Innovation - Journal of Creative and Scholarly Works

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Innovation: Journal of Scholarly and Creative Works

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Volume 2, 2014

Innovation The Journal of Creative and Scholarly Works

www. highpoint.edu/urcw/hpu-journal/ journal.urcw@highpoint.edu Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Works High Point University 833 Montlieu Ave. High Point, NC 27262 1

Innovation: Journal of Scholarly and Creative Works

Editor-in-Chief

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Dr. Joanne D. Altman, PhD Director, Undergraduate Research and Creative Works Professor of Psychology

Cover design by Laura Schramm Laura Schramm, creator of Innovation’s cover design, was a nonprofit business major and graphic design minor at High Point University. Schramm won the journal cover design competition hosted by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Works in the fall of 2012. She began by brainstorming different ideas and jotting down anything she thought of in her sketch book. She decided to use light bulbs because they symbolize all majors and the trial and error it takes to come up with that one brilliant idea. Schramm graduated High Point University in May 2013 with plans to attend graduate school online to pursue an MFA in graphic design while working a full time job in the nonprofit or graphic design field.

Copyright @ 2013 High Point University

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2014 Board of Reviewers Deborah N. Albert, MEd Clinical Assistant Professor of Education High Point University

Laura Linker, PhD Assistant Professor of English High Point University

Joanne D. Altman, PhD Director of Undergraduate Research and Creative Works and Professor of Psychology High Point University

Deborah J. Linville, PhD Associate Professor of Education High Point University

Jennifer Brandt, PhD Assistant Professor of English High Point University Matthew Carlson, PhD Assistant Professor of English High Point University Kelly Curtis, PhD Assistant Professor of Psychology High Point University Deborah S. Danzis, PhD Associate Professor of Psychology High Point University Robert Hallquist, DMA Associate Professor of Piano High Point University Cara L. Kozma, PhD Assistant Professor of English High Point University Sadie Leder Elder, PhD Assistant Professor of Psychology High Point University Kirsten T. Li-Barber, PhD Assistant Professor of Psychology High Point University

Brian Meixner, DMA Assistant Director of Bands High Point University Holly Middleton, PhD Assistant Professor of English High Point University Melissa Richard, PhD Instructor of English High Point University Donna L. Scheidt, PhD Assistant Professor of English High Point University Karen C. Summers, PhD Instructor of English High Point University Peter Summers, PhD Assistant Professor of Economics High Point University Suryadipta Roy, PhD Assistant Professor of Economics High Point University Allison S. Walker, MFA Instructor of English High Point University

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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief The office of Undergraduate research and Creative Works (URCW) encourages and supports the establishment of collaborative partnerships between nurturing faculty mentors and enterprising students.

Within these partnerships, critical inquiry, brainstorming, debate, and mutual discovery intertwine, leading over time to the production of finished work suitable for presentation, exhibition, and publication. This journal gives students the opportunity to follow their completed work all the way through the professional process to publication.

Thus, URCW is pleased to publish the second volume of the peer- reviewed journal, Innovation: Journal of Creative and Scholarly Works. In this issue, we include nine submissions from a range of disciplines from students who have completed independent undergraduate creative or scholarly work. We hope this journal inspires many young scholars to consider publishing their undergraduate academic papers before they graduate college.

Joanne D. Altman, Director of Undergraduate Research and Creative Works Editor-in-Chief of Innovation: Journal of Creative and Scholarly Works

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Table of Contents The Split Self in Atwood’s “Miss July Grows Older” Christina Burchette……………………………………………………………………….…7 Success at the Olympics: Talent is not Everything Rebecca Hemby…………………………………………………………………….………17 Multimodal Fichhtion and Mediated Boyhood: The Changing Construction of Contemporary Tenaged Masulinity as a Result of Convergent Storytelling James Kizer……..……………………………………………………………..…………....37 Beauty and the Billionaire: Evolutionary Psychology and Risk Regulation as Predictors of Partner Preference Ashlee Branch………………………………………………………………………….…… 43 Virginia Woolf’s Androgynous Ideal: The Procreative Mind in Mrs. Dalloway Devan Plyler………………………………………………………………………………..54 A globalized Education: A Comparative Study of the International Baccalaureate and Common Core State Standards Systems Alyssa Springer………………………………………………………………...……………63 Parenting and the Narrative Imagination in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Willson Shannon Curley………………………………………………………….………………….74 The Obsession with Youth in Adaptations of “Snow White” Taylor McAuliffe………………………………………………………………….…………80 Junior Recital: Flute Meaghan Reney.............................................................................................................86

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The Split Self in Atwood's “Miss July Grows Older” Christina Burchette Christina “Tina” Burchette is a junior English major. Her interest in her topic sparked after she wrote an essay about the poem for one of her literature classes. She chose to further investigate and elaborate on it for her manuscript. The most fulfilling aspect of the process for Burchette, is knowing that she went above and beyond her typical coursework. Her mentor, Dr. Matthew Carlson, has helped her to learn that she is capable of managing her time well enough to do additional research which has aided her in excelling in other classes.

Also, Burchette has gained the confidence in knowing that her writing is good enough for publication. She hopes to go into publishing, and possibly grad school, after graduation next year.

Abstract The media-induced obsession with women's bodies produces far more consequences than the misery of low self-esteem. Margaret Atwood explores these consequences through the speaker of her poem, “Miss July Grows Older,” where a washed-up calendar girl reflects upon her past and evaluates her identity in her older age. Through the use of duplicitous language, “Miss July” attempts to trick the readers into believing that she has remained immune to the effects of societal norms and stereotypes that regard womanhood, when in reality she has been split into two identities—body and mind—by her performance as a sex object. Her intent as a speaker is foiled by her own attempts at convincing her audience that she has gained intellectual awareness: Miss July ends up telling her audience that she has been fragmented by the very stereotypes she claims to have transcended. This essay analyzes Miss July's paradoxical language and how it demonstrates her split identity, embodying the plight of Western women subjected to a lifetime of certain stereotypes and societal constructions.

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n 1977, Adrienne Rich gave a speech to a group of female students about “taking responsibility” toward oneself, which meant “you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies and minds are inseparable in this life, and when we allow our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger” (26). This danger that Rich speaks of is the central conflict in Margaret Atwood's “Miss July Grows Older.” The

point of view is that of the speaker, “Miss July,” whose mind has become separated from her body. The physical image she retains of herself is that which has become frozen forever in a pin-up calendar, but the physical image found in the calendar no longer mirrors the aging body of the pensive Miss July. She is divided into two principal identities—the stereotypical sex object concerned with her physical body and the person concerned with her mind who is aware of how society shapes and defines what is beautiful. To become whole, she 6

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must connect the two important parts of herself—mind and body—and attempts to do so through reflection within the poem.

However, she fails to unify herself because the disconnect between her identities, induced by societal beauty standards, has become too strong.

Miss July is a quintessential example of a woman who has fallen prey to the “Beauty Myth,” and while it once falsely empowered her, in her age it has taken away any sense of power she previously had because all of her power came from her physical self.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, states that in Western society beauty is defined as an “inert, timeless, and generic” concept (124). This concept of beauty is used as a weapon against women to prevent them from overcoming the pressures to remain ignorant: mind and body must never connect for women because knowledge is power, and a woman with power is threatening to the traditional constructs of society. Therefore, knowledge is constructed as an undesirable trait in women. This prevents women from desiring knowledge and from discovering their true selves, for fear of becoming outcasts. Though they have the ability to do so, many women are unable to unite the two parts of themselves, which keeps them ignorant in their separation. The ability to become knowledgeable is especially important in youth when women could be developing real aspirations and goals beyond physical beauty. If women do not discover these other options and elevate these goals so they are more important than beauty, they are left powerless and dejected in their older age when they are no longer considered “beautiful” by the society that they had striven to please. We see this cycle culminate in Miss July, who has spent most of her youth acting purposefully as a sex object. In the poem, she makes several observations about her past self and

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proceeds to speak about the changes she has undergone in her older age.

Her comments are conflicting—glutted with self-resentment and pride—and attempt to distance her past self from her current self. Essentially Miss July bemoans her loss of physical beauty while feigning pride. She is resentful of her age because she, like other women, was told that “aging is considered 'unbeautiful'” because society knows “women grow more powerful with time” (Wolf 122). Miss July has created an identity based upon her youth and physical attributes. Her identity is akin to her picture in the calendar: one static image of what society wants a woman to be. This image is still, silent, passive, young, and for pleasure purposes only. On the other hand, Miss July has become wiser and therefore more powerful with age: her awareness of the easily shattered identity she embodies is becoming stronger the older she gets.

However, society has still turned its back on her because she is no longer youthful or experientially and sexually ignorant: the qualities necessary to be beautiful (Wolf 22). Though Miss July is aware that she can no longer exist with only a physical identity, she has been abandoned by the society that gave her this identity in the first place. She is, regrettably, past her prime, as evidenced by her literal place in the pin-up calendar that gives her the most basic identity of all: her name. She is Miss July. Not Miss April or Miss May—the months of newness and rebirth—but July: a month between fresh vitality and barren lethargy. Vigor and the natural beauty of summer are not over for her yet. However, she is aware that fall is soon approaching and the stale, humid air of late summer is becoming a bother to those who once appreciated her budding sexuality.

Though Miss July's identity stems from her physicality, she reflects on the fact that she has not experienced real intimacy with another human being of the opposite sex.

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Due to her issues with intimacy (which requires not only body but the mind as well) and self-resentment, she is unable to bring her mind and body together. She cannot become fully aware of the consequences she suffers as a washed-up sex object nor can she become fully empowered with the knowledge of awareness. Limbo and fragmentation is what Miss July faces: she remains in pieces because she still primarily identifies herself as a physical being.

It is clear from the content of the poem that Miss July is an ex-calendar girl. The title, “Miss July Grows Older,” and the sexual and youthful imagery such as “shoes with bows,” “cunning underwear” and “the catsuit” make her previous occupation evident (4, 7). Societal associations of beauty with youth turn these child-like items Miss July once wore into items used for voyeuristic sexual pleasure. This highlights the way in which sexuality infiltrates the mind of females at a tender age and creates the rule that beauty is youth, innocence, and ignorance. Girls begin to imitate the images of what society wants a woman to be and focus more upon their desirability than on other potential life goals. Imitation of the qualities associated with the female gender is what Judith Butler refers to as “performativity.” In her book Gender Trouble, Butler articulates that gender is not something permanent, binary, and biological but something we create through predetermined ritual: “what we take to be an internal feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts” (xv). Miss July understands the concept of performing a certain identity because she believes that she has been performing her entire life. Her opening lines “How much longer can I get away / with being so fucking cute?” connote that she is bitterly aware that her value to society is her cuteness, but that she is only pretending to

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be an object rather than believing that her value is purely physical (1-2).

Getting away with something implies that there is deceitfulness in the actions. In this case, Miss July thinks she is fooling everyone into believing that she is a sex object, when she actually views her own identity in this way as well. However, her performance as a sex object through the use of her body has taken precedence over developing all other parts of herself.

Regardless, she denies her exclusive preoccupation continuously through her language, which splits her identity between mind and body, awareness and ignorance.

The tension between Miss July's mind and body parallels the tensions between the ideals that society sets for women, starting with the phrase “fucking cute” (2). The first word of the phrase signifies sexual experience that comes with age, and the second word is associated with innocence and youth. The phrase also comments on the virgin/whore dichotomy that society presents to women: they must be innocent and virginal, but at the same time sexual.

The strain created by these opposites resembles Miss July's stress about her changing body and the division of her identity.

To distance and detach her current self from her past self, Miss July uses past tense to inform her reflections. The chance of uniting her two identities decreases the more she continues to separate them. Her detachment is a way of coming to terms with her developing body and mind, much like the protagonist in Atwood's second novel Surfacing. According to critic Meera Clark, the narrator of the novel views her parents as “living in another time” because “it seems a safe and convenient way of dealing with the present—to pretend that it has no connection with the past” (4). While in Atwood's novel the narrator attempts to keep her parents' memory at a distance, Miss July 8

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similarly attempts to come to terms with the fact that her physical beauty is fading. This beauty is the very thing on which she built her assumed identity. She is bitter that society no longer finds her viable, and because of this she talks about her youth as if she was a completely different person then. On the other hand, she is proud that she has been able to attain a certain degree of awareness due to the loss of her physical attributes. She acknowledges that she identifies as more than a “body” (65), but her use of biting language in relation to the loss of her physical identity becomes more important than the attainment of authority over her own mind and autonomy. Miss July still embodies her identity as a sex object, even though she may believe that she has transcended it. She is repeatedly divided into two parts: her physical identity as a sex object, and her mental identity, which gives her awareness. Her autonomous identity has the ability to save her physical identity, but the two pieces never become united, and Miss July remains only a body that is fading fast from society's approving eye.

Though Miss July attempts to distance her current self from her past, she explains the ways in which she exploited her body for the sake of performativity. She recalls going out “with my hair / hiding one eye,” which refers to her performance of the sexobject stereotype (12-13). By hiding a piece of herself—in this case her eye— she is hiding her mental identity while simultaneously acting out her physical identity with her exposed eye. Though Miss July seems to be aware of the role she plays, she does not understand that her body cannot be used in this way without consequence. As Hélène Cixous states in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” women “have wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they've been given a deadly brainwashing” (877). Miss July has been brainwashed into believing her only

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assets are her physicality and that the only way to get ahead in life is to exploit it.

Though she is aware that she is now suffering the consequences of age, she is not fully aware of the consequences of her fragmentation. She believes herself to be performing the part of a sex object, when through performing this ritual repeatedly Miss July becomes the stereotype and her obsession with her physical self becomes ossified. She unintentionally confines herself to the narrow room Cixous describes and her identity becomes defined by her performance, as Butler would observe.

Therefore, her continued attempts at detachment from her calendar girl days further confirm that she has become an object.

Miss July's use of present tense is even more revealing of her self-resentment than her use of past tense. The urgency in her words: “How much longer can I get away / with being so fucking cute? / Not much longer” signify that time is running out for her to exploit her physical beauty (1-3). She mentions her mouth changing sizes and pretends “not to care” about it (11). If Miss July had not cared about the size of her mouth changing then she would not have mentioned it. Clearly, she is in denial about her true feelings toward her body. Urgency is clear once more in the lines “The way the sun / moves through the hours becomes important” because she notes the passing of time and how it has only recently become a significant part of her life (52-53). An important part of one's identity involves fitting in and being desired by others.

Desirability is an attribute that is typically more important in a woman's life than a man’s because men are not taught to define themselves by who loves them. Not to mention, men also base their identities on a wider variety of attributes. Men are still valuable to society and to the opposite sex if they are not physically attractive. However, 9

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according to societal standards, desirability is of the utmost importance for women. If a woman is to be considered desirable, she must look and act a certain way. Therefore, a woman may spend a significant portion of her life trying to become desirable because she wants to be accepted by others, especially by men. For young girls, aging and the passing of time are of no significance because currently they fit the most important aspect of beauty: youth.

Aging is not a conscious concern for them because it is not something they are personally experiencing. It is not until they begin to notice little lines spreading across their faces or they find those first gray hairs that these women begin to realize that soon they will be society's rejects. Miss July is growing out of the qualities that once made her beautiful, and she realizes that her body is not going to remain the way it was in the calendar: youthful, beautiful, and sexy.

Now, with every minute that passes, she is getting older and less socially acceptable.

However, Miss July’s physical identity is not completely shattered. She is not quite over the hill. She is July: the end of summer.

She is getting stale but is s not quite there yet. December, when all is bare and empty, is still a ways off. Nonetheless, she is no fresh and renewing May either. That time for her has already passed.

This limbo between beauty and age in which Miss July finds herself is unnerving.

The loss of confidence is telling in lines such as “I still get letters, although not many” (30). She realizes her career as a calendar girl is over, but her beauty is not completely snuffed out yet. Regardless, she is still no longer the youthful model that society wants. She attempts to retain a sense of physical self-worth when she says “Don't get me wrong; with the lights out / I'd still take on anyone, / if I had the energy to spare,” but the lack of confidence in her exposed body is what stands out in the

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reader's mind (59-61). Though sexuality is valued and acceptable in a beautiful and young person, it is not as valued in an older woman because she does not fit the beauty ideal. Not to mention, it is likely that Miss July is sexually experienced and this knowledge is threatening to society. Her maturing and experienced body is made shameful and something that must be hidden. She also notes her loss of energy—a sign of her deteriorating physical ability.

The lines masquerade as hopeful, but behind them are shame and bitterness.

When Miss July describes herself as she once appeared in an old calendar, “the photo that's mostly bum and daisies / back when my skin had the golden slick / of fresh- spread margarine” (34-36), her fragmentation is further advanced. She continues to detach her current self from her youthful self when she refers to the picture as “the photo” rather than “the photo of me,” thereby removing personal attachment from the picture (34). What stands out in the photo are the flowers and the speaker's buttocks— not the person she sees herself as now—because her younger self did not have an intellectual aspect to her identity. The mature Miss July also acknowledges the falseness and impossibility represented by The Beauty Myth: she describes her skin as looking like fresh-spread margarine, a product that is not created from natural ingredients like butter which margarine imitates. Essentially margarine is equated to fake butter, similar to the way The Beauty Myth presents a false ideal for real women to achieve.

Critic Marge Piercy identifies in another of Atwood's works an idea which arises briefly in “Miss July Grows Older”: the consumption of women as if they are food.

The lines in which Miss July refers to her skin as looking like fresh-spread margarine highlight this dark concept. In Atwood's novel The Edible Woman, the main 10

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character, Marian, agrees to marry her boyfriend Peter, whom she does not love. As time passes, her inner turmoil about the marriage increases. She eventually cannot eat because she identifies too closely with the food items she can no longer consume.

She realizes that this is because of Peter. He is consuming her, thereby destroying her personhood. As an attempt to redeem her identity, “Marian bakes a cake in the form of a woman . . . When Peter comes she serves him the cake. 'You've been trying to destroy me haven't you,' she said. 'You've been trying to assimilate me. But I've made you a substitute, something you'll like much better'” (Piercy 41). Similarly, when Miss July mentions her “hen leg elbows,” she is not only demonstrating self-resentment and fragmentation, she is also equating herself to a farm animal that is bred for consumption by humans (68). It is as if Miss July is the hen, and society is the consumer. Although the association of Miss July with food is brief, its point is similar to that in The Edible Woman. Miss July is fragmented because she has been consumed— not loved or respected—which further reduces her to the status of an object. Now all that is left of the object is the hen-leg elbows that no one wants to eat.

Another consequence of Miss July's life-long objectification is her lack of intimacy, specifically with men. Whenever she mentions men, they are referred to in dehumanized terms. They are “a skill” equated to “playing the flute” (20-23).

Besides the obvious phallic imagery that is evoked by the musical instrument, it is clear Miss July does not view men as human beings, but rather as playthings that require only some skill to manipulate. She left “grateful, rubbery / sighs on the cigarettes of men” to get what she wanted, but it was all for show (17-18). Her actions are not genuine: the sighs are rubbery (rubber usually being a synthetic material, and

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therefore, in such cases, not natural) and she was not grateful to the men because she “hardly knew” them “and didn't want to” (19). Miss July was a user of people: always emotionally distant but willing to exploit her body to get what she desired. It comes as no surprise that she has intimacy issues because her identity and career were based on being an object of men’s sexual desire, not of their love. Since Miss July never thought herself to be a genuine sex object, she tries to objectify these men in the way they objectify her. Her behavior is an attempt to fight the sex-object stereotype by using her sexuality to attain power (albeit artificial power) over men. Miss July lacks the ability to share intimacy because society does not teach men and women to relate to each other, but rather to make assumptions about the opposite sex's behavior. The divide between the sexes makes them unable to achieve intimacy. To Miss July, the act of making love is “flesh arpeggios” and “too much of one kind of glory” (62, 64). Sex as monotonous event, such as scales up and down the piano, or something to be won shows her detachment to the act. The fact that she turns something musical that requires some sort of intellectual skill into “flesh” reflects a failure to think outside of her bodily stereotype, which lacks the ability to be intimate. The sex she has had does not mean anything; there is no love behind it, and therefore there is no intimacy.

To her, sex is a game and a weapon used to get what one wants. However, while attempting to victimize men, Miss July has unintentionally become a victim herself.

This double identity as a victim and victimizer is seen in an earlier poem by Atwood called “The Siren Song.” Critic David Buchbinder states, The Siren, as a particular female role, shows that in the politics of gender the victimizer's victim is, finally, the self. Each 11

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apparent success of her alluring verbal trap is a confirmation of the Siren's essential isolation. She is defined by her function as victimizer; her verbal ambiguities, intended to disguise that function, or to express dissatisfaction with it, serve merely to reinforce it. (130) Throughout “Miss July Grows Older,” Miss July describes herself as a victimizer of men through ambiguous language. The reader sees that she has isolated herself by victimizing others and becomes something she believes she is not—a sex object and a victim. She has discovered her intellectual awareness in age, but she still has not experienced intimacy, which could potentially help her transcend her sex-toy status and bring her mind and body together.

Like “The Siren and Circe, each at once victim and victimizer,” Miss July “remain[s] trapped within the predicament created in the articulation of [her] position” (Buchbinder 127 ). Young Miss July was unaware that she was both a victim and a victimizer. However, in her physical maturation her victimization becomes clearer to her as she loses her ability to manipulate men. When she describes “the other things” that were unsatisfactory about her relations with male suitors such as “the absence of flowers, the death threats, / the eating habits at breakfast,” she then mentions that she is “using the past tense” (41-44). Miss July unknowingly describes the consequences of any relationship that lacks intimacy, and then notes that she no longer experiences these altercations because the men in her life disappear.

Societal standards have come knocking at her bedroom door: Miss July's age makes her undesirable to men who only want sex.

