our units. Rarely did we just breeze through something, but took the opportunity to delve deep, even if only examining a single case study. In this course, I was able to build on my prior knowledge of Classics, as well as explore topics from entirely different point of view. For instance, though I knew something of Greek goddesses before taking this course (as is to be expected, given my Western education), I did not know specifically how rituals and rites involving these goddesses related to women in their everyday lives in Greek society. In this examination, I felt I developed a more mature and multifaceted view of women and religion in Ancient Greece. A capstone of this course for me was my work on my final project for the class. Our professor left this very open-ended, asking us to simply come up with something we felt demonstrated our interpretation of ancient and scholarly sources in a rich and thoughtful way. I chose to do this through my passion for creative writing, by crafting my own interpretation of the story of Medea, informed by the plays of Euripides and Seneca, as well as scholarly writings about the character and her role in myth and literature. I first read Euripides’ Medeain my freshman year of high school and was fascinated by how feminist the character of Medea was in the play. What was more, all of the ideas and arguments she presented about life as a woman and an immigrant in Ancient Greece were largely true, but because they were coming from the mouth of the story’s villain, a woman who had far surpassed the society’s boundaries of acceptability, her views were likely disregarded. As a high school freshman, I was outraged, and have been a staunch defender of Medea as a character ever since. For this particular project, I chose to frame Medea’s story as the court testimony she would never be allowed to present, as a woman, and a foreigner and sorceress at that. The piece, attached below, explores these aspects of her identity and the limitations and advantages they place on her within Greek society, and ultimately comes around to discussing my view of why she makes the choices she does. For instance, I justify her infamous murder of her sons at the play’s conclusion by highlighting the fact that Medea herself has met nothing but strife and hardship in her time on Earth. She fears her son’s neglect and abuse in her husband Jason’s new household. Medea believes her boys are better off dead, living forever in Elysium, the Greek Underworld’s paradise, than at risk of suffering, or worse, if they remain on Earth. Their deaths she views as a mercy, the final protection she can offer her most beloved of souls. This is just one example of the way I attempted to delve into the mind of one of the most infamous of Ancient Greek women, drawing on the material we learned within our course to represent her perspective and experience the best that I could. I particularly valued this assignment because it allowed me to unite the material we spent so long studying with my passion for creative writing and storytelling. I plan to continue to develop this piece (which clocked in at about 4500 words, 12 double-spaced pages, in its finished form) for my own creative purposes outside this class.
0 Comments
As a bit of a perfectionist, I took our Honors 394 midterm quite seriously. My roommate (also taking the class) and I ended up with a twenty-five page document consisting of all of our compiled information about the topics our professor listed might be on the exam. We then has a two hour block to answer eight short answer prompts and write a prepared essay. I've included here the double-sided index card containing my essay notes (this may be the smallest handwriting I've ever achieved). Although my hand was sore for hours after, our hard work paid off - my roommate and I each received 100% on the test. Now we know just how much overachieving we need to put in to prepare for our final!
|
|