What has brought her to this stagnant place with men are the victimizing strategies used to rebel against her stereotype. By remaining emotionally distant, she never meets a man

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who wants to know her on an intimate level, and even if she happened to meet men like this, she likely manipulated them and then removed them from her life. Now she is left with no one. The cycle brought on by victimization prevents Miss July from uniting her identities and from finding love.

Reflecting on the words of Adrienne Rich about separation of mind and body, one can conjecture that Miss July has already suffered the consequences of separating the two, since she is unable to transcend the stereotype she performed in her youth.

There are two stanzas of the poem that are more abstract than the typical language found in “Miss July Grows Older.” The speaker is most likely Miss July, but the lines are more ambiguous than the majority of the poem. It is perhaps Miss July's unconscious self whom we are confronted with in the stanzas. This unconscious self is her intellectual awareness fully realized.

This self is able to accept the deteriorating body, and appreciate the newfound power of the mind. It is the key to uniting the two identities. Both stanzas use nature imagery to demonstrate that Miss July has not elevated herself past the boundaries of female stereotypes and societal standards.

Her mind is past the point of mortal danger: it has been murdered. The irony in this apparent death scene is that nature is pitted against the artificiality of civilized society.

One stanza begins with a forest scene. There are “grey stems” of trees and “standing pools, tarn-coloured, choked with brown leaves” (24-25). The imagery creates a feeling of dread and apprehension. It is as if one is experiencing the uncertain silence after watching a person suffocate, unsure if the victim is truly dead or not. The landscape becomes even more like the scene of a murder when Miss July describes “an arm, a shoulder,” which can be seen “when the light is right, with the sky clouded” (2627). In Atwood's novel Surfacing, the 12

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narrator has an epiphany while swimming in a lake: “As she dives and dives again into the lake which mirrors her own sternly repressed, unconscious self, she at last finds . . . the power which resides in the unconscious. As she surfaces from the lake, her lost and buried self also surfaces to her consciousness” (Clark 7). The forest scene parallels the event in Surfacing, but does not end with the discovery of Miss July's unconscious. The arm or shoulder seen in the standing pool is her unconscious self: the part of her that that can eclipse the sexobject stereotype and unite her two parts.

Miss July has attempted to dive into the pool, so to speak, to uncover her unconscious. She tries to find the part of herself that knows the truth about the stereotypes thrust upon her. Within this unconscious lies her natural ability to be whole. Nonetheless, her actions are futile, for it is likely that the dead body lying in the pool “choked with brown leaves” is Miss July's own body (25). The word “choked” signifies that a physical death has occurred, but more importantly, it is the death of her unconscious self. It is the failure of her unconscious to free itself from repression.

Miss July will never surface from the pool thereby freeing her unconscious self, which would help her transcend her sex-object status and make her whole. Lamentably, Miss July's lack of intimacy and hatred of her aging body—effects of the stereotype she has performed—are more powerful than her unconscious. The “mortal danger” that Rich speaks of becomes literal in the poem.

The subsequent abstract stanza reveals more about feminine stereotypes as a whole and how they affect all women through the use of second-person pronouns. “The vaporous cloud of chemicals that enveloped / you” is a universal message to all women (45-46). The cloud of chemicals refers to the expectations, stereotypes, and social constructions that women must confront

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starting from birth, which are as artificial as the chemical cloud Miss July describes. She claims that “You grow out / of sex like a shrunk dress / into your common senses” (49-51), but this exclamation is not as satisfying as it seems. She is describing her current state of mind in which she believes that she is no longer defined by her physical identity only. However, growing out of sex like a dress parallels the growing vapor cloud. Miss July is not growing out of sex; she is encountering different societyproduced stereotypes and obstacles as she ages. In particular, she confronts the stereotype that claims older women should not have or enjoy sex because they are no longer deemed sexually desirable by society.

Her apparent contempt for sexual activity because of the boredom it brings demonstrates that she embraces this stereotype regarding older women and sexuality. The social constructions and expectations that were ingrained in her while performing the sex- object stereotype are not lost, just different. They contradict her present lack of youth and beauty. Life is forever changed because she can no longer use her sexuality to get what she wants and needs. The discrimination and prejudices that occur for older women have become her reality, which is almost worse than when she “was all body” and existed purely for the pleasure of men (65). In her calendar girl days she was appreciated, albeit in a tragic and twisted way. Now it is no longer socially acceptable for her to express her sexuality, which was the only thing she had in her youth.

Miss July's final attempts to show the reader that she has discovered and accepted a new part of her identity—the identity concerned with her intellectual awareness— appear in the last lines of the poem where she says “Don't confuse me with my henleg elbows: / what you get is no longer / what you see” (68-70). In her opinion, she is 13

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a changed woman: the object that existed purely for sex and pleasure is no longer her identity. At first the poem leave the reader believing that Miss July is proud that her identity no longer resides with only the physical part of herself. However, she makes light of her “hen-leg elbows” in the midst of affirming her mind, which demonstrates her continued preoccupation with the physical self (68). The preoccupation is fleeting, but the negative association of herself with skinny, wrinkly animal appendages is apparent. Miss July reduces herself to unattractive, aging parts and continues to refer to herself in pieces rather than as a whole person. “Hen-leg elbows” are only one part of her physical self, but she insists on separating them from the rest of her body and certainly from her intellectual awareness (68). However, Miss July still shows signs of mental and emotional growth. She acknowledges that there is a new identity within her which did not exist in her youth.

Nonetheless, the attempt to redeem herself from the vices of societal desirability and to unite her two identities— mind and body— fails because she focuses too much on fragmentation. This is not only evident by mentioning her “hen-leg elbows” but also when she states “now there are more of me” (66). She recognizes that her intellectual awareness is becoming a new part of who she is, but she chooses to keep this intellectual identity separate from her physical identity. Miss July has already let her body become an object, and now she is incapable of seeing her new identity as

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connected with her physical identity. She remains fragmented and unable to discover and nurture her whole self.

Naomi Wolf describes beauty as “inert, timeless, and generic,” which are traits that Miss July does not possess, nor does any woman possess. A person cannot remain youthful forever because aging and death is inevitable. Therefore, beauty as society defines it is an unattainable ideal. By this definition, no one can be beautiful for the entirety of their life because they eventually mature and age, rendering them unbeautiful.

Miss July is now aware of this sobering fact, and continues to lament it even to her last few lines. When she says “I had an easy life, and was not grateful,” she acknowledges that things were easier when she fit the beauty ideal, and the fact that she recognizes her ungratefulness is remorseful on her part (65). To the end of the poem, Miss July cannot bring the fragments of herself together to realize her full potential as a woman and a human being. The Beauty Myth has been the driving force behind her performance as a sex object and the way she defines her self-worth. Though in her age she has indeed become more powerful through knowledge and awareness, this is unattractive to society and Miss July, who has been a victim of this myth, continues to see herself as unattractive. Though she recovers pieces of her mind, she is unable to connect these pieces to her bodily identity and the poem ends on a bitter note for the reader.

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Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. “Miss July Grows Older.” Morning in the Burned House. New York: Houghton, 1995. 21-23. Print.

Buchbinder, David. “Weaving Her Vision: The Homeric Model and Gender Politics in Selected Poems.” Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Ed. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988. 122-41. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 8 Apr. 2013.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 10 Nov. 2013.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-893. Print.

Clark, Meera. “Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: Language, Logic, and the Art of Fiction.” Modern Language Studies 13.3 (1983): JSTOR. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Print.

Piercy, Marge. “Margaret Atwood: Beyond Victimhood.” The American Poetry Review 2.6 (1973): JSTOR. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.

Rich, Adrienne. "Claiming an Education." The Douglass College Convocation. Douglass College. New Brunswick. 6 Sept. 1977. Address.

Wolf, Naomi. "The Beauty Myth." Women: Images and Realities, A Multicultural Anthology. Ed. Amy Kesselman. 4th ed. Boston: McGraw, 2006. 120-125. Print.

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Success at the Olympics: Talent is not Everything Rebecca Hemby Becca Hemby, a senior Mathematical Economics major, is on the Women’s Soccer Team at High Point University and has been playing sports her whole life. Hemby is intrigued by the Olympic Games and how the same set of countries continually win medals. Her research is aimed at discovering if the countries had reasons for winning medals that went beyond athletic talent. Dr. Crofton, Hemby’s mentor, aided her throughout her research. Dr. Crofton was extremely helpful and always had her best interest in mind, which allowed Hemby to apply what she learned in the classroom to real world situations to find her own answers.

This fall, she will be attending Ohio University’s Masters of Sports Administration/MBA program.

Abstract This paper examines the economic, social, and cultural factors that contribute to medals won by individuals of each nation at the Olympics. Studies indicate that Olympic performance is much more complex than sole individual athletic talent. Our study adds to the preceding work by explaining Olympic success in terms of individuals of nations rather than of whole nations, and by exploring factors of winning medals that have been previously overlooked. Several OLS models with weighted medals per capita as the dependent variable were examined for the most recent summer and winter games, which were London 2012 and Vancouver 2010, respectively.

Each season was also dissected and analyzed by gender. We find support for our hypothesis that social development variables, such as female literacy rate, have a statistically significant impact on individuals’ Olympic success. Furthermore, that impact differs between males and females.

Although individual Olympic success is highly idiosyncratic, it is evident that medals won per capita can be estimated beyond the most obvious variables of GDP and population.

Introduction he Olympic games are the most recognized and prestigious sporting event in the world, attracting thousands of participating athletes and billions of viewers worldwide. The London 2012 Summer Olympics was host to 10,500 athletes from 204 nations in 39

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disciplines, while the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics was host to over 2,500 athletes from 82 nations in 15 disciplines (www.olympic.org). Although the International Olympic Committee does not recognize country rankings, the media tracks performance in the Olympics with a medal table, which ranks nations by the number of

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medals won and has become a symbol of international social and economic prowess.

The purpose of our paper is to build on previous Olympic literature about the factors that foreshadow how many medals a nation wins by adding a deeper level of analysis that has not yet been explored. The majority of the previous papers have focused on a historical study of the predictors of country medal counts at the summer Olympic games, and have included a core set of statistically-important variables, namely Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or GDP per capita, population, a dummy variable to represent political structure (i.e. communist vs. non-communist), and a dummy variable to represent the host nation. Our paper will ask a more precise question by investigating predictors of Olympic success in terms of an individual athlete’s success, by using medals per capita as our dependent variable. We will add to the relatively small amount of existing literature on the winter games by exploring both the most recent Summer and Winter Olympics, first in respect to total medals per capita won by a nation, and then with medals per capita separated by gender.

In addition, we hope to discover the predictive power of variables that have been previously overlooked, such as variables indicating a nation’s stance on women’s rights and overall social development.

Although it may seem obvious that nations with larger populations and higher GDPs will win the most medals, we believe there are other underlying factors at work that may deepen the explanation of both the obvious and the not-so-obvious results. For instance, India is a prime example of a nation that performs poorly at the Olympics despite its huge population of 1.2 billion. In India, very few citizens participate in sport due to poor health, lack of athletics infrastructure, and poor transportation to athletics centers. Furthermore, Indians in general do not place as high of a priority on

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sport relative to the rest of the world, and they are not sufficiently aware of the Olympics or the sports involved; because India is not as economically developed as Western nations, Indians cannot afford to spend as many hours practicing sports as compared to hours spent studying, training for jobs, or working (Fisher, Aug. 3, 2012).

In other words, India wins few medals not only because it is poor, but because of its overall relative social attitude towards athletics. Attitude towards sports is not easy to directly measure, but we are hoping to explore a new set of variables that may capture this factor, as well as others, indirectly.

Literature Review Of the literature we found and studied only one piece analyzed both the summer and winter games. The overwhelming majority studied only the Summer Olympics, given that many more countries participate in the summer games and there is a larger variety of sports and data. There are key variables that are consistent across the literature, for wealth (either GDP per capita or GNP per capita), population, and dummies to indicate whether a nation was the host nation and whether it was formerly (or currently) part of the Soviet Union or other non-market regimes. The first portion of this paper details a summary of the most relevant pieces of literature found on previous research on the contributing factors of Olympic success.

Bernard and Busse’s “Who Wins the Olympic Games: Economic Development and Medal Totals” (2000) provides a strong foundation and starting point for further works on the subject. Their research studies the summer games from 1960-1996 in anticipation of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. They began with a Cobb-Douglas production function in log population and

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log national income to model generating talented athletes in each country, and then modeled the given country’s share of Olympic medals as a log function of its respective talent. Results using a Tobit regression (due to the fact that many participating countries win no medals) showed total GDP is the best single predictor of performance, but other variables play a role as well, such as population, being a host country, and being a former member of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.

“Economics and Olympics: An Efficiency Analysis” (2007) by Rathke and Woitek explored whether Olympic success is related to the importance of sport in society, which is a difficult variable to measure. For this reason they used a production function and used the importance of sport as their interpretation of efficiency.

The dependent variable was the number of medals won per country divided by the total number available in a given year, using data for summer games from 1952-2004. Results agreed with findings from previous literature, aside from the finding that only very rich countries with relatively small populations gain medals from population increases. This is because population increases in poor nations will exhaust their already limited resources. Rathke and Woitek analyzed differences in gender across disciplines by changing the output measure to log share of medals won by each country in each sport by gender. Their findings showed that the importance of sport is not equal across disciplines and genders for each country, meaning specialization occurs. From the gender results the authors concluded that communist countries seem to be more successful than market economies in providing women equal opportunity to participate in sports.

“A Tale of Two Seasons: Participation and Medal Counts at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games” (2004) by Johnson

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and Ali was the first piece to consider the Winter Olympics, studying the postwar games from 1952-2000. Two tests were run, first one to estimate participation levels for each country, and then one to test medal success in relation to participation. For medal success, a panel OLS regression was chosen to focus on the subset of nations that participate and give more accurate in-sample predictions. The same variables were included as in other literature, but other factors were added. A neighbor variable indicated whether a nation had immediate proximity to the host country, and light frost and high frost variables measured land area feeling light frost less than 5 days per winter month or heavy frost more than 20 days per winter month, respectively. There is valid reason to suspect that climate influences medal success: at the time of writing their article in 2004, no athlete or team from a snowless nation had ever placed higher than 14th in a Winter Olympic event. Statistically, colder nations were shown to outperform in both summer and winter games. GDP per capita was significant for summer but not winter. Population was significant for both seasons, but less populated nations actually perform better for the winter games.

Johnson and Ali also found that female participation has been rising over time, and high-income nations tend to send more females to the games.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (2012) attempted to create a model to predict the outcome of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London by incorporating data from the 2000, 2004 and 2008 games. Again, log population, log GDP/capita, host nation, and belonging to the former Soviet Union or communist bloc were all found to be significant variables. Including medal shares won at the previous two games increased the explanatory power of their model, which indicates that sources of competitive advantage in sports continue over time. This

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change improved the adjusted R-squared from 0.51 to 0.96.

Trivedi and Zimmer’s “Success at the Summer Olympics: Do Economic Factors Have High Predictive Value?” (2012) seeks to add to the previous literature by including several previously overlooked variables.

They used a two-stage modeling process where the first stage estimated the probability of winning one or more medals and the next stage was the number of medals won conditional on winning at least one. A “medals production function” similar to Bernard and Busse was used. Trivedi and Zimmer used previously proven variables and incorporated government type by specifying if a country was Islamic or not.

Islamic governments generally discourage female participation, and the authors were interested in investigating whether female representation affected medal success.

Female participation has been increasing, up to 44% of total participation in 2012 from just 11.5% in 1960. Their results showed that larger female shares of participation are associated with a larger probability of winning a medal. They mention there is significant room for error because of immeasurable variables such as a nation’s “sport culture,” instances of sudden, random success or loss, and increased international arbitrage, where athletes are more mobile and may train in countries other than their home nation.

Data and Methodology After studying the literature and variables used, we saw a lack of independent variables that may tell the story of how government policy and culture affects Olympic success. We hypothesize that climate and female participation are important variables and are interested in the further exploration of how a nation’s perspective of women in society plays a role

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in its medal count 1. Tables 1 and 2 display descriptive statistics for the independent variables and dependent variables explored.

The female literacy rate and the female to male secondary enrollment rate have the dual purpose of being direct measures of education and attitudes towards women.

Furthermore, the female labor participation rate may also be a measure of general women’s rights. We also included types of variables that had not previously been used at all. Obesity rate is included as a measure of general health. Sport has a direct correlation with health and fitness, and this measure may give insight into a nation’s ability and willingness to participate in sport. As a measure of education, we used the total literacy rate of adults over the age of 15. Education could have numerous implications, such as access to sport by school association, better sport-related technology and training. It may also indicate lower child labor rates, which may take away from time to compete in sport.

Research and development (R&D) is used as a proxy for expenditure on healthcare per capita. We added this variable to test whether more expenditure on healthcare leads to more improvements and advancements in athletic training and injury rehabilitation techniques, not to mention the overall betterment of health and the ability to compete.

Most of the literature used as the dependent variable a nation’s total medals won without weighting the different levels of gold, silver and bronze. We used a weighted system to better relate our results to how success at the Olympics is actually viewed by society, with gold medals being considered greater successes than silver or bronze medals. Specifically, we assigned gold medals three times as much value as 1

We provide full definitions and sources for our variables in the appendix.

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bronze medals, and silver medals twice as much value as bronze medals.

Our study focused on the most recent Summer (London 2012) and Winter (Vancouver 2010) Olympic games. We chose this focus because we were interested in testing the most current data available.

Our dependent variables are the same for both summer and winter: total medals won, medals won my males, and medals won by females. Our study is unique in that we chose to divide medals by population for each dependent variable. We chose to do this in order to try to explain Olympic success in terms of medals per capita. We would expect a nation with a bigger population would win more medals, so our approach builds on the research we have already seen and takes a more demanding approach. With a more difficult test we expected to find a lower R2 statistic and fewer significant independent variables; our results may not appear to be as good statistically but we believe they will be more revealing about the true nature of Olympic success based on the chosen factors.

Medal data were obtained from the International Olympic Committee. Most of the data for our independent variables were retrieved from the most recent World Development Indicators data from the World Bank (generally from 2010). For GDP per capita, GDP is in US dollars and population is in the millions. We used several independent variables that had been lacking or absent previous studies. For example, we used three measures of female rights: female secondary enrollment, female literacy, and female labor participation. A former soviet dummy variable was found significant in the other literature, so we included it in our tests. We classified the former soviet dummy variable as whether the nation was part of the USSR or

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controlled by it as some point 2. For a complete list of the independent variables used, please see the appendix.

We did not include a host variable, although it has been found to be significant, because our analysis focused on only one Olympics for each season, rather than several games over a span of time.

Therefore, there could only be one variable with a value of 1, which would not provide enough statistical variation to be useful.

We believed some variables, such as several possible measures of female rights, may be multicollinear. To address this issue, we tested our model with different combinations of the independent variables, leaving some out that we thought may lead to multicollinearity. While many of our independent variables are somewhat correlated, they are not perfectly so. For instance, Saudi Arabia has a high GDP per capita but a low female labor participation rate. Similarly, Cuba has a very low economic freedom index but a female-tomale labor participation ratio that is almost one-to-one. Because our variables are not perfectly correlated, it was necessary to explore all of their effects on Olympic performance separately in our analysis.

Overall, we expect our models with many independent variables to have few significant variables due to multicollinearity.

Tables 7 and 8 present correlation matrices for our variables for the London Olympics and Vancouver Olympics, respectively.

Results In this section we present and interpret the results of our regressions exploring 2

The countries we included in our former soviet variable are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

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variables that may help to predict the number of Olympic medals won per capita across countries. Some regressions have varying sample sizes due to the varying availability of data across countries for our different independent variables.

Table 3 presents general results comparing medals per country, which we will call “raw medals,� and medals per capita as dependent variables. It also compares several models for total London Summer Olympic medals per capita using combinations of the independent variables for which we had a theoretical reason to believe may be significant. Table 4 presents similar findings for the case of total Vancouver Winter Olympic medals per capita. Lastly, Tables 5 and 6 explore the differences between the amounts of medals per capita won by each gender. 3 Regression 1 in Table 3 shows a model that is similar to those found most frequently in earlier literature. It uses raw medals as the dependent variable and GDP per capita, population and the former soviet dummy as independent variables. As in the earlier papers, we found all three variables to be highly significant. The finding that population is significant highlights simply that larger countries (with larger populations) unsurprisingly earn more medals. The additional variables then explain how medals deviate from country to country, beyond each nation getting its share of medals based on population. Following this fact, we decided in our analysis to ask a question that would build on the earlier 3

Heteroscedasticity was found for the models including economic freedom and female literacy rate variables for the London 2012 games and for all independent variables for the Vancouver 2010 games. We corrected for the heteroscedasticity using the Weighted Least Squares method by transforming each piece of the model with the inverted square root.

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findings and would also provide a deeper examination. We chose to analyze why individual citizens of different countries may be more or less likely to earn medals, and therefore used medals per capita as our dependent variable rather than raw medals 4.

Because we chose a more difficult question for our models, we suspected our analysis was likely to show fewer statistically significant results than models in the previous literature.

Regression 3 in Table 3 includes all of the independent variables that we hypothesized may have an effect on medals won, with medals per capita as the dependent variable. However, due to multicollinearity, the more appropriate models to look at are those with one extra variable. As regressions 4 through 7 show, the coefficients for education rate, economic freedom, and female literacy were all positive and statistically significant, while temperature maximum was negatively significant. Therefore, in this specification, it seems the amount of education in a nation, especially among females, is positively correlated with an individual’s chances of winning a medal at the London 2012 Summer Olympics, while temperature maximum is negatively correlated. Since the three former variables are related to education and development, we can conclude that higher education in general is an important factor in increasing the ability of an individual to perform well at the London Olympics. As an overall model, we suspect fewer variables are significant due to issues of multicollinearity, as noted in the previous section.

Since many of our independent variables have multicollinearity, we include a fairly large number of models with a small 4

Medals per capita will be the dependent variable in our models from this point onward in the paper. We define medals per capita as medals per million inhabitants.

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number of variables each, to highlight factors that may help predict medals per capita. Whereas not every variable is consistently significant, we use a core set of variables that earlier literature and theory highlight as particularly relevant: GDP per capita, as a measure of economic development, and a former Soviet dummy variable to control for the fact that some nations may allocate more resources to sports for political reasons. While both of these variables are significant in some specifications, they are not significant consistently. This finding highlights that Olympic performance, as measured by medals per capita, is idiosyncratic.

Regressions 4 through 7 in Table 3 display our core model with one extra variable added at a time. We included only the models with the extra variables that turned out to be significant, which were education rate, economic freedom, female literacy and temperature maximum, respectively. Education rate has a coefficient that is positive and significant, implying that an individual’s chances of winning a medal improve by living in a more literate and educated country. Education may be a measure of overall social development and correlate with sports-related advantages such as access to better training techniques, greater knowledge of sports medicine, etc.

As seen in regression 5, economic freedom is positive and significant as well.

The components of the economic freedom index provide a good indicator of overall social development and social rights, specifically the ability to participate in athletics in our case, which would explain why the variable would be associated with an individual winning more medals. For instance, women (and even men, although likely to a lesser extent) in nations with low economic freedom generally do not have the rights or the opportunity to participate in organized athletics. Following the previous

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two regressions, the female literacy variable is also positive and significant and implies that 1% extra female literacy in a country is associated with 0.0165 extra medals per capita.

Like education rate and economic freedom, the female literacy variable implies that individuals are more likely to win medals in nations where women are more highly educated and have more rights in general. In the previous three regressions the variables had positive coefficients, which is what we expected. Lastly, regression 7 shows that the coefficient for temperature maximum is negative and significant, meaning that the likelihood an individual wins a medal decreases for nations with hotter temperature extremes. We expected that nations benefit from warmer climates to a certain extent, but then at some point too much heat becomes a disadvantage and inhibits training.

As described above, we started our exploration by modeling total summer medals per capita. The regressions clearly showed medals per capita was a more appropriate dependent variable to use than raw medals. Thus, for winter medals and for when we broke our models down by gender, we do not report regressions of raw medals versus medals per capita as we did with the summer model.

Regression 1 in Table 4 presents our Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics model with all independent variables included and medals per capita as the dependent variable 5. Temperature maximum was the only significant variable. As in our summer model, we suspect that multicollinearity is likely the reason why the majority of variables are insignificant. Regression 2 shows the winter version of our core model 5

To clarify, the dependent variable includes only medals won in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, not a combination of both London and Vancouver games.

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with temperature minimum added as the extra variable. As we expected, nations with colder climates have an advantage in the Winter Olympics, where many events are performed in snow or on ice and are more popular and accessible in colder nations.

Our results indicated that temperature minimum is negative and significant, which implies that individuals are less likely to win medals in nations with higher temperature minimums and therefore less cold climates.

Similarly, regression 3 presents temperature maximum as negative and significant.

Specifically, a maximum annual temperature that is 1 degree Fahrenheit higher is associated with 0.0323 less medals per capita. We expected that individuals from nations with hotter temperatures would be at a disadvantage in the Winter Olympics because most events require colder climates, which is what the results indicate.

In Tables 5 and 6 we separate the summer medals by gender and compare medals won by males versus medals won by females at London 2012. Education rate, economic freedom, and female literacy are significant in the models for both female summer medals and male summer medals.

Regression 4 in table 5 and regression 5 in Table 6 imply that an extra 1% female literacy in a country is associated with an 0.0105 extra medals won by males per capita and 0.006 extra medals won by females per capita. Originally we included the female literacy variable in our model as a proxy for women’s rights. However, because the coefficient is even larger for males than it is for females, it seems that female literacy could be acting as something broader, such as an overall measure of social development, or perhaps a sign that the country is more progressive and has a more highly educated labor force.

The Heritage Foundation states that the economic freedom index indicates: “the institutions of a free and open society do not

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discriminate either against or in favor of individuals based on their race, ethnic background, gender‌or any factor unrelated to individual merit.� We expected economic freedom to have a higher coefficient for females, because generally women are discriminated against more often than males in societies that are not economically free, and therefore have less opportunity to participate in sports. We had a similar hypothesis for education, where we would expect females to benefit more from a higher education rate since males generally have greater access to education than females in most nations, with a few developed countries where females have a higher education rate as possible exceptions.

However, as with the female literacy rate, both economic freedom and education rate exhibited higher coefficients for males than for females. This finding leads us to believe all three variables may be acting as proxies for more progressive societies.

When we split the winter medals by gender, none of the independent variables were found to be significant beyond GDP per capita in either the female only or male only models, so we did not include tables with those results. We tried models similar to those we explored for the summer medals separated by gender.

As we noted earlier, we expected our models to be less statistically significant than previous models because of our use of medals per capita as our dependent variable, which was in an effort to answer the more difficult question of what makes individuals of nations more likely to perform well at the Olympics. Similarly, we expected our models to have lower đ?‘… 2 statistics than models with raw medals as the dependent variable. Thus, our raw medals model for the summer games had a larger đ?‘… 2 than our medals per capita model. When we only consider the medals per capita models, the model with all of our independent variables

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included has the highest � 2 for each subcategory (summer, winter, and gender divisions for each season). The core models have the lowest � 2 , and the core models with an additional variable added have � 2 s in between. Moreover, our complete winter model had a higher � 2 than our complete summer model, while our complete summer males’ model had a higher � 2 than our summer females’ model. All but one of our models had � 2 statistics below .500 and were most frequently in the range of .100 to .300.

Again, our low statistics were not surprising due to the nature of our question.

Much of individual performance seems to be largely idiosyncratic and hard to predict, especially when one considers the numerous factors affecting individual performance that are virtually impossible to measure. The nature of sports in general makes it very difficult to correctly predict the outcomes, which is one of the inherent qualities that attract so many people to watch and participate in them, and why we see “upsets� occur on a frequent basis. Likewise, occasionally there will be a single exceptionally talented athlete who seems to completely “sweep� the medals in a particular sport, which would be extremely difficult to model. A case at London 2012 was U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps, who won six medals, which could have ranked him at 13th in the overall country medal count as an individual (Chase, 2012).

Similarly, there are factors that affect athletes’ performance that are difficult or impossible to measure, and therefore could not be included in our analysis. For instance, individuals from smaller, less developed countries may train in wealthier countries (i.e., attending U.S. universities, playing in professional leagues) but choose to represent their home nations in the Olympics (Trivedi and Zimmer, 2013). Medals that they may win then may not be as representative of the

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characteristics of their home nation, but more of the nation they train in. The data also do not take into account country specialization in specific sports. For instance, Kenyans dominate long-distance running events in the Olympics and generally medal in those events. Studies indicate that this is likely because Kenyans have a physical advantage due to significant differences in body mass index, bone structure, and “bird-like� physical traits that make them better runners (Fisher, Apr. 17, 2012). Another example is Brazil’s historical dominance in men’s soccer. These specialties are difficult to quantify and measure and may have little, if anything, to do with a nation’s economic and social indicators.

Conclusion Our paper adds to the previous work done on the predictors of Olympic success by analyzing medals per capita with a set of variables that have not been previously explored, such as economic freedom, female secondary enrollment, and the obesity rate.

As our results showed, we expected our statistics to be lower than those in previous literature, because our goal was to add insight to the discussion by asking a harder question and examining medals per capita rather than raw medals. Although it was less relevant to include population in our model, the other core variables previously explored, especially GDP per capita, were unsurprisingly still significant in our models.

We also found that economic freedom, education rate, female literacy and temperature were consistently significant across the summer and winter models and for females and males in the summer games.

Our results for the former three variables add to the Olympic literature that was previously lacking variables relating to social development. Nations that give

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women more rights and are overall more socially free and developed foster an atmosphere that gives individuals a greater chance of winning medals at the Olympics.

Future research should be done to better understand the varying coefficients between male and female London 2012 medals won for those variables: female literacy, education rate, and economic freedom. A more detailed analysis could help to determine why the coefficients were higher for males and provide better knowledge of whether the variables were a suitable measure of what we originally intended

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them to measure, or if they were actually implying something different.

It could also be useful to do an analysis with similar dependent and independent variables for other previous summer and winter games in order to determine if our results are consistent throughout history. It may be the case that some nations performed uncharacteristically well or poorly in the Olympic games we chose to study, so further analysis would be useful to minimize the chances of those random occurrences distorting the data.

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Appendix A complete list of independent variables with data sources in parenthesis: •

GDP per capita (World Bank, data.worldbank.org/indicator)

•

R&D: health expenditure per capita, used as a proxy for development of healthcare (World Bank)

•

Education rate: literacy rate of total adults above the age 15 (World Bank)

•

Female secondary enrollment: ratio of females to males enrolled in secondary schools (World Bank)

•

Female literacy: literacy rate of adult females over the age 15 (World Bank)

•

Female labor: labor participation rate of female adults over age 15 (World Bank)

•

Economic freedom: index on a scale of 0-100 that indicates a citizen’s ability to control his or her own labor and property based on 10 measures of freedom under the categories of rule of law, limited government, regulatory efficiency, and open markets (Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/index/)

•

Temperature minimums and maximums: gathered from annual low and high temperature averages (weatherbase.com.)

•

Obesity rate: percentage of the population over age 20 with BMI greater than 30, which is considered to be obese (World Health Organization, www.who.int/research/en/)

•

Former soviet: dummy variable for whether the nation was part of the USSR or controlled by it as some point. See footnote on page 8 for a full listing of countries.

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Table 1: Descriptive statistics for independent variables believed to possibly be a factor in Olympic performance Independent variable

# obs.

Min.

1st quartile

Median

3rd quartile

Max.

Mean

Std. dev.

POPULATION

196

GDP CAPITA

180 198.7087

FORMER SOVIET

202

0

0

0

0

1

0.1089

0.3123

OBESITY RATE

186

1.1

7.3

19.8

25

71.1

19.1495

12.5531

EDUCATION RATE

104

31.0998

72.6267

91.8408

97.8408

99.8309

84.2204

17.1788

ECONOMIC FREEDOM

174

1

51.8

59.45

67.3

89.7

59.4741

11.8162

R&D

185

11.9035

FEMALE SEC. ENROLLMENT

135

42.108

96.193

100.5

103.911

138.199

98.0431

13.0477

FEMALE LABOR PARTICIPATION

178

12.9

43.8

53.05

61.5

88.3

52.6121

15.934

FEMALE LITERACY

104

20.2879

66.0442

90.3507

97.1989

99.8235

80.8322

20.9375

TEMP MIN

184

20

48.05

65.25

72.7

83

60.0027

14.7502

TEMP MAX

184

38.5

63.85

81.55

85.8

97

75.4598

13.6896

0.0098

1.3408

6.9732

1347.234 4590.286

77.3302 319.6404

23.7216 1337.825

34.9385 133.6133

14548.56 103574.2 12699.61 18290.61

881.5662 8361.732 1020.155 1722.507

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Table 2: Descriptive statistics for dependent variables used to measure Olympic success Dependent variable

Definition

# obs.

Min.

Summer raw medals

1st Quartile

Median

3rd Quartile

Max.

Mean

Std. dev.

total medals won by country

199

0

0

0

3

104

4.799

13.5877

Winter raw medals

total medals won by country

81

0

0

0

3

37

3.1852

7.103

Summer medals per capita

total medals won/ population

194

0

0

0

0.5615

28.7117

0.6959

2.3812

Summer males

total medals won by males/ population

194

0

0

0

0.2799

28.7117

0.5122

2.2538

Summer females

total medals won by females/ population

194

0

0

0

0.0962

3.3305

0.1717

0.4621

Winter medals per capita

total medals won/ population

81

0

0

0

0.1832

10.022

0.4362

1.29

Winter males

total medals won by males/ population

81

0

0

0

0.0314

6.545

0.2462

0.8528

Winter females

total medals won by females/ population

81

0

0

0

0.0314

3.477

0.1698

0.5072

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Table 3: Regression results for London 2012 Summer Olympics country performances Dependent variable

Raw Medals 1

2

3

-1.9230 (-0.80)

.5139 (0.89)**

12.1250 (2.90)***

-1.0283 (-1.53)

GDP CAPITA

.0005 (3.30)***

.00002 (1.50)

0.00003 (1.31)

POPULATION

.1048 (8.07)***

-.0008 (-0.58)

FORMER SOVIET

18.5591 (3.30)***

0.5139 (0.89)

-0.5434 (-0.84)

Independent Variable Constant

6

7

-1.7155 (-2.58)**

1-.8708 (-1.69)*

1.8450 (2.25)**

.00001 (0.91)

.000007 (1.05)

.00001 (0.78)

.00001 (.86)

.4006 (1.01)

.6640 (2.28)**

.3514 (0.89)

.3128 (-1.96)*

0.0305 (0.99)

OBESITY

-.3303 (3.62)***

EDUCATION RATE ECONOMIC FREEDOM

0.0151 (0.54)

R&D

-.0005 (-1.25)

FEMALE SEC. ENROLLMENT

.0175 (2.01)** .0358 (3.03)***

-.0434 (-2.13)**

FEMALE LABOR PARTICIPATION

0.0045 (0.33) .2884 (3.64)***

FEMALE LITERACY TEMP MIN

0.0600 (1.52)

TEMP MAX

-.1044 (-2.20)**

R squared Number of observations

Medals per capita 4 5

.0165 (2.35)**

-.0192 (-1.96)*

0.3409

0.0185

0.3774

0.119

0.1491

0.1322

0.1115

178

178

58

97

166

97

166

Note: t-statistics are included in parenthesis below each coefficient. *, **, and *** denoted significance at the 10%, 5%, and 1% level

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2014

Table 4: Regression results for Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics country performance Winter medals per capita 1 2 3 Constant

-.8812 (-0.11)

1.4107 (1.77)*

2.2282 (2.11)**

GDP CAPITA

0.0001 (1.02)

.00002 (3.04)***

.00002 (2.39)**

FORMER SOVIET

-.4918 (-1.16)

-0.1838 (-0.47)

-0.2405 (-0.62)

OBESITY

0.0312 (1.06)

EDUCATION RATE

0.0480 (0.36)

ECONOMIC FREEDOM

-.0035 (-0.12)

R&D

-.001 (-1.11)

FEMALE SEC. ENROLLMENT

-.0129 (-0.45)

FEMALE LABOR PART.

0.0077 (0.42)

FEMALE LITERACY

-.0101 (-0.10)

TEMP MIN

0.0548 (1.62)

TEMP MAX

-.0704 (-2.06)*

R squared

0.5068

0.2575

0.2692

25

71

71

Number of observations

-.0282 (-2.06)** -.0323** (-2.32)

Note: t-statistics are included in parenthesis below each coefficient. *, **, and *** denoted significance at the 10%, 5%, and 1% level

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2014

Table 5: Male individual medal performance at London 2012 Summer Olympics Dependent variable Independent variable

1

2

Summer Male Medals per Capita 3 4

5

6

Constant

8.9315 (3.34)***

-.6497 (-1.33)

-1.112 (-2.10)**

-.5590 (-1.48)

-0.9082 (-1.68)*

-0.0904 (-0.32)

GDP CAPITA

0.00003 (2.03)**

.00001 (1.16)

.000004 (0.69)

.0000 (1.04)

.00001 (1.01)

0.00001 (2.93)***

FORMER SOVIET

-0.5740 (-1.39)

.3132 (1.08)

.3999 (1.72)*

.2793 (0.97)

0.2299 (0.78)

0.4191 (1.78)*

OBESITY

0.01557 (0.79)

0.0044 (0.77)

0.0054 (1.09)

EDUCATION RATE

-0.2201 (-3.77)***

ECONOMIC FREEDOM

0.0151 (0.85)

R&D

-0.0005 (-2.01)*

FEMALE SECONDARY ENROLLMENT

-0.0300 (-2.30)**

FEMALE LABOR PARTICIPATION

.0236 (2.51)**

0.0014 (0.16)

FEMALE LITERACY

.1916 (3.78)***

TEMP MIN

0.04215 (1.67)

TEMP MAX

-.0814 (-2.68)***

R squared Number of observations

.0110 (1.74)*

.0105 (2.05)**

.0123 (2.30)**

0.4296

0.1136

0.098

0.1244

0.1374

0.0684

58

97

166

97

94

166

Note: t-statistics are included in parenthesis below each coefficient. *, **, and *** denoted significance at the 10%, 5%, and 1% level

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Table 6: Female individual medal performance at London 2012 Summer Olympics

Independent variable

Dependent variable Female Medals per Capita 3 4

1

2

3.2035 (1.96)*

-.3787 (-1.32)

-.5787 (-2.32)**

.0000002 (0.02)

.0000007 (0.13)

FORMER SOVIET

0.0317 (0.13)

.0879 (0.52)

OBESITY

0.0149 (1.24)

Constant GDP CAPITA

EDUCATION RATE

-0.1104 (-3.09)***

ECONOMIC FREEDOM

-0.00005 (-0.00)

R&D

0.00001 (0.09)

FEMALE SECONDARY ENROLLMENT

-0.0134 (-1.67)

FEMALE LABOR PARTICIPATION

0.0032 (0.60)

FEMALE LITERACY

6

-.0877 (-0.24)

-.3122 (-1.41)

.0099 (0.09)

.000002 (0.86)

.0000 (1.98)**

.0000 (0.03)

.0000 (3.94)***

.2508 (2.29)**

.2665 (1.86)*

.0726 (0.43)

.2862 (2.96)***

.0064 (1.74)* .0119 (2.68)***

.0022 (0.58) .0008 (0.38)

.0970 (3.12)***

TEMP MIN

0.0180 (1.17)

TEMP MAX

-0.0233 (-1.25)

R squared Number of observations

5

.006 (1.99)**

0.2849

0.0613

0.1232

0.0601

0.0702

0.1213

58

97

166

125

97

166

Note: t-statistics are included in parenthesis below each coefficient. *, **, and *** denoted significance at the 10%, 5%, and 1% level

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Table 7: Correlation matrix for full London 2012 Summer variables Summer

GDPCAPITA

FORMER SOVIET

OBESITY

ECON FREEDOM

EDU RATE

R&D

2014

FEMALE SEC. ENROLL.

FEMALE LABOR

FEMALE LITERACY

TEMP MIN

Summer

1.0000

GDPCAPITA

0.1942

1.0000

FORMER SOVIET

0.1726

-0.0493

1.0000

OBESITY

0.2408

0.4189

0.1306

1.0000

ECON FREEDOM

0.2902

0.4563

0.0136

0.5706

1.0000

EDU RATE

0.2785

0.3835

0.3951

0.5515

0.4454

1.0000

R&D

0.1835

0.762

-0.0633

0.3471

0.4528

0.4399

1.0000

0.1697

0.3121

0.363

0.4848

0.4911

0.6828

0.2377

1.0000

0.0032

-0.1462

-0.0387

-0.6179

-0.2344

-0.1898

-0.1642

-0.2337

1.0000

FEMALE LITERACY

0.3225

0.3814

0.3944

0.5512

0.4676

0.9923

0.439

0.7148

-0.1747

1.0000

TEMP MIN

-0.2728

-0.1302

-0.6232

-0.2198

-0.1792

-0.5589

-0.2703

-0.1346

-0.0248

-0.5483

1.0000

TEMP MAX

-0.3258

-0.1514

-0.6049

-0.2435

-0.2409

-0.6653

-0.3212

-0.2657

0.0192

-0.6535

0.9434

FEMALE SEC. ENROLL. FEMALE LABOR

TEMP MAX

1.0000

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2014

Table 8: Correlation matrix for full Vancouver 2010 Winter variables Winter

GDPCAPITA

FORMER SOVIET

OBESITY

ECON FREEDOM

EDU RATE

R&D

FEMALE SEC. ENROLL.

FEMALE LABOR

FEMALE LITERACY

TEMP MIN

Winter

1.0000

GDPCAPITA

0.2872

1.0000

FORMER SOVIET

-0.0962

-0.366

1.0000

OBESITY

0.1349

0.0996

-0.1148

1.0000

ECON FREEDOM

0.3245

0.4981

-0.2101

0.2785

1.0000

EDU RATE

0.3046

0.2627

0.4915

-0.2354

0.139

1.0000

R&D

0.2116

0.982

-0.3928

0.0686

0.4083

0.2356

1.0000

-0.1147

-0.1836

-0.4886

0.1429

0.1082

-0.569

-0.1696

1.0000

0.1744

0.0141

0.1408

-0.512

0.231

0.3874

-0.0298

-0.1262

1.0000

FEMALE LITERACY

0.3032

0.2315

0.4832

-0.2442

0.2425

0.9466

0.1990

-0.4894

0.5087

1.0000

TEMP MIN

-0.2386

0.0656

-0.4679

0.1595

0.0442

-0.7412

0.1082

0.4795

-0.2239

-0.6163

1.0000

TEMP MAX

-0.4011

-0.0306

-0.4155

0.1967

-0.022

-0.7600

0.0177

0.4354

-0.2591

-0.6600

0.9325

FEMALE SEC. ENROLL. FEMALE LABOR

TEMP MAX

1.0000

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References Bernard, A. B., & Busse, M. R. (2000). “Who Wins the Olympic Games : Economic Resources and Medal Totals.” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(1), 413-511.

Chase, C. (2012, August 4). 22 facts about Michael Phelps’ record 22 Olympic medals. FourthPlace Medal, [blog]. Retrieved Sept. 23, 2013, from http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/ Den Butter, F., & Van Der Tak, C. M.(1995). “Olympic Medals as an Indicator of Social Welfare.” Social Indicators Research, 35(1), 27-37. from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27522828 Fisher, M. (2012, April 17). “Why Kenyans Make Such Great Runners: A Story of Genes and Cultures.” The Atlantic, from http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/why-kenyans-make-such-greatrunners-a-story-of-genes-and-cultures/256015/ Fisher, M. (2012, Aug. 3). “Neither the Will nor the Cash: Why India Wins So Few Olympic Medals.” The Atlantic, from http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/neither-the-will-nor-the-cashwhy-india-wins-so-few-olympic-medals/260693/ Hoffman, R., Ging, L. C., & Ramasamy, B. (2002). “Public Policy and Olympic Success.”

Applied Economics Letters, 9(8), 545-548.

Johnson, D. K., & Ali, A. (2004). “A Tale of Two Seasons: Participation and Medal Counts at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.” Social Science Quarterly, 85(4), 974-93.

Official website of the Olympic movement. Retrieved February 12, 2013, from www.olympic.org.

PricewaterhouseCoopers. (2012, June). “Modelling Olympic Performance.” From http://www.pwc.com/mu/en/pressroom/assets/Olympic_medals_paper_2012_final.pdf Rathke, A., & Ulrich, W. (2007). “Economics and Olympics: An Efficiency Analysis.”

University of Zurich Working Paper No. 313.

Trivedi, P. K., & Zimmer, D. M. (2013). “Success at the Summer Olympics: How Much Do Economic Factors Explain?” from http://people.wku.edu/david.zimmer/index_files/draft_olympic_revised.pdf

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Multimodal Fiction and Mediated Boyhood: The Changing Construction of Contemporary Teenaged Masculinity as a Result of Convergent Storytelling James (Sam) Kizer Sam Kizer is a senior Communication major with a concentration in Media and Popular Culture and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. His interest in mediated storytelling arose while taking his advisor, Dr. Jenn Brandt’s, “Women, Gender, and Culture” course in the fall of 2012.

Working with her has been the most fulfilling part of undergraduate research for Kizer as it has allowed him to integrate ideas from his independent study into his classes while gaining insight into the field. Dr. Brandt has also had a large impact in cultivating his professional goal of becoming a professor. After graduation, Kizer will pursue a Master of Arts degree in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Abstract Young men growing up as Millennials have experienced a radically different response to media than their parents. As opposed to passive consumers, contemporary adolescent males are active participants in media; they are an embodiment of the explosive interactions between powerful producers and powerful consumers. This allows their individual and collective narratives of 21st century masculinity to guide and construct, as well as be guided and constructed by, convergent media. Drawing from Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Stacey J. T. Hust’s Exploring Boys’ Uses and Gratifications of Media in Their Personal Spaces, this paper analyzes the relationship between boys’ responses to media, their uses for media, and their understanding of media as narrative agents; additionally, it examines how this relationship’s interaction with convergent media creates fresh ideas of masculinity among teenaged boys. To that end, this paper examines boys’ involvement on the microblogging platform Tumblr, and proposes that the site serves as a medium to negotiate definitions of contemporary masculinity through convergent storytelling. _________________________________________________________________________

I

n a patriarchal culture laden with images of hypermasculinity, it is all too easy for young boys and teenagers to aspire towards an essentialized manhood.

Everything from Saturday morning advertisements to mature video games falls

victim to the longstanding hegemonic narrative of over-sexualized, white, wealthy, and unquestionably straight men subjugating women and other men to their arbitrary cultural rule. Interestingly, many young male teenagers are not buying into a singular 36

Innovation: Journal of Scholarly and Creative Works

definition of masculinity; rather, they are subverting the very images they consume into vehicles to convey their own ideals of masculinities by employing new media.

Media have converged into a multifaceted platform these boys can employ, perhaps unknowingly, to gain a sense of agency, by extension creating an environment ripe for an ideological shift. In spite of stiff patriarchal values, these boys understand and use convergent media as narrative agents to utilize in the discourse for a broadened construction of masculinity. By establishing interactive and participatory communication routes between boys of different classes, races, family backgrounds, and sexual orientations, media have allowed for the future generation of men to synthesize many different ideals in the quest to redefine the contemporary masculine ideal. Specifically, this paper discusses how Tumblr, the popular micro-blogging platform, serves as an integrated Internet experience providing young men an outlet to discuss masculine ideals, in turn contributing to the larger discourse of masculinity in contemporary culture by challenging the ideals of their parents’ generation.

The 21st century has brought forth a fundamentally different approach to media in both form and function. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins argues that the “power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (15). Media have converged in such a way that consumers and producers are no longer separate entities; they are interconnected in a battle for hegemonic power across multiple platforms.

Consumers have the added task of bonding together through discourse to author a narrative combining both mass-produced mediated texts and homegrown mediated tidbits. For instance, as Stacey J. T. Hust,

2014

Assistant Professor of Communication at Washington State University, argues in “Exploring Boys’ Uses and Gratifications of Media in Their Personal Spaces,” the emergence of massive multiplayer (MMP) video games allows boys to connect with each other not only in context of the game itself, but also through the dialogue players have amongst themselves about the game and, inevitably, about their lives (Hust 210).

MMP games highlight two principles needed to understand how boys construct their narrative: interactivity and participation. Convergent media function in the context of both; they cannot function independently of one another. Interactivity refers to the potential engagement a consumer can demonstrate in a prestructured technological environment. Gamers can only utilize an MMP text to the extent the designer intended (Jenkins 146).

Participation, however, is much less concrete. It has more to do with cultural protocol than media and, as a result, allows consumers to impose a function on any given text. They are able to participate in the production and distribution of cultural goods on their own terms through this dialogue (Jenkins 147).

Examining Tumblr reveals that the platform functions quite similarly to MMP games, although on a much greater scale.

The framework of the micro-blog (the interactivity) allows for a multitude of different mediums simultaneously, and creation and distribution of content is both simple and rapid. Content can be found simply by searching for tags or by perusing blogs themselves. Each individual microblog has two main interfaces: the dash and the personal blog. The dash allows for users to access all content posted by other Tumblr users they follow, and users can scroll infinitely until there is no more to view.

From this, users can “reblog” posts on the dash to their own blog, and Tumblr

37

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automatically links content back to its original poster, and also includes a list of notes with everyone who has reblogged or liked the content. By extension, anything a users post on their own blog can be reblogged by their followers. Thus, an extended network of users with access to multiple mediums comprises Tumblr interactivity.

Tumblr participation is relevant to individual users, and overarching themes are hard to pinpoint. The site does not release data on demographics, but most third-party reports agree that 46% of all users are male, and 50% of all users are between 18-24 years of age1. It is logical to believe that young men participate in Tumblr activity.

As for how they are using Tumblr, no hard data are available; however, exploring and analyzing content posted in blogs run by 1824 year old males often leads to themes of liberalism, religious neutrality, gender fluidity, and universal equality.

Additionally, content promoting feminist activism is prevalent. These ideals counter those of patriarchal masculinity, and while it is not safe to assume that these young men are all political activists, they are definitely engaging in a discourse of counterpatriarchal ideas. In fact, since blogging is an activity commonly associated with femininity as a result of its self-expressive and conversational nature, these male bloggers are inherently demonstrating an openness to stand against gender constructs by utilizing this medium.

Hust extensively studied how teenaged boys employ the root theories of media convergence by highlighting the necessity for three key components: personal space, interactive space, and participatory space.

Having all three zones exist simultaneously provides the agency boys need to create a dialogue amongst themselves and to feel comfortable doing so (Hust 204). This, of course, is crucial if boys are to understand

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masculinity in expanded settings, since that requires liberation from intrusive surroundings (i.e. family background, high school) and allows them access to a world with like-minded yet radically different boys who can collectively interact in it. Producers take notice when boys interact in the texts they have created for them, and technological advancements allow companies to track trends among such a complexly narrow demographic, especially considering that it is harder to engage them in these spaces than it is to engage women.

A boy’s personal space—his physical surroundings—offers insight as to how and why he is consuming media (Hust 198).

Demographics set the stage for both the technological and qualitative aspects of media consumption. For example, of the environments studied, Hust found that boys from white, middle to upper class nuclear families with media technology in both private bedrooms and “bonus room” spaces were more likely to have the newest equipment and to use media solely for entertainment, whereas boys from black, middle to lower class non-nuclear families were markedly more prone to use media to establish social connections that otherwise might not develop, using older technology (Hust 200). Since Tumblr is a relatively new platform, emerging in 2007, its potential is exclusive to those who have access to recent technological advancements, and while boys with this access do indeed use Tumblr primarily for entertainment, they are also quite active in discussing the images they consume on the site. This discrepancy provides the framework for how boys function in both their interactive and participatory spaces.

Involvement in the interactive space hones in on the relationship between a boy and his media and defines the state of being in the mediated, as opposed to personal, realm. A boy has left his physical

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Innovation: Journal of Scholarly and Creative Works

surrounding and has fully immersed himself in media (Hust 200). Every word he utters, every step he takes, and every goal he does or does not achieve happens within the parameters of the page, sound, and/or screen; his human personality and his media persona marry. Because of this, an interesting paradigm emerges. The physical reality and the mediated reality do not align, prompting both intra and interpersonal communication regarding the causes and effects of this, resulting in fruitful media participation. Hust notes in her study that boys “fully integrate or are ‘transported’ into the narrative and leave the reality behind, like being lost in the book” (Hust 210).

Among the boys she observed, most of them used at least one medium (video gaming) to convey their emotions and thought processes through a self-dictated and self-monitored portal, i.e. a gaming avatar. One subject mentioned how he handles his anger by tackling other players in virtual football, while another offers insight into his fantasy world created as an escape from the stress of school (Hust 211). Boys are able to create and maintain lasting impressions of them and share them with other boys through an alternative universe, essentially supplying a dialogue they are unable to use in their everyday realities. On Tumblr, boys create personas for themselves as they run their blogs and communicate with other bloggers.

They engage in “Tumblr speak,” including using the popular phrases “what is air?” to describe extreme excitement, and “I can’t even” to indicate disdain for illogical messages. The latter is sometimes indicative of political commentary and is usually followed by a remarkably insightful, albeit colorful, response. The use of specialized blog lingo, combined with the multi-pronged nature of Tumblr, provides boys a rich interactive space.

The last of the three spaces required for boys to engage in productive discourse, the

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participatory space, is perhaps the most important. It is here that media convergence takes place. Consumers discuss media in three main contexts: across multiple platforms, among other consumers, and among other consumers across multiple platforms (Jenkins 15). This is particularly prevalent in sports media, as Adi Adams, Eric Anderson, and Mark McCormack discuss in “Establishing and Challenging Masculinity: The Influence of Gendered Discourses in Organized Sport.” Discussions of masculinity occur between players, between coaches and players, between players and non-players, among non-players, and in the media (Adams et al. 294). This same multiplatform approach can be applied to all media and any array of ideologies, though, and Hust notes in her study that all of her subjects participated in media to a noticeable degree (Hust 201).

The participatory space is definitely applicable to Tumblr, as boys utilize the site to communicate in three key ways. They are able to send direct messages to other bloggers on the site, and the recipient has the option of publishing the message or keeping it private. In most instances, though, users send messages as “anonymous,” and the post must be published to the blog when answered, which usually prompts a larger discussion among the blog’s followers.

Additionally, Tumblr posts often link to media on other websites, with YouTube being the most prevalent. “Moving” pictures, or .gif sets, often lead back to the original video, and audio posts list other places to find similar sounds. With this in mind, boys often link other social media outlets to their Tumblr pages (Twitter is the most common) and invite their followers to connect via these mediums, as well. This adds depth to both direct communication and content dissemination, creating a multiplatform approach for online communication.

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When boys’ participation, interactivity, and media spaces mesh, they create agency.

Unfortunately, not all boys have access to all of the elements, and this is evidenced in exploring Tumblr. White males run most blogs operated by the teenaged male demographic, and of those, many appear to blog from smart phone technologies. This leaves the luxury of personal media spaces reserved for those who can afford them, leaving a large demographic of teenage males out of the conversation since they cannot use Tumblr to access the interactive and participatory spaces it offers. Certainly, Tumblr does not condone themes of racism or wealth-centricity, but its very nature is directed towards a white audience and those without economic means lack access.

The boys who do have access, though, have more power than they might realize.

Media are creating and maintaining multiple approaches to masculinity, and that is not by accident. Teenagers, both male and female, have an intrinsic desire to “find themselves,” and that demands a guiding image. One image, one version of masculinity, is entirely insufficient, and when that realization combines with convergent media and productive spaces, boys are able to attract the attention of producers merely by consuming the product in all of its forms (Hust 207). Brenda Cooper, in “Boys Don’t Cry and Female Masculinity: Reclaiming a Life & Dismantling the Politics of Normative Heterosexuality,” discusses this phenomenon in terms of the film Boys Don’t Cry and how it was the discussion of the film, not just its content, that paved the way for challenging contemporary thought on masculinity (Cooper 49). Likewise, blogging as a mediated activity is just as important as the content users post, since allowing media to spread rapidly to large audiences is key to engaging users. Tumblr’s effectiveness among teenaged males is achieved by including not only vast amounts of

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multimedia posts, but also by providing a near limitless space in which to share, analyze, and critique these messages, and by allowing these processes to spread across the platform. Young men are able to utilize Tumblr through being fully engrossed in blogging about other media, political and social movements, and most any aspect of popular culture, all by just clicking their mouse.

The relationship between teenaged males and the media has proven its significance as a narrative agent. The intricate connections between mediated texts, producers, consumers, principles of participation and interactivity, and the space in which they all collide suggest that boys stand poised to change the course of the cultural narrative. In 21st century convergent media, ideas are consumed, discussed, challenged, and recreated incessantly across multiple demographics and technological platforms. As a result, boys are shifting away from defining masculinity as one cultural product; rather, they see it as a broad spectrum of cultural products, all worthy of discourse and, by extension, value. The strict definition of masculinity as anti-feminine, heteronormative, and androcentric is being dismantled and replaced by progressive, multifaceted masculinities encompassing freedom of gender expression, freedom over one’s body, and unlimited expression of the mind.

There is no “right” way to be masculine; each and every ideal is acceptable and reconcilable with others. Teenagers are changing media by virtue of participation, and the resulting discourse is influencing both producers and consumers alike.

Hopefully, as they enter adulthood, they will have similar effects on society at-large.

Until then, they have Tumblr to disseminate their own ideals to each other and to the entire blogosphere.

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______________________________________________________________________________ Note 1. Third party agencies reporting Tumblr demographics include comScore, Hypebot, and Quantcast. All three sources monitor user traffic on domain names formatted as username.tumbr.com, where “username” represents a personal microblog. The numbers presented in this report are accurate as of May 2013.

Works Cited Adams, Adi, Eric Anderson and Mark McCormack. “Establishing and Challenging Masculinity: The Influence of Gendered Discourses in Organized Sport.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 29.3 (2010): 278-300. Web. Cooper, Brenda. “Boys Don’t Cry and Female Masculinity: Reclaiming a Life & Dismantling the Politics of Normative Heterosexuality. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 19.1 (2002). 44-63. Web. Hust, Stacey. “Exploring Boys Uses and Gratifications of Media in Their Personal Spaces.”

Mediated Boyhoods: Boys, Teens, and Young Men in Popular Media and Culture. Ed. Annete Wannamaker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2011. 197-218. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. 2006. Print.

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Beauty and the Billionaire: Evolutionary Psychology and Risk Regulation as Predictors of Partner Preference Ashlee Branch Ashlee "Tree" Branch is a junior psychology major, with minors in Women's and Gender Studies and Religion. Her research developed from a long standing interest in relationship dynamics, particularly why people seek out certain partners over others. She blended this interest with the work of her mentor, Dr. Sadie Leder Elder, on ‘risk regulation’. Branch feels this work has clarified her career goals and made her more prepared for graduate work.

She plans to go to graduate school to get her Psy.D in clinical practice in psychology. She is also considering spending some time in northern Iraq working with women's aid organizations as a counselor. Branch's mentor, Dr. Sadie Leder Elder, guided Branch through the research and publication process and expanded her opportunities beyond her expectations of what she could accomplish as an undergraduate. Branch credits Dr. Leder Elder for making her undergraduate career enriching and inspiring.

Abstract The current work examines partner selection by bridging the tenets of evolutionary psychology and risk regulation. As put forth by evolutionary theories of attraction, males and females should seek out partners who have the most desirable traits as a means of ensuring genetic fitness.

However, seeking out highly desirable partners carries an increased risk of rejection. Previous research on risk regulation has shown that people strive to balance their need for intimacy against their competing desire to avoid rejection when seeking a romantic relationship.

Accordingly, it is anticipated that when choosing romantic partners, people will consider both the desirability of an alternative, as well as the likelihood of acceptance vs. rejection by that individual. Ninety-two participants were asked to read scenarios about individuals in romantic relationships. They then rated the extent to which they thought the target individuals should remain with their current relationship partners as compared to pursue highly desirable romantic alternatives. Analyses revealed that partner preferences were impacted by rejection salience (acceptance vs. rejection priming), alternative quality (physical attractiveness vs. wealth), participant gender (male vs. female), and target gender (male vs. female). Male participants primed with rejection were particularly likely to encourage male targets to “trade up” for physically attractive romantic alternatives.

Keywords: evolutionary psychology, partner selection, risk regulation

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volutionary theories of attraction build from Darwin’s (1859) assertion that populations change over time through a process of natural selection.

Darwin posited that evolution and natural selection stem from three fundamental truths: more offspring are produced than can survive, traits that allow for survival and reproduction vary among individuals, and these traits are heritable. Stated another way, this theory holds that those individuals who have the most advantageous traits will be the ones to survive and reproduce.

Evolutionary theories of attraction build from these tenets to argue that partner preferences serve the important function of facilitating and increasing genetic fitness (Buss, 1988). In particular, relationships with partners who possess superior traits should lead to an increased likelihood of getting one’s genes to the next generation.

Interestingly, traits that lead to increased genetic fitness may differ by gender. That is, partner selection for men and women may be guided by the same principle (i.e., survival), but lead to markedly different types of preferences. As put forth by Trivers (1972), the key to mate selection may lie in the size and type of investment that each gender must make in the process of reproduction. The parental investment model states that women are more selective in choosing mates than their male counterparts. This is largely attributed to the greater investment by women in reproduction, child-bearing, and childrearing. Therefore, women must be incredibly selective, seeking only the partners with the best genes to ensure that the effort they put into mating and reproduction will be worth their while.

More recent research has found that women predominantly seek men who have the resources available to be “good providers” (Kenrick, Sedalla, Groth, & Trost, 1990). In the modern context this

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usually refers to men who have wealth and financial stability. Women seek resources because this material wealth serves as an indication that the man would be able to provide for her and their offspring, giving the woman’s genes the best chance of survival.

On the contrary, men do not need to be as selective when choosing a mate because they are not risking as much in the process of reproduction. Because their investment in a child can be as minimal as a one-time donation of sperm, they should demonstrate different partner selection preferences (Trivers, 1972). Rather than seek a mate who possesses the potential to be a good provider, they must instead seek partners who are likely to be fertile and able to carry their genes into the next generation. In particular, men seek partners who are highly attractive and show signs of youth and fertility (e.g., clear skin, long hair, firm muscle tone, facial symmetry). This is because these traits are believed to signify health and reproductive capability (Buss & Schmitt, 1993).

A host of research supports these differential mate selection preferences. In particular, Buss (1988) studied the traits that were the most effective in determining mate selection. He assessed the behaviors exhibited by both men and women during the partner selection process and determined which traits and behaviors led to the most success in selection. He found that resource display was a more effective tactic for men than for women, whereas efforts to increase attractiveness were more effective for women than men. In addition, Townsend and Levy (1990) found that while both men and women rank partner attractiveness as an important component of selection, men rank it higher than women. Men and women also both found socio-economic status to be of importance in mate selection, though women ranked it as much higher across the board.

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Although there seems to be some consistency on what attracts someone to a partner, one’s level of connection to that partner is another component to consider.

Fisher (2000) evaluated the three primary emotion systems that are important for mating, reproduction, and parenting (lust, attraction, and attachment, respectively).

She evaluated these three systems using fMRI imaging and found that the systems operated independently in such a way that enables attachment to a partner, without inhibiting their ability to seek out potential romantic alternatives. The independent operation of the three systems could allow men to pursue other reproductive opportunities and women to establish resourcefully advantageous friendships with other men. Interestingly, this could be a mode of self-protection and risk reduction for both men and women, because it keeps them aware of mating options outside of their relationship. The autonomous nature of each emotional system may serve to enhance genetic fitness by allowing an individual to “keep their options open” and remain unfettered should a partner with more evolutionarily advantageous qualities emerge.

The idea of reducing relationship risk is an important subject of study in social psychology. The risk regulation model proposes that people must balance their need for connectedness against their desire to avoid rejection (Murray, Holmes, & Collins, 2006). At the root of this theory lies Baumeister and Leary’s (1995) assertion that people are motivated by an intrinsic need to belong - or a need to engage in and maintain a minimal number of positive interpersonal relationships. This theory suggests that people want to experience positive, supportive, and enduring relationships with others. In fact, research has shown that those who have these types of relationships tend to live longer, more

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satisfying lives (Baumeister & Leary 1995; Liu & Reczek, 2012). In light of these findings, it is interesting yet necessary to consider why people sometimes avoid interpersonal relationships. As Murray and colleagues have established, by their very nature, relationships increase people’s vulnerability to hurt (Murray, Holmes, & Collins, 2006; Murray, Derrick, Leder, & Holmes, 2008). The goal, according to risk regulation, is to have a fulfilling relationship while minimizing the risk of rejection.

There are a number of ways that people can regulate their dependence on a partner or relationship to decrease the likelihood of hurt and rejection. Within established relationships, people often use perceptions of their partner’s positive regard as a gauge to whether it is safe to seek closeness (Murray, Bellavia, Rose, & Griffin, 2003).

If people believe their partners view them benevolently and are willing to respond to their needs in a supportive fashion, then they are more likely to have the confidence needed to open up to them. However, when people feel as if their needs would not be met positively, they may opt instead to minimize their exposure to potential rejection by distancing themselves from their partner.

Another possible measure that could impact an individual’s assessment of risk is the perception of being irreplaceable to a relationship partner (Murray, Leder, MacGregor, Holmes, Pinkus, & Harris, 2009). Feeling irreplaceable provides the assurance that it is okay to be dependent and vulnerable. Although most people desire to feel as if no one else could take their place, the reality is that many relationships do not last, and eventually many partners will be replaced (Copen, Daniels, Vespa, & Mosher, 2012). In fact, an assessment of available alternatives as more attractive than a current partner may lead to decreased dependence and ultimate separation, even in situations

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where relationship partners are otherwise satisfied (Crawford, Feng, Fischer, & Diana, 2003; Kelly & Thibaut, 1978). Accordingly, a consideration of one’s alternatives, as well as one’s partner’s available alternatives, may factor in to overall willingness to risk vulnerability and connection. It may be prudent to have an awareness of a partner’s available alternatives. To the degree that they are deemed unlikely to match what the individual brings to the relationship, the individual may experience a feeling of confidence. When an individual can trust that their partner will continue to be responsive to and interested in them, it gives them assurance and lessens the risk of rejection.

The current study aims to bridge what is known about partner selection from the evolutionary theory of attraction with what has been put forth from the risk regulation perspective. As detailed, people have a number of strategies for selecting a relationship partner, and the particular strategy utilized may be the result of a number of factors. We hypothesize that people should show a preference for partners with evolutionarily adaptive traits. That is, we expect men to “trade-up” more readily for attractive alternatives, whereas women will “trade-up” more readily for wealthy alternatives. However, we anticipate that rejection salience will impact ultimate partner preferences. In an attempt to balance competing desires for connection and protection, participants may differentially prioritize the risk of drawing closer to an established relationship vs. seeking connection with a new and highly desirable partner. Therefore we hypothesize that participants primed with rejection will be more likely to pursue a new relationship with someone who has not been identified as a source of rejection. This work endeavors to uncover the balance people may strike when determining whether it is better to stay

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with a current relationship partner or “trade up” to pursue a potential alternative with more desirable traits. In accordance with the parental investment model, men and women are anticipated to calculate the benefits of safety and security differently, as well as show a preference for different partner attributes.

Method Participants The participants were 95 undergraduates from a private liberal arts university recruited from the introductory psychology classes’ participant pool. The data from three participants were eliminated: one for reporting same-sex orientation and two for failing to complete the rejection manipulation. The final sample consisted of 92 (70 female, 22 male) participants, who were between 18-21 years old (M=19.37, SD=.72). Forty-seven participants (51.1%) reported being single at the time of participation, 38 (41.3%) reported being in an exclusive dating relationship, and seven (7.6%) were casually dating. The majority of participants were White (84.8%), followed by 8.7% African American, 4.3% Asian, 1.1% Native American, and 1.1% self-identified as “other.”

Materials Relationship scenarios. Hypothetical relationship scenarios were developed detailing information about an individual in a romantic relationship (see Appendix).

Each participant read two scenarios: one about a man named “John” and another about a woman named, “Alice.” For each target individual, the scenarios included information about that person’s current relationship partner, as well as a potential relationship alternative. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions

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that manipulated the romantic alternatives’ qualities. They either received information about the current partner and a romantic alternative described as extremely attractive or received information about the current partner and a romantic alternative described as extremely wealthy. Participants then rated how much they would encourage the target individual to pursue a relationship with the current partner as well as the romantic alternative using a scale that ranged from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very much).

Procedure Participants began by completing computerized questionnaires assessing background and demographic information.

Then, participants completed an autobiographical recall task. In order to manipulate rejection salience, half of the participants were randomly assigned to write about a rejection experience and half were asked to recall an acceptance experience. In the rejection condition, participants wrote about a recent interaction with a close friend or family member, in which they felt intensely rejected or excluded. In the acceptance condition, participants wrote about a recent interaction with a close friend or family member in which they felt intensely accepted or included. (The acceptance condition was utilized as the control group based on previous work revealing no statistical difference in participants completing an acceptance vs. control reliving task, see Leder & Murray, 2008). Next, participants read and evaluated two relationship scenarios. For each scenario, participants rated the degree to which they would encourage the target individual to stay with his/her current partner, as well as the degree to which they would encourage him/her to “trade up” for a romantic alternative with more

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evolutionarily desirable qualities (i.e., physical attractiveness or wealth).

Results We began by creating a difference score to be utilized as our dependent variable.

This difference score indexed the tendency for participants to encourage the target to stay with the current partner as compared to purse the alternative partner. To calculate the difference score, we subtracted participants’ ratings of how much they encouraged the target individual to pursue the available alternative from how much they encouraged the target individual to stay with his/her current relationship partner. A positive difference score indicated preference for the current partner, while a negative difference score indicated a preference for an alternative. A large difference score represented a strong preference for the current romantic partner over available alternatives. As each participant gave ratings for both the male (John) and female (Alice) scenarios, we created two separate difference scores to be utilized as dependent variables.

We then conducted a 2 (Rejection Salience: acceptance vs. rejection) x 2 (Alternative Quality: attractiveness vs. wealth) x 2 (Participant Gender: male vs. female) x 2 (Target Gender: male vs. female) mixed factorial ANOVA. Results revealed a significant two-way interaction of rejection salience x target gender F(1, 77) = .19, MSE = 4.36, p < .01, a two-way interaction of alternative quality x target gender F(1, 77) = 1.14, MSE = 4.36, p = .02, a three-way interaction of rejection salience x participant gender x target gender F(1, 77) = 2.57, MSE = 4.36, p = .03, and a four-way interaction of rejection salience, alternative quality, participant gender, and target gender, F(1, 77) = 5.09, MSE = 4.36, p = .03. This four-way interaction accounted for

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primed with rejection and evaluating a physically attractive alternative were significantly more likely to encourage “trading up” as compared to any of the other conditions (p < .05) (i.e., rejection/wealth; acceptance/wealth, and acceptance/attractiveness). In line with predictions, male participants showed a preference for the pursuit of highly attractive partners, but only when rejection risk was salient. Thus, priming risk may make males particularly sensitive to seeking out evolutionarily desirable partners

Difference Score (Pref for Current - Alt Partner)

6.2% of the variability in difference scores and the power of this interaction was 0.61.

As seen in Figure 1, across all possible conditions, participant generally encouraged the target individuals to stay with their current partners (i.e., positive difference scores), as compared to pursue the available romantic alternatives (i.e., negative difference scores). The exception to this tendency was found for male participants’ ratings of male targets in the rejection condition when the alternative was described as physically attractive. Post-hoc analyses confirmed that among male participants rating male targets, those

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Figure 1. Difference scores of partner preference for male and female targets by male and female participants for each rejection salience and alternative quality combination.

Post-hoc independent samples t-tests revealed that when primed with rejection and presented with a physically attractive alternative, male participants were more likely to encourage male targets to “trade up” as compared to female targets (p < .05).

Similarly, male participants’ ratings for male targets in this condition were also significantly different from female participants’ ratings for either male or female targets (p < .05).

Looking at post-hoc analyses for participants in the acceptance condition who

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rated attractive alternatives, we find that male participants’ ratings of male targets were significantly different from female participants’ ratings for female targets (p < .05). Similarly, female participants’ ratings for male targets statistically differed from female participants’ ratings of female targets (p < .05). In both cases, participants rating male targets were significantly more likely to encourage “trading up” as compared to participants rating female targets. In keeping with predictions and evolutionary theories of partner preference, physically attractive alternatives were rated as less desirable for female targets as compared to their male counterparts.

We also examined participants’ responses to wealthy alternatives. Although unexpected, post-hoc analyses revealed that in both the rejection and acceptance conditions, male participants were more likely to encourage male targets to “trade up.” Specifically, in the rejection condition, male participants’ were more likely to encourage male targets as compared to female targets to “trade up” for wealthy alternatives (p < .05). Also, when primed with acceptance and presented with a wealthy alternative, male participants’ ratings for male targets were significantly different from all other conditions. These participants were more likely to encourage “trade-up” as compared to male participants’ ratings for female targets (p < .05), as well as female participants’ ratings for both male and female targets (p < .05).

Discussion In line with predictions, findings indicate that rejection salience, alternative quality, and gender impact partner selection preferences. In particular, it was found that male participants were more likely to encourage male targets to “trade up” for physically attractive alternatives when

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rejection concerns are primed. Additionally, results tended to show that male targets were encouraged to “trade up” more than female targets, particularly when the available alternative was physically attractive.

Evolutionary theories of attraction state that males should seek out partners who are physically attractive, as appearance may help to assess a potential partner’s fertility and reproductive ability. The findings of the current study are in line with these claims.

Even when evaluating a hypothetical relationship scenario, male targets were encouraged to place a premium on physical attractiveness and were more likely to be encouraged to “trade up” for alternative partners with this particular trait.

An interesting twist on this finding was that rejection priming influenced male participants’ preferences. As put forth by risk regulation theories, people must continually strike a balance between their desire to connect and their desire to selfprotect against rejection. Asking participants to recall a time in which they had been rejected or excluded by a close other should have brought to mind the potential for hurt that can be associated with connection. This, in turn, impacted the way that participants behaved.

In this study, it appears that male participants responded to rejection priming by balancing their competing drives for intimacy and protection by encouraging the male targets to show a preference for pursuing those with optimal traits for reproductive success. This may be a strategic means for maximizing genetic fitness and thereby ensuring the “protection” or survival of their genes. In this particular situation, priming rejection may lead men to calculate risk in terms of the damage that may result from failing to select the partner with the most evolutionarily adaptive traits, rather than in terms of personal hurt that may occur from having an alternative with

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highly sought-after qualities reject their romantic interest.

The fact that when primed with rejection participants’ ratings of female targets did not show the same tendency to prioritize connection to an evolutionarily desirable romantic alternative may suggest that for women’s competing desires are balanced differently. For females, greater emphasis may be placed on maintaining an established relationship. In light of the increased investment women make in reproduction, the attractiveness of “security” that a current partner offers may surpass the desirability of one that offers only the potential to be a good provider. Quite likely, this may be a strategic means for maximizing safety and connection. For women, people may acknowledge the increased safety (and minimized risk of hurt and rejection) associated with staying with the current partner over pursuing someone with highly sought-after traits.

Another possible explanation for our findings may be that people are socially constructed to believe that men should seek out highly attractive partners to confirm their sense of masculinity. Media messages prescribe a certain version of masculinity as being superior. In these messages men are told that in order to prove themselves as a man, they must not only find the most attractive female partner, but that they must have multiple partners. This could explain the gender difference in which men were more likely to be encouraged to seek an alternative than women. Rejection priming may serve to increase this culturally developed behavioral tendency, which is why in this study we failed to see women being encouraged to seek out alternative partners.

One final point worth noting is that people’s partner selection preferences may differ to the extent that they anticipate a relationship to be short-term as compared to

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long-term. For instance, men show significantly more concern about a woman’s socio-economic status when they were pursuing a relationship that could result in marriage. There also seems to be consideration of the quality of economic resources. Jonason, Norman, and Madson (2011) found that individuals, particularly women, preferred partners who earned their money, as opposed to won or inherited it, as it indicated more stability for the long-term.

The current study did not assess whether the participants’ advice to the target was based on perceptions of a short- vs. long-term relationship, and this lack of clarification may have impacted obtained results.

Limitations and Future Directions The current work was not without limitations. For instance, one limitation of our study was that we did not have a large male sample (n = 22). However, we believe that our findings are robust enough to be evident even with the limited number of male participants we were able to recruit.

An examination of previous research on the topic provides confidence in the results put forth within this paper. Secondly, because of the participant pool that was utilized, this work is based on a fairly homogeneous population of mostly White, middle-upper class, private university students. As the tenets of evolutionary psychology and risk regulation are theorized to be universally applicable to different ethnicities, socialeconomic statuses, and cultures, this limitation should also not compromise the findings put forth in this paper. Thirdly, the current work makes use of hypothetical paradigms rather than real life experience.

This may have led participants to be less invested in the proposed relationship outcomes or more polarized in their opinions and unreflective of how they would have behaved in reality. In answer to this, we

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believe similar studies that have employed hypothetical scenarios provide a foundation for the external validity of such methods. A final limitation of this study is that the hypothetical target scenarios are dissimilar between John and Alice. The scenarios differ in relationship duration and stability, as well as age of target. Initially, this discrepancy was included so that participants would not blindly provide identical responses from one scenario to the next, and would instead have to contemplate their responses. However, these differences may have impacted the results we obtained.

In the current analysis, we were able to include target gender as a variable under

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investigation to account for such differences.

However, future replications and extensions of this work may employ more similar scenarios.

Conclusion We believe that this study is an important step towards furthering our understanding of the complex relationship between evolutionary theories of attraction and risk regulation with regard to partner selection. In particular, we have been able to shine some light on the circumstances under which a partner may choose to abandon their current relationship and “trade up” for an alternative.

______________________________________________________________________________

References Aiken, L. S., & West, S. G. (1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions.

New York: Sage Publications.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529.

Buss, D. M. (1988). The evolution of human intrasexual competition: Tactics of mate attraction.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 616-628.

Buss, D. M. & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204-232.

Copen, C. E., Daniels, K., Vespa, J., & Mosher, W. D. (2012). First marriages in the United States: Data from the 2006-2010 national survey of family growth. National Health Statistics Reports, 49 1-21.

Crawford, D. W., Feng, D., Fischer, J. L., & Diana L. K., (2003). The influence of love, equity, and alternatives on commitment in romantic relationships. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 13, 253–271.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species. London: John Murray.

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Fisher, H. (2000). Lust, attraction, attachment: Biology and evolution of the three primary emotion systems for mating reproduction and parenting. Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, 25, 96-104.

Jonason, P. K., Norman, P. L. I., & Madson, L. (2011). It is not all about the benjamins: Understanding preferences for mates with resources. Personality and Individual Differences, 52, 306-310.

Kelley, H. H. & Thibaut, J. W. (1978). Interpersonal relations: A theory of interdependence.

New York: Wiley-Interscience.

Kenrick, D. T., Sadalla, E. K., Groth, G., & Trost, M. R. (1990). Evolution, traits, and the stages of human courtship: Qualifying the parental investment model. Journal of Personality, 58, 97-116.

Leder, S., & Murray, S. L. (2008). When highly desirable partners are less attractive: A model of strategic partner selection aimed at balancing the goals of connection and selfprotection. Unpublished manuscript, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Liu, H. & Reczek, C. (2012). Cohabitation and U.S. adult mortality: An examination by gender and race. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74, 1741-3737.

Murray, S. L., Bellavia, G. M., Rose, P., & Griffin, D. W. (2003). Once hurt, twice hurtful: How perceived regard regulates daily marital interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 126-147.

Murray, S. L., Derrick, J. L., Leder, S., & Holmes, J. G. (2008). Balancing connectedness and self-protection goals in close relationships: A levels-of-processing perspective on risk regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 429-459.

Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Collins, N. L. (2006). Optimizing assurance: The risk regulation system in relationships. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 641-666.

Murray, S. L., Leder, S., MacGregor, J. C. D., Holmes, J. G., Pinkus, R. T, & Harris, B. (2009).

Becoming irreplaceable: How comparisons to the partnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s alternatives differentially affect low and high self-esteem people. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1180-1191.

Townsend, J. M., & Levy, G. D. (1990). Effects of potential partnersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; physical attractiveness an socioeconomic status on sexuality and partner selection. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 19, 149-164 Trivers, R.L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company.

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Appendix Relationship Scenarios Scenario One: It is John’s first semester of college and he has been dating a girl back home for 5 weeks. They have similar backgrounds and interests. All of his friends like her and they get along great.

If you were John’s friend, how much would you encourage him to: Alt1: Go out with a girl he met at a coffee shop. She is really beautiful and has even done some modeling.

Alt2: Go out with the daughter of the billionaire.

Alt3: Stay with his current partner.

Scenario Two: Alice is dating an officer in the military stationed abroad. While he does not make a lot of money, when at home he cooks and is “Mr. Fix-it.” For their last anniversary he took her on a romantic picnic and picked her flowers.

If you were Alice’s friend, how much would you encourage her to: Alt1: Go out with a highly successful businessman she met at a charity benefit who owns a private yacht.

Alt2: Go out with a really hot guy she met at a coffee shop who does some acting and modeling.

Alt3: Stay with her current partner.

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Virginia Woolf’s Androgynous Ideal: The Procreative Mind in Mrs. Dalloway Devan Plyler Devan Hirst Plyler is a junior majoring in English Writing. Her interest for her manuscript developed after she was introduced to Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” The most fulfilling part of her research has been learning through trial and error while identifying which rhetorical techniques are not effective to hone in on more important evidence. Plyler’s mentor, Dr. Matthew Carlson, has been her prime supporter throughout her work on the paper. He has inspired Plyler to work even harder and care about literature to the extent that he does.

Abstract This essay aims to examine character relationships in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as they relate to Woolf’s androgynous ideal and the artistic endeavors she expresses in her essay “Modern Fiction.” Through the process of creating art, the androgynous artist reconciles his or her multifaceted identity to create multidimensional art. The nature of this introspection shows us how Woolf uses a given character’s aptitude for empathy and actualization to indicate a regeneration and reproduction of the creative mind. By establishing androgyny as the encompassing union of biological parts and by viewing life in art as the exploration of the human consciousness, one can interpret the androgynous intellectual process as a birth where prosperity is made possible by a character’s ability to understand and organize multiple perspectives both internal and external to the self.

Keywords: androgyny, introspection, birth, empathy, creativity

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

-- Albert Einstein

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his essay aims to examine character relationships in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as they relate to Woolf’s androgynous ideal and the artistic

endeavors she expresses in her essay “Modern Fiction.” Through the process of creating art, the androgynous artist reconciles his or her multifaceted identity to

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create multidimensional art. The nature of this introspection shows us how Woolf uses a given character’s aptitude for empathy and actualization to indicate a regeneration and reproduction of the creative mind. By establishing androgyny as the encompassing union of biological parts and by viewing life in art as the exploration of the human consciousness, one can interpret the androgynous creative process as a birth where social, intellectual, and artistic prosperity is made possible by a character’s ability to understand and organize multiple perspectives both internal and external to the self.

It is impossible to properly assess androgynous characters in Mrs. Dalloway without alluding to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where upon watching a man and woman share a taxi-cab, Woolf meditates on how androgyny might serve to benefit the creative mind: [W]hen I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate . . . the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body . . . I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female . . . If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.

Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous.

It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any

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more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by manwomanly, and conversely by womanmanly. (97) Woolf uses the taxi-cab as a space to unify gender, the composition of the cab now being partly masculine and partly feminine.

Her rhetoric sexualizes the union of these parts, describing a co-operative natural fusion between these different entities. The cab as a whole represents a body of androgyny (see Fig. 1); the intercourse between masculine and feminine parts within that space links androgyny to conception and birth.

Fig. 1. The taxi-cab as a body of androgyny, also Woolf’s androgynous ideal. We come to understand how androgyny is the enveloping of variant parts.

But this interaction transcends gender; in fact, Woolf sketches the human soul as a spectrum of man-womanly or womanmanly, rendering both the man and woman in the cab as androgynous and neutralizing gender altogether; her sketches shift our focus to the mind, permitting us to view the cab as a space occupied by two people, each with their own subjective experience of life, but within themselves1 divided (see Fig. 2).

Within the cab, these androgynous minds interact and become conscious of one another. The basis of their connection shifts from copulation to empathy, a connection based on psychic intuition activated by

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introspection, using the parts within themselves as a means to understand a consciousness that transcends their own— the life and vitality in the androgynous mind being a mutual awareness cultivated by an inherent ability to identify others with oneself.

Fig. 2. Two interacting androgynous entities within a single space.

Elsewhere, Woolf argues that fiction ought to reveal “the flickerings of [the] innermost flame” (“Modern Fiction” 2153), the depth of the human consciousness. She does this in her own work, writing through variations of the interior monologue; illustrating the complexity of the human psyche; connecting these multiple character perspectives; and depicting each subjective angle as a Cubistic part connected to a whole portrait of life. The taxi-cab metaphor then extends to the narrative body of Woolf’s fiction as a whole, her fiction itself being androgynous in that it collects and connects the varying, intimate, and complex perceptions of life as those perceptions interact, the androgynous sketches of the soul being her characters who are forced to introspect and reconcile multiple identities in contention within themselves. Her desire to represent life in these fragmented myriads pushes against important Victorian norms in social and literary discourse: surface-level, singlesexed interpretations of gender where men and women are characterized primarily by

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the actions surrounding their respective social positions (job, marital status, money), as housewives, heiresses, bachelors, patriarchs, maids, or as peasants.

These novels, according to Woolf, fail to address the complexity of life and the human condition. In her essay “Modern Fiction,” she attributes these faults in literature to “materialist” authors like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, whose novels have yet to explore “how . . . these characters live, and what . . . they live for” (2151-53). In regard to materialist representations of men and women and life, Woolf asks, “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” (2152). In her essay, Woolf argues against materialist traditions and says instead that life, for modernist writers, “lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” (2153). As an artist, she is concerned with illustrating life by assembling the components of the individual mind and by threading her characters’ minds together.

The question that arises, and the question this essay means to address, is how, if the artist wishes to represent these impressions on the human psyche, as Woolf obviously means to do, how does the artist imagine these variant subjective conditions? Martha C. Nussbaum, in her essay “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” argues that the task of interpreting others is doomed (733). Her reading of Woolf’s novel suggests that Lily Briscoe—functioning within To the Lighthouse as a surrogate for Virginia Woolf herself—is a failed artist, denied access to the minds of others by external communicative modes that render full expression of one’s feelings and perceptions impossible. Nussbaum views language as an “imperfect instrument,” a “general medium of exchange,” a “window” through which we are forced to

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“make ourselves available to one another” even though it is a mode that is “too crude to express what is most personal, what is deepest in the individual consciousness” (734). Nussbaum’s argument, while making valid observations in line with moderns about external connections between people, relies on Lily’s failed artistry, which is a controversial point for Nussbaum to uphold; other critics have widely explored Lily’s ability to transform life into art. To understand Lily’s ability to create life as an artist (remembering that life, according to Woolf, resides in the depths of the consciousness), despite being hindered by the limbo of Nussbaum’s communicative mode, we must revisit Woolf’s notions of the androgynous mind and recognize that the manifestation of Lily’s art was inspired by an androgynous imagination; her all-encompassing, androgynous consciousness transcends her subjective ego and is more intuitive of others and therefore made aware of her external world. The androgynous mind is at liberty to connect with others through actualizing “their” multifaceted self. These applications reveal how Woolf uses androgyny to indicate a given character’s capacity for compassion and intuition; by establishing androgyny as the biological union of many parts and by viewing life and birth in art as the exploration of the human condition, we see the extent to which Woolf—with her endeavor to crossexamine various subjective experiences— values androgynous intuition in her surrogate artists. Through their layered, creative minds, Woolf acknowledges how one’s empathetic awareness is the key to individuation as well as social and artistic prosperity.

Of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa best exemplifies the awareness required of the artist in accordance to Woolf’s androgynous ideal. She has the gift

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of “knowing people almost by instinct” (6); the full extent of her insight is first introduced during her exchange in the attic with Peter Walsh. In this section, Woolf writes interior monologue as if it were part of the dialogue, indicating a strong mutual understanding between the two characters, but it is clear that Peter does not understand Clarissa as thoroughly as she understands him; although Peter believes that he and Clarissa “[go] in and out of each other’s minds without any effort” (57), Clarissa criticizes Peter’s inability to fully read others: For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now [love] at his age, how silly! I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against, he thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife. (42) This excerpt illustrates the discrepancies between these two interior monologues and how Clarissa has more telepathic access to Peter than he has to her; while Clarissa has multiple grievances about Peter’s knife, his relationship, and his “lack of a ghost of a notion,” Peter is only able to interpret one of her issues. While he acknowledges the absurdity of his love life, he continues to stroke his knife, a phallic symbol of manhood, without any inclination of how much it annoys Clarissa. The sexual imagery here connects hyper-masculinity (or any type of gender singularity) to subjective shortsightedness.

Peter fails again to understand Clarissa; he says of her intellect, “she [is] very shrewd – and with it all, purely feminine” (70); his insular assessment of Clarissa is

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entirely surface-based, for he only sees her as feminine: a hostess, planning parties and mending dresses; however, readers have access to Clarissa’s internal dimensions, dimensions that are stifled by Victorian gender norms. Through these hidden aspects, Peter’s single-sexed image of Clarissa is disrupted.

[S]he did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. (28) Clarissa’s erection is reflective of an undeniably masculine part of her, a part that she can only express in the privacy of her attic, for the public English society would have been unwilling to accept such an alternative lifestyle, and with Clarissa’s desire to throw parties and be part of society, it is impossible for her to reveal any inconsistency from feminine gender archetypes without being entirely ostracized.

Clarissa’s contemplation of her image in the mirror introduces her struggle to reconcile her identity with social constructs: How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was

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her self—pointed; dartlike; definite.

That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting point . . . never showing a sign of all the other sides of her. (33) For Clarissa to successfully assimilate herself into prominent English society, society demands that she must assemble only the parts of her that coincide with an amiable and acceptable social persona.

Clarissa’s identity confliction maintains Woolf’s social critique of patriarchal figures like Sir William Bradshaw who superimpose unreasonable standards through what Woolf calls “divine proportion” (Mrs. Dalloway 92). The principle of Bradshaw’s divine proportion functions as the antithesis of Woolf’s androgynous ideal.

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women. (92) The tension between divine proportion and the androgynous ideal is a conflicting definition of “prosperity.” To Woolf,

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prosperity is the synchronization of paradoxical elements internal to a person, the sense of identity this synchronization establishes, and the effect self-actualization has on a person’s ability to organize interpersonal elements external to themselves. To Bradshaw, however, prosperity relies on the differences between men and women; he views them as completely separate biological entities and strictly for the purpose of reproduction, where society thrives off the continuation of men behaving “manly” and women behaving “womanly.” While Bradshaw’s ideal is like Woolf’s in that it also depends on the synchronization of paradoxical elements, his ideal refuses to acknowledge men and woman as creatures more complex than their single-sexed bodies. Woolf uses Bradshaw’s ideal to give us an example of thinking that is inherently self-contradictory and unprosperous; if men and woman then are separate, and also single-sexed, than it would render the individual—as a thinking, creative being—completely sterile.

The consequences of Bradshaw’s divine proportion are most evident in Septimus Smith who parallels Clarissa as her manwomanly double. In a sense, the two share a taxi-cab throughout Mrs. Dalloway and are connected in their mutual struggle to reconcile their androgynous identities within the confines of Victorian gender norms; Clarissa is forced to conceal her masculine attributes and homosexuality as a woman in high society, and Septimus is forced to conceal his feelings as a soldier during and after war. Masculine social expectations force Septimus into a degraded and irretrievable mental state, allowing us to see that Woolf views these objective social constructs and their suppression of the androgynous mind as a form of insanity; in fact, Woolf uses Septimus’s hyperreal inner monologue to invert our notions of what is sane versus what is insane, and we see that

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insanity is not attributed to Septimus—“his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—that he could not feel” (81)— but instead to Sir William Bradshaw’s eugenic-like prohibition of the “propagation” of social deviancy. His proportion is insidious, especially in respect to Clarissa’s and Septimus’s androgyny, and ensures that alternative lifestyles do not corrupt and undermine traditional Victorian ideals of how one ought to live.

Woolf views this monoculture, in society and in literature, as unprosperous; we have already established that Woolf understands the mind that is either purely masculine or purely feminine to be incapable of creating what Woolf would consider to be prosperous fiction. Woolf prefers that both men and women write as men and women rather than writing from a narrow, single-sexed, surface-oriented scope. Woolf explicitly rejects this singlemindedness in A Room of One’s Own, where she critiques the fiction of Rudyard Kipling and that again of John Galsworthy, likening their self-involved prose to “a masculine orgy” devoid of feminine fertility (101).

[S]ome of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there.

It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible . . . The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power.

And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface

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of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

(Woolf, A Room 100-01) In this excerpt, Woolf ties together the necessity for creators to be androgynous with the necessity for the art they produce to be androgynous; by asserting a need for the assembly of a creator’s masculine and feminine parts so that their art can be fully fertile and effectively resonate and prosper in the minds of readers, Woolf attributes the visions and awareness inspired by the union of many parts as a form of birth and creation. We come to understand the regenerative relationship between the androgynous artist and their androgynous art as a mutually beneficial process; through the process of the artist using the parts within themselves to be aware of and to create multidimensional art, they are forced to reconcile the parts in contention within themselves; the art itself is dependent on the artist’s assembly of these parts, and the artist is dependent on their art to reconcile meaning in their multifaceted identities. Let us consider, then, how Clarissa’s party is an art form associated with androgynous attributes and how Clarissa learns from her party while simultaneously organizing it.

Some scholars criticize Clarissa’s yielding compliance to high society and suppression of her deviating masculine attributes as a submissive “death of the soul” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 53). Shannon Forbes, in her essay, “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” reads Clarissa’s party as the final enacting of a confining social role which interrupts Clarissa’s disassociation from her position as a hostess, successfully reinstating her Victorian identity completely (49). Shalom Rachman interprets the denouement of Mrs. Dalloway similarly in his essay “Clarissa’s Attic: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

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Reconsidered,” arguing that Clarissa is prevented from developing her identity freely and that the only insight she gains at the end of the novel is the transient disillusionment which briefly reveals to her the meaninglessness of her social role (15).

These claims against society are firmly supported by Woolf’s disdainful ironic commentary and tragic social parody, but Woolf would not entirely be comfortable with their vilification of society as a whole.

She would take issue with their reading of society in the final party scene as being exclusively defined according to Sir William Bradshaw’s constructs; it is not the idea of society that is repulsive to Woolf, it is the way that society exists as is: as an infringement on personal freedom. These critics disappoint Woolf in that they fail to acknowledge the redemptive powers of unity—of what society could be and what it could offer the creator in regard to Woolf’s androgynous ideal.

Jacob Littleton, in his essay “Mrs. Dalloway: Portrait of the Artist as a MiddleAged Woman,” defends Clarissa’s party orchestration as “a way for [Clarissa] to act to strengthen collective being” (42), and says that Clarissa is more concerned with “expressing society’s values as part of a whole array of ideas” than paying homage to the “great names, prominent people, [and] social ladder” (44). He views her party as a meaningful organization of people within society, saying For Woolf, as for many artists of her time, the inevitable motion of human consciousness to impose order on a world without apparent meaning was itself the motive force of religion and philosophy. Artists, as knowing manipulators and expressors of consciousness, replaced priests and monarchs as actual creators of order and meaning. (42)

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Having already established the sexual imagery connoting Clarissa’s biological creative abilities and having established her uncanny perceptive qualities, we can see how Clarissa in hosting a party gives birth to a live-action drama in which she is both the director and the star. She is hyperaware of scenes and characters and how they are to interact with each other. Using her awareness of others in relationship to her art form, Clarissa is able to understand where she fits among “the people who complete [her]” by assembling these parts, each with their respective connection to a layer internal to her (143). Clarissa’s final vision, which occurs upon her hearing the news of Septimus’s death, is her process of actualizing her androgynous self by identifying with her man-womanly counterpart to whom she feels “somehow very much like” (174). In connecting with Clarissa, Septimus is indirectly able to achieve artistry; he is finally able to communicate “the truth” (62)—about life, about death—to someone who is able to perceive him, for throughout the novel he struggled to communicate his ideas and connect with others: “‘Communication is

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health; communication is happiness, communication’ he muttered. ‘What are you saying Septimus?’ Rezia asked, wild with terror, for he was talking to himself” (87).

While Septimus is unable to communicate while he is alive, he is able to communicate with Clarissa posthumously after throwing himself to his death through the window.

By returning to Nussbaum’s argument about how communication through the external world is an unsatisfactory window to the mind of others, we can see the effectiveness of Septimus’s clairvoyant access to Clarissa’s consciousness, and her to his, and how the two envelop one another through their shared androgyny.

In connecting the narratives of Clarissa and Septimus, Woolf offers a social manifesto upholding the regenerative symmetry of humanity and identity as she idealizes a process through which we can prosper and enter the future. For Woolf, with her aesthetic endeavor to explore the human contours of the mind, progress can only be achieved through the actualization of one’s self by one’s relationship to others, and reconciling the contradicting elements of their fragmented personalities in terms corresponding with the external world.

Notes 1. In her essay, “Revisiting Woolf’s Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation,” Karen Kaivola dissects Woolf’s pronoun shifts in Orlando from a singular gender subject to a collective use of “their,” arguing that it “call[s] the singularity of Orlando's identity into question, implying that human subjectivity is not reducible to a noncontradictory whole or consistently expressive of the sexed body” (235). ______________________________________________________________________________

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Works Cited Forbes, Shannon. “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association 38.1 (2005): 38-50. JSTOR. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

Kaivola, Karen. “Revisiting Woolf’s Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2 (1999): 235-61. JSTOR. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

Littleton, Jacob. “Mrs. Dalloway: Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman.” Twentieth Century Literature 41.1 (1995): 36-53. Proquest. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” New Literary History 26.4 (1995): 731-53. JSTOR. Web. 31 Mar. 2013.

Rachman, Shalom. “Clarissa’s Attic: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Reconsidered.” Twentieth Century Literature 18.1 (1972): 3-18. JSTOR. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Harper, 2013. Print.

---. “Modern Fiction.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. F. New York: Norton, 2012. 2150-55. Print.

---. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Houghton, 2005. Print.

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A Globalized Education: A Comparative Study of the International Baccalaureate and Common Core State Standards Systems Alyssa Springer Alyssa Springer is a senior and an Elementary Education major. Her interest came from living abroad and comparing multiple educational systems. During Springerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in an International Baccalaureate school, she learned how different our standards are from an international curriculum. Her research has opened her eyes not only to other methods of teaching, but how much further could take our educational standards. Working with her mentor, Dr. Leslie Cavendish, has been one of the most rewarding experiences. Springer would never have dreamed of being published or presenting her research nationally if it was not for the encouragement and help of Dr. Cavendish. She has even adjusted her goals to include teaching abroad to continue learning about international educational systems. After graduation, Springer plans to teach while finishing her fifth year for her Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Degree in Elementary Education with a concentration in Literacy.

Abstract This research investigates the elementary educational oral, written, and reading language standards of the International Baccalaureate Program and the United States Common Core State Standards. Not only will this research explain the similarities and differences of the educational philosophies and standards, but it also explores the implementation of the standards in schools. With the new Common Core implemented in the past year, education in the United States is focused on creating an internationally benchmarked set of standards in mathematics and language arts (National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], Achieve, Inc., 2008). The International Baccalaureate Program, common in international schools, has an overall goal of a globalized education extending beyond the classroom (International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO], 2009). The Common Core State Standards, used in 48 states has a goal of making students college and career ready (NGA], [CCSSO], Achieve, Inc., 2008). This paper examines the two more closely, noting important differences both within standards and in instructional practice.

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s the world continues to evolve in terms of technology and the digital age continues, educators are continually asking for a globalized education system. World Reference defines an educational system as a particular kind of instruction or training. This definition is extremely broad and can be interpreted in many different ways. Looking at the educational systems in place throughout the world, it is obvious that this definition has been interpreted differently, providing us with many educational systems to study.

Two elementary programs in particular are the focus of this comparison: The International Baccalaureate, and the United States Common Core State Standards. Each strives to be a globalized and international education system, and approaches it in very different ways.

This research began with two internships, one eight-week internship in an International Baccalaureate school in London, England, and one fifteen week internship in a North Carolina public school following the Common Core State Standards. After studying both curriculums, the following research question came about, “In elementary schools, how does the Common Core State Standards compare to a curriculum program used in international schools in regards to literacy?” Research methods include photographs, observations, interviews, lesson plans and curriculum guides from each educational system collected and documented throughout the course of each internship.

A

History The International Baccalaureate (IB) has been in place since the 1960’s. IB first introduced its Diploma Program in 1969 which was implemented at the high school level (grades 9-12). It was followed by the

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Middle Years Program (MYP) in 1994 and the Primary Years Program (PYP) in 1997.

The PYP was developed by the former International Schools Curriculum Project whose aims were to produce a common curriculum for international primary education that would suit all the learning communities represented within the group as well as to develop international-mindedness on the part of the learners (International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO], 2009.

Primary). The members of the project shared the belief that the nature of learning was to promote insight, empathy and compassion. In this respect, the IB Program is very much focused on the whole child and not just the educational standards. The IB Program developed elements such as the IB learner profile, The Key Concepts, The Transdisciplinary Themes and Skills, and the Essential Elements.

The United States’ Common Core State Standards were developed in 2009 in a state led effort with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) leading the development. The goal was to establish a single set of clear educational standards (National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], 2010 Common core state standards initiative). The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared for college and for the workforce. Students, parents, and teachers are to have a clear understanding of expectations. The Common Core State Standards are not national standards, meaning that each state chose to adopt the standards. Currently, forty five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have adopted the Common Core State Standards.

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Research Methodology Research methods included an eight week internship at an International Baccalaureate school in London, England and undergraduate experience in North Carolina public schools. This included various interviews, observations, photographs, lesson plans and curriculum guides from both the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program and the Common Core State Standards. During the eight week internship, an interview was conducted with the Primary Years Program Coordinator for the school to learn more in depth about how the curriculum is formatted, and how it is put into practice.

Observation in two different classrooms of different age groups was also conducted.

Included in the undergraduate experience in North Carolina were various internships in different grade levels and all undergraduate coursework in Elementary Education.

The findings of this research are outlined within three major categories. The student goals cover the overall goals that each program has for students in their schools. The curriculums are examined as the two are very different. They are explained and then compared. Finally, the student outcomes are examined. This includes the written curriculum and sets of standards or learner outcomes that each program has and the major similarities and differences between the two.

Student Goals There are many ways in which these two programs differ. One is the overall goals they have for their students. The IB Learner Profile consists of ten qualities that the IB schools promote. Their goal is for students to be inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded,

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caring, risk takers, balanced, and reflective (International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO], 2007). The learner profile is valueladen in order to help students to become internationally-minded, caring young people. In every unit of inquiry, some of these ten qualities must be addressed, and in reports, all aspects are reported on to parents. In this way, teachers are constantly addressing the learner profile.

The IB has stated that the prime object of the PYP is to provide feedback on the learning process. Both the student and the teacher should be regularly reflecting on progress made ([IBO], 2009. Primary). It is the IB position that they do not administer or encourage the use of standardized testing but recognize there are local, state or national requirements that must be met ([IBO], 2007). The IB instead encourages authentic assessments such as rubrics, anecdotal records, checklists, etc. ([IBO], 2009.

Primary). The most important things to consider for teachers are how the studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nature of inquiry has developed over time, how their knowledge could help solve problems, and if they are able to work both collaboratively and independently ([IBO], 2009. Primary). The IB program is mainly focused on the education of the whole child as far as creating a certain kind of thinker, and less focused on the standards that are taught.

The overall goal the Common Core State Standards is to make sure upon high school graduation, students are prepared for college or the workforce. However, the Common Core State Standards also has smaller goals within subject areas. For example, in language arts there are seven goals that if met, show that the student meets the standards and is indeed college and career ready in language arts. These goals are: students demonstrate independence, build strong content knowledge, respond to varying demands of

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audience, task, purpose and discipline, they comprehend as well as critique, value evidence, use technology and digital media strategically and capably, and they come to understand other perspectives and cultures.

All of these goals demonstrate what a college and career ready student looks like in language arts.

Curriculum Another area in which these programs differ is the curriculum. One of the most

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interesting aspects of the PYP is the way units are constructed. Instead of the traditional math, science, English, and social studies units taught at various points in the day, the majority of each day is spent on units of inquiry, which integrate the different subjects. The PYP believes that student learning is best done when it is authentic and relevant to the world around the student. To further their authentic learning platform, the PYP has six Transdisciplinary Themes that are covered throughout the year (Figure 1).

Transdisciplinary Themes Who We Are Where We Are in Place and Time How We Express Ourselves How the World Works How We Organize Ourselves Sharing the Planet Key Concepts Questions Form What is it like?

Function How does it work?

Causation Why is it like this?

Change How is it changing?

Connection How is it connected to other things?

Perspective What are the points of view?

Responsibility What is our responsibility?

Reflection How do we know?

Figure 1. This table depicts the six Transdisciplinary Themes, Key concepts and questions associated with the Key Concepts.

These themes are addressed and revisited from a different point of view every school year. While working in my internship in London, I observed the unit â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sharing the Planetâ&#x20AC;? in both Year One (kindergarten age) and Year Six (fifth grade

age). In Year 1 students learned about conservation and how to plant seeds, while in Year 6, students learned about recycling and taught the entire school about recycling.

Each unit is explored for a designated amount of weeks and will integrate at least 65

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three of the traditional subject areas most of the time. There are eight key concepts and corresponding questions that drive the units and help students to be inquirers (Figure 1).

These basic questions drive students to ask their own questions and become what the IB calls â&#x20AC;&#x153;active participants in their own educationâ&#x20AC;? ([IBO], 2009. Primary). While the students follow their inquiry, there are essential elements that need to be covered. It is up to the teacher to drive the inquiry in the way to accomplish meeting the essential elements. These elements are knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes, and action. It is encouraged for children to gain knowledge on the topic, through a concept driven curriculum, where students gain appropriate skills, while developing the IB PYP attitudes and converting all their learning into meaningful action ([IBO], 2007). In order to ensure that all of this is done teachers are encouraged to build on studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; existing knowledge to help students revise their views on the world.

The IB encourages teachers to take a constructivist approach to help the learners develop their own knowledge. The IB program is most commonly implemented in international schools where students come from different cultures. Due to the diverse backgrounds of the students, each learner has different beliefs about how the world works because of their experiences.

Teachers are told to help students to revise their constructs of the world by giving them chances to test their models, make connections between their perceptions and construct their own meaning ([IBO], 2009.

Primary). This is said to happen through structured inquiry. The Common Core State Standards look at things slightly differently.

The creation of the Common Core State Standards was a complete restructuring of the curriculum in the United States. Prior to the development of the Common Core, an International Benchmarking Advisory

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Group was formed to learn from top performing countries and compare their systems of education to the of the United States (National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], Achieve, Inc., 2008). The CCSSO and NGA Center recognized how globalized the world was becoming and realized the need to act. The International Benchmarking Advisory Group provided them with five action steps to help making the process of improving the education system more effective. The first action step is to upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12. This ensures that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive ([NGA], [CCSS], Achieve, Inc., 2008). Standards in the best performing nations include three things that were the main focus in implementing the common core: focus, rigor and coherence ([NGA], [CCSS], Achieve, Inc., 2008). By using these three characteristics as a starting point, the common core developers had an idea of in which direction to move.

The developers of the Common Core made the standards with certain criteria in mind. The standards needed to be aligned with expectations for college and career success, clear and consistent, include both content and application of knowledge, build upon strengths, realistic, informed by other top performing countries, and evidence based. These criteria were chosen to make sure that all students, regardless of location or socioeconomic status, in the United States were equally ready to enter college or the workforce upon graduating high school.

Math and Language Arts were the first subjects chosen to be revised and implemented. There are plans to eventually add different subjects to build on what is already in the Common Core ([NGA],

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[CCSS], 2010 Common core state standards initiative). The goal for the states who have adopted the Common Core State Standards is to continue with the rest of the action steps proposed by the International Benchmarking Advisory Group. The second action step is to “leverage states’ collective influence to ensure that textbooks, digital media, curricula and assessments are aligned to internationally benchmarked standards and draw on lessons from high-performing nations and states” ([NGA], [CCSS], Achieve, Inc., 2008). This step has already begun with the implementation of the Common Core starting in the 2012 academic year. The standardized testing done at the end of the academic year in 2013 was newly designed to fit the Common Core State Standards. States are also beginning to work together to encourage the creation of textbooks, digital media and other teaching materials that are designed to fit the material ([NGA], [CCSS], 2010 Common core state standards initiative). With the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, the remaining three action steps are also being put into place.

The third action step is, “revise state policies for recruiting, preparing, developing, and supporting teachers and school leaders to reflect the human capital practices of top-performing nations and states around the world” ([NGA], [CCSS], Achieve, Inc., 2008). The standards, along with state implementation of them, are helping teachers figure out the knowledge and the skills their students should have to that they can build the best lessons and environments for their classrooms. These important goals will help guide professional development in order to better prepare teachers for the classroom ([NGA], [CCSS], 2010 Common core state standards initiative). Action step four is, “holding schools and systems accountable through monitoring, interventions, and support to

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ensure consistently high performance, drawing upon international best practices”.

Action step five is, “measuring state-level education performance globally by examining student achievement and attainment in an international context to ensure that over time, students are receiving the education they need to compete in the 21st century” ([NGA], [CCSS], Achieve, Inc., 2008). These last two steps will come with time. The standards were only implemented in the last year, making it impossible to really know just how the standards have done to make students more globally competitive just yet. However, with three of these action steps in effect the Common Core State Standards are certainly changing the educational system in the United States.

Standards & Outcomes During the course of this research it became apparent that these two educational systems are very different. One focuses on the heart, and mind, addressing social, physical, emotional and cultural needs. The other is focused on getting the students to be college and career ready. The Common Core State Standards have explicit direction for what students should be learning in what grade. The IB program has what is called a scope and sequence document which outlines different “phases” of learning to allow for greater differentiation, however does not give a clear outline of what students should have learned by what age.

The IB does however give somewhat specific learner outcomes that should be demonstrated in each phase (International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO], 2009.

Language). When putting the standards side by side there are some similarities to be noted. Figure 2 highlights similarities between the reading standards.

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A number of the standards described in the chart do not align perfectly, but when interpreted, can relate to each other. For

IB Learner Outcomes Phase 1: Show curiosity and ask questions about pictures or text Listen attentively and respond to stories read aloud Distinguish between pictures and written text, for example, can point to a picture when asked Indicate printed text where the teacher should start reading Handle books, showing an understanding of how a book works, for example, cover beginning, directional movement, end Phase 2: Listen attentively and respond actively to readaloud situations; make predictions, anticipate possible outcomes Understand sound-symbol relationships and recognize familiar sounds/symbols/ words of language community Have a secure knowledge of the basic conventions of the language(s) of instruction in printed text, for example, orientation, directional movement, layout, spacing, punctuation Phase 3: Read texts at an appropriate level, independently, confidently with good understanding Recognize a range of different text types, for example, letters, poetry, plays, stories, novels, reports, articles Realize that there is a difference between fiction and non-fiction and use books for particular purposes, with teacher guidance

Recognize and use the different parts of a book, for example, title page, contents, index Understand sound-symbol relationships and apply reliable phonetic strategies when decoding print

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example, in phase one of the Primary Years Program there are two learner outcomes that relate to one Common Core Standard. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Indicate printed text where the teacher

Common Core State Standards RL.K.4. Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text RL.K.1. With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text RF.K.1.b. Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters RF.K.1.a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page RF.K.1.a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page

RL.1.2. Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson RF.1.3. Know and apply grade-level phonics and world analysis skills in decoding words RF.K.1.a&c a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page c. Understand that words are separated by spaces in print RF.2.4. Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension RL.K.5. Recognize common types of texts

RI.1.1&2 1.Ask and answer questions about key details in an informational text 2.Identify the main topic and retell key details of an informational text RI.K.5. Identify the front cover, back cover and title page of a book RF.2.3.Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words

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Use a range of strategies to self-monitor and selfcorrect, for example, meaning, context, rereading, reading on, cross-checking one cue source against another Phase 4: Use reference books, dictionaries, and computer and web-based applications with increasing independence and responsibility Identify relevant reliable and useful information and decide on appropriate ways to use it

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RF.2.4. Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension

RI.3.5. Use text features and search tools to locate information relevant to a given topic efficiently RI.3.7. Use information gained from illustration and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text RI. 5.7. Draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently

Phase 5: Identify genre (including fantasy, biography, science fiction, mystery, historical novel) and explain elements and literary forms that are associated with different genres

RL.5.7.Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone or beauty of a text (eg. Graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem) RL.5.9. Compare and contrast stores in the same genre on their approaches to similar themes and topics Understand that authors use words and literary RL.4.4. Determine the meaning of words and devices to evoke mental images phrases as they are used in a text Recognize and understand figurative language, RL.5.4. Determine the meaning of words and for example, similes, metaphors, idioms phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes Identify and describe elements of a story â&#x20AC;&#x201C; plot, RL.1.7. Use illustrations and details in a story to setting, characters, theme â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and explain how they describe its characters, setting or events contribute to its effectiveness RL.2.7. Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot Compare and contrast the plots of two different RL.4.9. Compare and contrast the treatment of but similar novels, commenting on effectiveness similar themes and topics and patterns of events and impact in stories, myths, and traditional literature from different cultures Consistently and confidently use a range of RF.3.5. Use text features and search tools to resources to find information and support their located information relevant to a given topic inquiries efficiently Figure 2. Standards quoted from: [IBO], 2009. Language scope and sequence. And National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], 2010. Common core state standards for English language arts.

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should start reading,” and “Handle books, showing an understanding of how a book works, for example, cover beginning, directional movement, end” both relate to Common Core Standard, “RF.K.1.a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page” (International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO], 2009. Language), (National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], 2010. Common core). All of these goals are related to the overall lesson of children becoming familiar with text and how it works. They are learning features of a text by identifying the front cover, back cover, spine and understanding how reading takes place by knowing that we read from left to write. All of those concepts are a part of these three different goals.

It is important to note that not all of the IB learner outcomes nor all of the Common Core State Standards are outlined in this chart. Only those which related to a similar learner outcome or standard are included.

Twenty-two learner outcomes are included to match with various Common Core standards. There is much excluded from each.

The IB learner outcomes as a whole focus more on the learner. For example,

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there are outcomes listed such as “enjoys listening to stories,” and “develop personal preferences, selecting books for pleasure and information” ([IBO], 2009. Language).

While these seem to be unimportant when looking forward to high school graduation, but they support the IB’s stance on educating the whole child. The Common Core also includes many more standards concerning retelling stories, understanding key details, and comparing and contrasting.

These standards are geared toward students’ overall fluency and comprehension of a text. The Common Core also wants students to think deeply about texts. Although it is not explicitly listed in the standards, students must be able to participate in thoughtful discussions which aligns with many of the IB learner outcomes (National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], 2012).

The Common Core also separates their reading standards into literature, informational, and foundational skills (National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], 2010. Common core state standards for English language arts.). The IB learner outcomes for reading are all integrated together.

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Figure 3

Conclusion The Common Core State Standards and the IB program are very different in theory, written curriculum, and in practice.

However, there is some overlap as far as what is expected of the students. Both programs have goals of preparing students for the globalized 21st century. With this goal in mind, two educational programs have been created. Figure 3 shows a brief overview of the similarities and differences of the two programs. The Common Core State Standards strive to create an internationally benchmarked program of education that will reach all students in the United States regardless of location or socioeconomic status. The focus is on meeting the required standards which when met will create 21st century ready students who are prepared for college or the workforce. The IB program strives to create internationally-minded students through encouraging certain attitudes along with transdisciplinary lines of inquiry.

Observing the overlap and the differences between the standards and the learner outcomes, it seems possible that a school could use both to develop an exceptional globalized student. With the Common Core State Standards so newly implemented, further research could be done to examine how students with both of these programs in place at their elementary school fair. The primary reason these two programs could be implemented together is because the nature of the programs have different goals in mind. The IB program works toward a specific kind of student. The Common Core State Standards work towards students who are college and career ready. The two programs are not very similar other than in their shared goal of creating students ready for the 21st century.

These two academic programs provide steps toward creating a globalized student.

However, they go about it in different ways.

The International Baccalaureate program strives to educate the whole child in way that is globally significant to each specific child. This allows the program to be 71

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successful all over the world. The Common However, both of these programs, despite Core State Standards recently implemented how they are different, take action to make in the United States focus on making children ready for the globalized world we students college and career ready. Further live in. research will need to be done to test the quality and significance of the standards. ______________________________________________________________________________ Works Cited International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO]. (2009). Language scope and sequence.

Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO]. (2007). Making the PYP happen: a curriculum framework for international primary education. Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO]. (2009). The primary years programme: a basis for practice. Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS].

(2010). Common core state standards initiative frequently asked questions.

National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS].

(2010). Common core state standards for English language arts and & literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.

National Governors Association [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS].

(2012). ELA and literacy curricula, grades K-2.

National Governors Assocaition [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], Achieve, Inc. (2008, December 18). Benchmarking for success: Ensuring U.S. students receive a world-class education. Retrieved July 10, 2013, from http://www.nga.org/files/live/sites/NGA/files/pdf/0812BENCHMARKING.PDF

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Parenting and the Narrative Imagination in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson Shannon Curley Shannon Curley is a junior and an English major. She sparked an interest in her topic of American Literature and Social Theory after taking Dr. Donna’s Scheidt’s Print Artifacts course on Law and Literature. The most fulfilling part of completing her undergraduate research is the ability to present her hard work to other like-minded audiences while being able to learn about the research others are doing. Curley considers all of the professors in the English department her mentors as they inspire her and support her in producing projects that showcase her interests in new, exciting ways.

After graduation, Curley hopes to work in publishing for academic press.

Abstract Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, written in 1893, is at once humorous and a commentary on racial stereotypes and social divides in the pre- and post- Civil War era. Although there are many examples of Twain’s influence regarding race relations to analyze, one of the more subtle and simultaneously most effective narratives in Pudd’nhead Wilson is the role of parenting.

Twain bridges the racial and social gap between black and white society, despite glaring differences in social status and vernacular, by showing the reader that the parental motives of leading characters Roxy and Judge Driscoll have the same base and therefore, despite occupying very different social spheres, share a few distinct similarities. As a consequence, these very different characters are sympathetic and relatable to the predominantly white readers of the era, constructing what Martha Nussbaum would call the “narrative imagination” in which readers engage with and become familiar with others through acts of storytelling. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain creates a spectrum that unites seemingly opposite characters through the common theme of parenthood, thereby challenging his readers to develop sympathy and empathy in a move towards improved citizenship and better understanding of cultural “others.”

M

ark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson is, in its most basic form, a fable, one that is at once humorous and a commentary on racial stereotypes and social divides in the pre- and post- Civil War era. Although there are many examples

of Twain’s ideas regarding race relations to analyze, one of the more subtle and simultaneously most effective narratives in Pudd’nhead Wilson is the role of parenting.

Twain bridges the racial and social gap between black and white society, despite 73

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glaring differences in social status and vernacular, by showing the reader that the parental motives of both an AfricanAmerican slave woman and white, prominent male have the same base. As a consequence, these very different characters are sympathetic and relatable to the predominantly white readers of the era, constructing what Martha Nussbaum would call the “narrative imagination” in which readers engage with and become familiar with others through acts of storytelling.

Although this theme in Pudd’nhead Wilson has not been studied extensively up until this point, there is sample evidence to support that, through the common theme of parenthood, Twain creates a spectrum that unites seemingly opposite characters, thereby challenging his readers to develop sympathy and empathy in a move towards improved citizenship and better understanding of cultural “others.”

In her book Cultivating Humanity, Nussbaum argues that storytelling begins with a parent and a child and is the starting point for most moral interactions and understanding among people, especially as they grow, develop, and learn new stories (89). She argues that children’s stories interact with readers’ “own attempts to explain the world and their own actions in it.

A child deprived of stories is deprived, as well, of certain ways of viewing other people” (Nussbaum 89). Therefore, the responsibility of the writer in employing the narrative imagination is to flesh out the experience of their characters in order to create a story, a background, and an experience that allows the readers to “put themselves in someone else’s shoes” and develop a greater understanding of human experience. Through this kind of narrative, the audience may participate in what Diana Meyer calls “imaginative reconstruction,” an alternative form of empathy by which “to empathize with another...is to construct in

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imagination an experience resembling that of another person” (29). Therefore, via the narrative imagination and imaginative reconstruction, and with the understanding that, “traditionally, the assumption has been that good fiction for children and adolescents has a positive influence on society” (Lukenbill 219), Pudd’nhead Wilson cultivates positive citizenship by eliciting sympathy and compassion from its readers towards characters that they may not otherwise be able to relate to.

In their various roles as storytellers, authors create depth that both complicates characters’ situations and gives readers something to be compassionate about. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain creates unique opportunities for compassion by giving authentic voices to characters who may not otherwise have had a chance to speak in his era: a woman, an African-American, and a pair of Italian immigrants, to name a few.

The effectiveness of this narrative construction relies on what Christine Sylvester calls “empathetic cooperation,” or, the way in which people become “relationally rather than reactively autonomous with those we have defined as unmistakably other, with those who are not inside ‘our’ community, our value system” (119). Furthermore, “empathy enables respectful negotiations with contentious others because we can recognize involuntary similarities across difference as well as differences that mark independent identity” (119). In this way, “the arts play a vital role, cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship” (Nussbaum 85). By creating relatable circumstances involving unfamiliar characters, a narrative can cross social divides and open up new possibilities for more inclusive citizenship, both socially and legally.

It is critical to acknowledge that both Roxy, the poor and uneducated AfricanAmerican slave, and Judge Driscoll, the

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town leader and First Family Virginian (F.F.V.), are set up as devoted parental figures. Roxy makes the choice to switch Tom and Chambers because she is trying to do what is best for her son from her limited position as a black woman in a predominantly white-male society, one typical to many small, southern, slaveholding towns before the Civil War. She is terrified that Percy Driscoll will sell her son down the river and so she switches the two boys, hoping to secure a better fate for her son; “oh thank de good Lord in heaven, you’s saved,” she says, “you’s saved! – dey ain’t no man kin ever sell mammy’s po little honey down de river now!” (Twain 16). As Myra Jehlen notes, Roxy’s options within her social position are limited and, “given those alternatives, her stratagem appears righteous and even fair, despite its concomitant enslavement of the white baby. Without condoning this but simply by focusing on Roxy and her child, the story enlists the reader wholly on their side” (40). Furthermore, “the subversive act that Roxy commits against white society is no less a confirmatory one” (Carton 85), since its necessity reiterates the oppressive divisions of race and class in Dawson’s Landing. If this act is Roxy’s only solution, then its inevitability promotes within the reader a reconsideration of socially constructed divisions based on identity and the potential impacts of these divisions on the lives of children – both black and white, as witnessed through Tom and Chambers’ respective fates.

Importantly, although Roxy’s decisions may be morally flawed, they come from an arguably sympathetic source. As a parent, Roxy, and arguably most parents, make choices to provide what they believe is best for their children. Twain cleverly juxtaposes Roxy’s role as a parent with that of Judge Driscoll who, along with his wife, was “very nearly happy, but not quite, for

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they had no children” – that is, of course, until the Judge adopts Tom (Twain 5).

Indeed, when Wilson discusses Tom’s adoption later with Luigi, after Tom has run into some trouble with the law, Wilson describes Tom as the Judge’s “doll – his baby,” and furthermore capitulates, “One must make allowances for parental instinct,” referring to Judge Driscoll’s lenient nature with his adoptive son (Twain 98). Twain draws parallels between “maternal justice and patriarchal right” in order to equalize the roles of parents in the novel in such a way that classifications of race, gender, and class are not considered essential (Jehlen 54). Rather, the most important aspects of parenting are the decisions parents must make given their relationship to and understanding of society and their children’s place within that society.

The tendency of the white and educated reader, the most common audience in Twain’s time, might be to fault Roxy for her choices because she is an uneducated, African American woman; however, Twain shows his reader that Judge Driscoll’s treatment of Tom is not any more effective in bringing him up “right” – in fact, the Judge himself says of Tom: “He is worthless and unworthy but it is largely my fault. He was entrusted to me by my brother on his dying bed, and I have indulged him to his hurt, instead of training him up severely and making a man out of him” (Twain 72).

Roxy’s actions seem extreme until the reader is made to understand that Roxy fervently believes that what she is doing is the best choice for her child, just as Judge Driscoll believed that providing for every need of his adopted son was the right choice.

Roxy’s action, which may have otherwise been dismissed as irresponsible or immoral, is thereby clothed with sympathy, as she can now be seen through the lens of parenthood.

Twain, in constructing a story that compels narrative imagination, depends on one

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parent’s compassion for the measures taken by another parent, for the sake of good parenthood, apart from whether that parent is actually good or not.

Parenthood crosses all social and racial lines, as most parents would be sympathetic or compassionate toward another parent who has made drastic and life-changing decisions for the betterment, or attempted betterment, of his or her own child. In the end, the tragic fates of Tom and Chambers again force the reader to see the similarities between both characters: “Tom” is eventually sent down the river, despite Roxy’s greatest efforts to protect him, and “Chambers,” finally acknowledged as a white man, is unable to join white society because he has been too fully socialized as a black slave. Insofar as neither parent is ultimately successful, Twain makes an important distinction between being a good parent and being a relatable parent: neither Judge Driscoll nor Roxy is a textbook “good parent,” since the decisions they make apparently doom their children, but because they are in a parental role widely understood by the latenineteenth-century audience, they are still able to function as sympathetic characters.

In fact, to reflect once more on Nussbaum’s view of the role of vulnerability in eliciting sympathy and compassion, it seems that by failing as parents, Roxy and Judge Driscoll are even more effective in extracting the sympathies of audiences that may fear similar parental failures.

With these considerations of the role of readership in mind, it is important to note that women were the most active readers of the novel during Twain’s time (Lyons 31315), something he surely would have known was key to popularity as a novelist. Given this, it is interesting to consider the use of parental roles in eliciting sympathy, presumably with the knowledge that women, whose positions in society were primarily focused around their roles as parents, were

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those also most likely to be reading and interpreting Pudd’nhead Wilson in its novel form. To quote James Machor, “What is meant to read as a woman...is a significant question with a significant hermeneutical history, a history that assumed an especially visible shape in early-nineteenth-century America, when new methods of printing, improved literacy, and changes in women’s social roles made female reading an increasingly prominent activity and a pressing topic of inquiry and discussion” (56). These facts, coupled with the growing feminist ideologies of the late-nineteenthcentury, certainly seem significant in understanding Twain’s audience and the potential purpose of including parental narratives in this novel, published in 1894.

Furthermore, it is important to note that women readers of Pudd’nhead Wilson, through their understanding of the responsibilities that come with being a parent, were encouraged to develop sympathy towards both white men and colored women through the text, two groups of people that they may otherwise feel “othered” from.

In Pudd’nhead Wilson, the choices that parents make for the good of their children are essential to Twain’s narrative and the development of the reader’s sympathetic imagination. As M.B.W. Culp argues, “Reading is a very personal experience, involving as it does the perceptions, psychology, and social concerns of both authors and readers” (qtd. in Lukenbill 226).

In both fiction and reality, parents must make choices for their children when they are not capable of doing so themselves.

Though Roxy’s choice was not one that white society would have seen as acceptable, her reasoning came from a place of parental concern, something that people from many diverse roles in society could understand. As Nussbaum notes, “It seems, then, to be beneficial for members of a

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society to see themselves as bound to one another by similar weaknesses and needs” (92). Twain would have been hard-pressed to find many similarities between white and black society in his time, especially in the 1830s in which Pudd’nhead was set, but parenthood is one of the most classically universalizing themes of humankind. Life and society could not exist without parenting and the raising of children. Moreover, if “compassion, so understood, promotes an accurate awareness of our common vulnerability” (Nussbaum 91), then Twain’s use of the parental theme is an artful way of playing on humanity’s common fear of failing as parents, guardians, surrogate parents, etc. and therefore leaving behind a damaged legacy.

Twain does not attempt to bridge every social gap in his novel, nor does he attempt to equalize the races, genders, or classes; as Nussbaum notes, “If we can easily sympathize with a character, the invitation to do so has relatively little moral value; the experience can too easily deteriorate into a self-congratulatory wallowing in our own compassionate tendencies” (98). Roxy and Judge Driscoll maintain most of their differences despite being joined by the commonality of parenthood. Attempting to fuse these characters in more complicated ways would have undermined Twain’s credibility in his era and, as we see with Pudd’nhead’s final court case, credibility is a most important tool in swaying the opinions of an audience. An attempt to join Roxy and Judge Driscoll on a level any more specific than parenthood would have seemed incredible, and improbable, to contemporary readers. By delicately juxtaposing their similar positions without removing them from their respective social orders, Twain is able to provide his reader with the possibility of similarity between two extremes. As Nussbaum argues, “Literary works are not free of the

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prejudices and blind spots that are endemic to most of the political life...If we are reading and teaching such novels with democratic ideals of equal concern and respect in mind, we will probably come to feel that there is something incomplete or even defective in these works” (101). Twain maintains his realism while also allowing for there to be a subtle social commentary in his work.

Twain’s use of the parental model has several key purposes. For one, it allows for compassion, sympathy, and empathetic cooperation on the part of the reader.

Coupled with this emotional value, Twain is able to minimize the significance of race, class, and gender, focusing instead on the raising of children and the way that society’s rules can negatively impact children of all identities, socially constructed and otherwise. Finally, the novel works towards molding its readers into better citizens, an end that is only made possible through narrative imagination and the ability to understand those who are different. To quote Nussbaum, “To allow inside one’s mind people who seem alien and frightening is to show a capacity for openness and responsiveness that goes against the grain of many cultural stereotypes of selfsufficiency” (98). By acknowledging similarities with “others” via relatability to parental models, readers are able to better understand the interconnectivity of oppression and the ways in which society can stunt generational growth. For example, the people of Dawson’s Landing are so stuck in their ways that they seem outlandish and foolish, with their understanding of civic responsibility tied explicitly to the critical importance they place on reputation and family history. Readers of Pudd’nhead Wilson are encouraged to think differently than the people of Dawson’s Landing via the downfall of each of the novel’s main characters due in some way to the

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functioning of the society to which they most closely belong. To quote Carton, “Twain’s novel implicates us in its community of disingenuousness and guilt, and by so doing, facilitates our realization of that community (ourselves) and its possible redemption through us” (93). It is by seeing the shortcomings of the characters in the novel that readers are potentially able to identify the shortcomings in their own possibly outdated social constructs.

Whether Twain intended a political agenda in his writing or not, Pudd’nhead Wilson allows the reader to consider, even subconsciously, a social agenda through the common themes and distinctive narratives throughout the novel. By employing narrative imagination to give a voice to Roxy, whose roles include being an African

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American, being a woman, being destitute, and being disabled – identities that would not normally be represented in writing – Twain is able to “promote our sympathetic understanding of all outcast or oppressed people, by giving their strivings a voice” (Nussbaum 96). Furthermore, by drawing parenting parallels between Roxy, a female slave, and Judge Driscoll, a white F.F.V. male, Twain pushes his readers to acknowledge that, if nothing else, black and white people can all understand the hard decisions that come with being a parent.

Indeed, Pudd’nhead Wilson, through its charges of compassion and empathy, subtly challenges racial divides and the dominant belief at the time that, when it comes to black and white society, never the twain shall meet.

______________________________________________________________________________ Works Cited Carton, Evan. "Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Fiction of Law and Custom." American Realism: New Essays. By Eric J. Sundquist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 82-93. Print.

Jehlen, Myra. "The Ties That Bind: Race and Sex in Pudd’nhead Wilson." American Literary History 2.1 (1990): 39-55. JSTOR. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Lukenbill, W. Bernard. "Family Systems in Contemporary Adolescent Novels: Implications Behavior Information Modeling." Family Relations 3.2 (1981): 219-27. JSTOR. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Lyons, Martyn. "New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers."A History of Reading in the West. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2003. 313-44.

Print.

Meyers, Diana Tietjens. Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Nussbaum, Martha Craven. "The Narrative Imagination." Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. 85-112.

Print.

Machor, James L. Readers in History: Nineteenth Century Reading and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Web. Sylvester, Christine. Feminist International Relations : An Unfinished Journey. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost).

Web. 3 Dec. 2013.

Twain, Mark. Puddâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins: An Authoritative Text, Textual Notes, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1980. 1-122. Print.

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The Obsession with Youth in Adaptations of “Snow White” Taylor McAuliffe Taylor Marie McAuliffe is a junior majoring in International Relations and Spanish. Her focus for her topic grew after reading “Snow White” in her Fairy Tale Literature course. McAuliffe felt compelled to explore the queen’s obsession with youth and reasons for her extreme behavior. Her mentor, Dr. Linker, was extremely helpful in her writing and editing processes and opened her eyes to explore the text in different ways. Once she graduates, McAuliffe hopes to attend law school where she wants to study to be an attorney.

Abstract The Grimm Brothers and Anne Sexton tell the tale of “Snow White" in two different ways that give way to two very different overall meanings. “Snow White” is a tale that explores the various stages of female development in both adaptations. It tracks Snow White’s development from a young girl in her childhood, into her adolescence, and finally, into adulthood. In both versions, the tale ends with the prince saving Snow White’s life. The Grimm brother’s version has a happy ending for Snow White, while Sexton’s ending is not all positive. Although the prince saves Snow White, it can be inferred she is destined to the same fate as her stepmother. The Grimm brothers’, “Snow White,” is aligned with the ideas of a patriarchal society and Sexton ridicules the gender stereotypes. Sexton creates a situation in which Snow White is not simply a victim, as she is portrayed in the Grimm brother’s version. Sexton, in her adaptation, satirizes the patriarchal stereotypes evident in the Grimm brother’s version of the tale in order to advance her feminist ideas.

T

he fairy tale, “Snow White,” has been told for centuries. Many adaptations of the tale have been written over time with various changes in the plot, which create different implications. In the versions of the fairy tale “Snow White,” by Anne Sexton and the Brothers Grimm, it is clear the queen, Snow White’s stepmother, is obsessed with youth. The Grimm Brothers and Anne Sexton tell the tale in two very different ways, providing different overall

meanings. “Snow White” is a tale that explores the various stages of female development in both adaptations. It tracks Snow White’s development from a young girl in her childhood, into her adolescence, and finally, into adulthood. In both versions, the tale ends with the prince saving Snow White’s life. The Grimm brothers’ version has a happy ending for Snow White, while Sexton’s ending is not all positive. Although the prince saves Snow White, it can be

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inferred she is destined to an obsession with youth, the same fate as her stepmother. The Grimm brothers’, “Snow White,” is aligned with the ideas of a patriarchal society, where in her version, Sexton exposes and ridicules the gender stereotypes. Sexton suggests the character Snow White is pure and innocent and then contradicts this view consistently throughout the poem, concluding she is not simply an innocent child, as she is portrayed in the Grimm version. Sexton, in her adaptation, satirizes the patriarchal stereotypes evident in the Grimm brothers’ version of the tale in order to advance her feminist idea that men and woman are equal in ability and therefore, Snow White should not be portrayed as weak, relying on her beauty to save her.

It is important to view the Grimm brothers’ adaptation, “Snow White,” in the context it was written to fully understand the queen’s intense feelings of jealousy and hatred toward Snow White. This adaptation was written in a patriarchal, male dominated, society. Simone De Beauvoir in her book, The Second Sex, describes the roles of women and how they have changed over time. She mainly attributes the female gender stereotypes of passivity and inferiority to men and their view of women.

This is evident in the Grimm Brothers’ version of “Snow White.” Shandi Wagner describes the role of women in the 1800s when the Grimm brothers wrote “Snow White:” young girls are taught their role in society should be one of passivity and inaction, unable to exist without a man (111). Women are expected to be beautiful in order to be chosen by a man. Wagner describes how these expectations relate to Snow White: “Nothing more than beauty is required or, in some cases, desired of Snow White” (115). In the Grimm brothers’ version, Snow White is helpless, on her own, and without the help of a huntsman or the seven dwarves, the queen would have

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killed her. She is very much reliant on male figures to save her from the queen’s harm. It can be argued the Brothers Grimm version of “Snow White” was written to teach young girls how to act properly in a patriarchal society, in which men are in control. With so much emphasis placed on a woman’s beauty, above all else, what is a woman to do when her beauty fades and she grows old? The queen faces this dilemma in both versions of “Snow White.”

Beauty is especially important in the Grimm brothers’ version of “Snow White.”

It is a source of power for women to be beautiful. Beauty and youth are very closely related. In the past, it was important to be beautiful in order to attract a wealthy man to marry because women did not work outside the home, so they would have to rely on men to support them. N.J. Giradot suggests the stepmother becomes aware of Snow White as a threat to her own beauty and power when Snow White begins her process of initiation into womanhood (283). Snow White gains her beauty through adolescence and is deemed, “fairest of them all” (Sexton 32). The young and beautiful grow old and are replaced by the younger and more beautiful. If the Queen had accepted her fate, all the characters could have lived happily ever after. Instead, the Queen attempts to control the cycle of life by refusing to lose her youth.

The queen appears to be the evil character in both versions of the tale. As she grows old, it is clear she is portrayed as the enemy, while the more beautiful, Snow White is a symbol of goodness and innocence. The concept of physiognomy is prevalent throughout many fairytales and particularly throughout “Snow White.”

Physiognomy is the idea of outer appearances determining inner worth. Outer beauty represents inner moral goodness, while ugly represents evil. Since youth is associated with beauty, especially in the

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Grimm version, the queen is considered evil when her looks fade, and she resists this change in hopes of keeping her inner goodness along with her outer beauty in order to retain her status in society.

In both versions, a transition occurs when the queen looks in the mirror and sees the beginning signs of old age signaling a loss of youth. In the Grimm version, the queen asks for Snow White’s lungs and liver on a platter. In Sexton’s adaptation, the queen demands the hunter bring Snow White’s heart to her. In both adaptations, she plans to consume Snow White’s organs in order to gain her youth and defeat the age that is consuming her. With Snow White dead, she believes she will be, “fairest of them all” (Sexton 32). The queen’s efforts are unsuccessful and Snow White remains alive. Wagner suggests these forces of consumption ultimately lead to the stepmother’s downfall at the end of both adaptations (113). In the end, the queen fails to stop the cycle of life and she is consumed by death.

Sexton’s adaptation is a feminist response to the Grimm brothers’ “Snow White.” Her adaptation appears to send an overall message to women that female competition and too much emphasis on outer appearances is very destructive to society as a whole. Wagner writes, “Sexton’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ is a warning against vanity and rivalry” (119). Sexton’s character, Snow White, does not fit into the female gender roles of the 1800s, as the Grimm brothers’ Snow White does. She portrays all the characters in a more realistic way, existing in a more modern and feminist society. Instead of portraying Snow White as innocent and vulnerable, as the Grimm brothers do, Sexton emphasizes her vanity and more negative attributes, to counter the Grimm brothers’ version. The Grimm brothers reinforce the ideas of feminine passivity and dependence. It seems to be

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Snow White’s beauty that saves her from being killed by the huntsman at the queen’s request: “Because she was so beautiful the huntsman took pity on her, and he said, ‘Run away, you poor child” (Grimm 84). This scenario demonstrates the power of beauty in a patriarchal society. Snow White’s beauty protects her from death and, as a result, appears to be an important source of power. Snow White’s passivity is emphasized in her inability to protect herself from the queen’s attempts to kill her.

Instead, she needs a male figure, the huntsman, to save her. In many other instances throughout the Grimm Brothers’ adaptation, Snow White is portrayed as naive and dependent on her beauty. She is referred to as, “the poor child,” (Grimm 84) and “a beautiful child” (Grimm 85). The description of Snow White as “the poor child, (Grimm 84) suggests she is vulnerable, in need of help, and deserving of pity. Instead of describing Snow White as strong, intelligent, and able, they describe her as beautiful, which focuses attention on her outer appearance. The character of Snow White is portrayed positively, through the gender stereotypes of the patriarchal time period in the Grimm Brothers’ version, while in Anne Sexton’s version of the tale, the character Snow White is a realistic response to the Grimm brothers’ Snow White that aims to demonstrate how dangerous placing too much emphasis on a woman’s beauty can be to society.

Sexton completely alters the female gender roles evident in the Grimm brothers’ “Snow White.” Her adaptation is much more pessimistic for both characters. It is clear Snow White will have the same fate as the queen, from the start of the poem. Sexton explains the fate of one who obsesses with youth and beauty: “Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes” (Sexton 21-23). At the end of the poem,

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there are “red-hot roller skates” (Sexton 151) clamped to the queen’s feet, when she arrives to Snow White’s wedding. Sexton is suggesting an obsession with youth will lead to death in the end, as it does for the queen: “First your toes will smoke and then your heels will turn black and you will fry upward like a frog, she was told. And so she danced until she was dead” (153-157).

Sexton is satirizing the patriarchal stereotypes of women throughout the poem, but particularly at the end. At the end of the poem, she writes, “Meanwhile Snow White held court, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut and sometimes referring to her mirror as women do” (Sexton 161-162).

Sexton creates a more realistic, but ridiculous version of Snow White, which suggests she is mocking the portrayal of Snow White in the Grimm Brothers’ version. Snow White’s eyes are compared to a doll, representing her robotic like existence, which suggests she has no control over her fate. She cannot help but refer to her mirror, just as the queen did. She will eventually grow old, like the queen, and the mirror will no longer deem her, “fairest of them all” (Sexton 32). As a result, her vanity will take over and her life will end, as the queen’s did. The lines are blurred between Snow White and her “evil” stepmother at the end of Sexton’s version. Unfortunately, in Sexton’s version, it seems Snow White does not even notice she is headed down the same path as the Queen and therefore, perpetuating the cycle of envy and jealousy.

The mirror’s authority, particularly in Sexton’s adaptation, is highly symbolic and helps to emphasize the dangers of placing too much emphasis on female beauty. It demonstrates the importance of outer appearances. Sexton writes, “The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred-- something like the weather forecast” (Sexton 23-24). The mirror appears to have immense power in the tale

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because it determines who is the “fairest” or most beautiful woman of all (Sexton 32). In some ways, it appears Sexton is mocking the significance of the mirror in the Grimm version. The queen does not show any signs of evil before her encounter with the mirror.

She is content until the mirror declares Snow White is “fairer” than her. This is a major shift in the tale because it changes everything for the queen and causes her to try to kill Snow White to regain her power as “fairest of them all” (Sexton 32). Cristina Bacchilega suggests the mirror plays a central role in the conflict between Snow White and the queen (3). The queen opposes the mirror’s authority and attempts to take fate into her own hands. Her obsession with youth and inability to be content with her status are the causes of her demise in both versions.

Snow White’s stepmother wants to kill her in order to take back her beauty and power. Both adaptations of “Snow White” deal with the idea of filicide. In some adaptations of the tale, the queen is Snow White’s biological mother and in others, she is her stepmother. In either case, the queen wants Snow White dead after Snow White takes her place as “fairest of them all” (Sexton 32). The queen is willing to commit filicide, or killing of her own child, to regain her title. Although at first it might seem difficult to understand how a mother could ever want to kill her own child, or any child in general, it is more conceivable, at least in the Grimm Brothers’ version, after grasping the emphasis placed on beauty and youth in a patriarchal society. The queen only had her beauty and that was her only source of power and authority. The extreme emphasis placed on beauty in a society dominated by men is what results in the queen’s attempts at filicide.

Sexton’s version of “Snow White” is a feminist response to the Grimm brothers’ “Snow White” because Sexton ridicules the

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Grimm Brothers’ suggestion that female beauty is synonymous with female power.

She contradicts her own description of Snow White as weak and innocent in order to satirize the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White.

She alters the female gender roles evident in the Grimm brothers’ version and, while the Grimm brothers’ tale ends happily, Sexton’s version is more pessimistic, indicating Snow

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White become like the queen in the end.

Overtime, society changes and along with it, gender roles and stereotypes adjust to these changes. Sexton’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” poem is one of her many Transformations poems, which are feminist attempts to respond to the gender stereotypes found in the Grimm brothers’ tales written over one hundred years before.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Works Cited Bacchilega, Cristina. "Cracking The Mirror Three Re-Visions Of 'Snow White'." Boundary 2: An International Journal Of Literature And Culture 15.3 (1988): 1-25. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1978.

Print.

Girardot, N. J. "Initiation and Meaning in the Tale of Snow White." The Journal of American Folklore 90.357 (1977): 274-300. Print.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. “Snow White.” The Classic Fairy Tales. Ed. Maria Tatar.

New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1999. 84-85. Print.

Sexton, Anne. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Poets.org. Academy of the American poets.

1981. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

Wagner, Shandi. "The Transformation Of Snow White Into The Evil Stepmother In Anne Sexton's 'Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs'." Sigma Tau Delta Review 8.(2011): 110120. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

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Junior Recital: Flute Meaghan Reney Meaghan Reney, is a junior and a double-major in Music and Human Relations. Originally from Duxbury, Massachusetts, music has always been a huge passion of hers. Reney began playing the flute at the age of 11 and has performed in multiple ensembles ever since. At HPU, she is a member of the University Band, Pep Band, Flute Ensemble, Chamber Orchestra, and the High Point University Community Orchestra. She is also the assistant to the director of instrumental studies. Reney has a keen interest in the way that music can create a strong connection between people. The most fulfilling part of doing undergraduate creative work is sharing her passion and hard work with others. Her mentor, Dr. Laura Stevens, has been her driving force; she is a daily motivator who sees great amounts of hidden potential. Reney believes Dr. Stevens has greatly enhanced her musical success. Furthermore, Reney is planning on working in New England for the Human Relations department of a corporation and auditioning to join ensembles and orchestras after she graduates in the spring of 2015. In the future, she hopes to open a private flute studio in Massachusetts.

Abstract This paper describes a performance which is a culmination of musical compositions for the flute.

Each composition was thoroughly analyzed and researched over a period of five semesters beginning in the fall of 2011. This performance draws upon the flute literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For each composition, the following musical elements were explored: harmonic and form analysis, historical relevance pertaining to the flute repertoire and composers researched, stylistic interpretation, flute technique and methods, musical expression, musicianship, and ensemble collaboration. Prior to the performance, each composition was individually performed and critiqued by students and faculty. A jury was held by the Department of Music faculty to assess the preparedness of each composition one month prior to the final performance. The performance was held on Friday, November 8, 2013 in the Charles E. Hayworth, Sr. Memorial Chapel at 7:30pm by Junior, Meaghan Reney and Associate Professor of Piano, Dr. Robert Hallquist. Approximately fifty people were in attendance, including students and faculty. Subsequently, the faculty members in attendance evaluated the performance.

Meaghan Reney is a student of Ms. Laura Stevens and performed her recital in partial fulfillment of the degree requirements for the Bachelor of Arts in Music.

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Program Suite Modale (1957) by Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) Moderato L’istesso tempo Allegro giocoso Adagio – Allegro deciso /

E

rnest Bloch was an American composer and teacher but born of Swiss nationality. Suite Modale mainly focuses on modal melodies and polyphonic writing. Bloch often referred to the sound of the flute as the voice of the soul, and dedicated his piece to Elaine Schaffer – a flautist whose sound he greatly admired. The modal lyricism incorporated throughout is thought to resemble Schaffer’s youth and freshness. The piece can be referred to as a reverie, as if Bloch is looking back through the course of his life and the impressions he left behind, as well as the impressions put onto him. The four movements are related with recurring themes and ideas. The first movement, moderato, has a sense of improvisation and wispiness, with echoes in the piano. The second movement shows Bloch’s compassion for Schaffer through the thoughtful lines and serene modes. The last movement incorporates themes from the previous movements and ends with the initial slow theme of the first movement.

Fantasie ; by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) Op. 79 (1898) Gabriel Fauré was a French composer, teacher, pianist, and organist. Known as the greatest master of French song, Fauré developed an iconic, personal style that influenced the majority of early 20th-century composers. The general public did not know Fauré’s music until he was fifty years old. The style of his compositions combined the end of the Romantic era with the 20th century. One of Fauré’s greatest elements is his attention to the flute’s technical and expressive capabilities shown through his compositions. Fantasie embodies a magical trance from the first note. There are times when Fauré incorporates unpredicted notes, which create a surprise for the listener’s ear as well as a new tone color. Remaining consistent with the traditional French conservatory contest piece, the opening section of Fantasie suggests a lyrical lullaby while the second section demonstrates Fauré’s technical writing for the flute.

Tango Etudes for solo flute by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) Tango Etudes for solo flute (1987) Lento – Meditativo Molto marcato e energico Astor Piazzolla was an Argentinian composer, bandleader, and bandoneon player. Throughout his compositions, Piazzolla managed to create a distinctive brand for himself. This was later called Nuevo tango and was at first met with resistance. His premiere works composed in this style were only publicly approved in France and the USA, but by the 1980’s his music was accepted across the world. His style includes extreme chromaticism, dissonance, and elements of

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jazz, while incorporating Argentinian dance rhythms. Lento – Meditativo, is a very lyrical piece that is slow but juxtaposes delicate with intense moments. Molto marcato e energico, includes lively dance rhythms, complex textures, and the presence of counterpoint due to the fast exchange between the high and low registers. A slow contrasting section evokes freedom and passion. The movement concludes with the return of the original themes presented in the beginning of the tango.

Sonata No. 1 for Flute and Piano (1945) by Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959) Allegro moderato Adagio Allegro poco moderato Bohuslav Martinů was a Czech composer, who began his music career by learning the organ.

During World War II, Martinů managed to elude conscription because of an ailment. He learned the violin during his time at home and began to concentrate on composing. His music was very prolific, and his compositional technique allowed him to write for nearly every instrumental and vocal genre. This three-movement sonata was written for the French flutist Rene le Roy. The opening movement, in ternary form, portrays a conversation between the flute and piano through lively and lyrical themes. Throughout the second movement, Martinů portrayed a sense of love and loss through the use of dark harmonies and dissonances. The last movement’s motive is inspired by the song of the whippoorwill bird that Martinů first heard in the summer of 1945 while on Cape Cod. Below, please find the YouTube link of the live performance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6adQSmtZya8&feature=share&list=PLBjClxueCows1stAiQo zxOAilYcOnC0O_

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