Vassar Critical Journal – The Vassar College English Department Student Journal of Critical Essays

Current Issue Spring 2025

This is my final term as faculty advisor to the Vassar Critical Journal intensive. I am handing off the role to Assistant Professor of Early Modern and Disability Studies Pasquale Toscano, who will surely attract a different pool of student editors and contributors, bringing the Vassar Critical Journal to the attention of a new, in addition to its customary, audience. Readers see only the finished product. The work that goes into selecting, editing, and publishing the Journal takes place behind the scenes. In my six years as faculty advisor, I have greatly enjoyed working with students, watching them exercise critical judgement, debate and resolve their differences, both with each other and with me, and come up with the best possible selection and arrangement of material. Read more

Editor’s Note

by Charlotte Robertson

Before divulging into my personal feelings regarding this year’s edition of the Vassar Critical Journal, I would like to first recognize the brilliant 2025 Editorial Board, without whom this publication would not exist, as well as our faculty advisor, Wendy Graham, invaluable in her wisdom and hilarious digressions. Meeting weekly to discuss and evaluate a particularly outstanding round of student submissions in the face of a rising anti-intellectual movement was, to put it simply, cathartic. On a related note, I want to acknowledge our writers, whose invigorating, ambitious essays inspired contemplation and debate—testament to the power of literary criticism. Thank you, Zhikai Sheng, Miranda Chen, Franklin Zhu, Elia Smith, Anna Terry, John Cody Gilbert, Kai Speirs and Jaden Schapiro, for expanding our horizons.

Can Bigger Thomas Speak: An Exploration of the Affective Space

by Zhikai Sheng

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas faints at the inquest after his arrest. He only learns of his fainting by reading the newspaper titled “NEGRO RAPIST FAINTS AT INQUEST,” where he is grotesquely depicted as “a jungle beast” (Wright 260). The newspapers not only deprive Bigger of his subjectivity but also disseminate false and racist narratives about the crime such as the unfounded accusation of his rape of Mary, a white woman, despite his firm denial. Bigger’s reliance on newspapers demonstrates how he loses his subjectivity by experiencing life via the lens of others, and how he could not assert his voice in the public domain. Can Bigger Thomas speak?

Arrested Development: The Uncanny Child in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

by Miranda Chen

In his controversial yet powerful book, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, James R. Kincaid discusses the image of the child as pure, angelic, and asexual—a notion that he argues is quintessentially Victorian (57). In Kinkaid’s analysis, this cultural conception transforms the “true child” into a “false child” capable of embodying fantasy, obsession, and desire (196). In her third and last novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë employs this trope through her portrayal of the girl-woman Paulina Home, whose transgression of age categories throughout the novel gives her an otherworldly quality, reified by other characters frequently calling her a “ghost” or “fairy.” Paulina’s most potent narrative function, however, is as a double for Lucy Snowe, Villette’s unreliable narrator.

Queer Desire and Colonial Power in Noa Noa and The Ebb-Tide

by Franklin Zhu

European representations of the Pacific have long depicted the region in feminized, idealized terms—a static paradise of erotic fulfillment, cultural innocence, and timeless beauty. This mythologized South Seas image, rooted in early travelogues and colonial art, persists not as a simple naïve fantasy but as a fraught site of colonial ambivalence. On the surface, imperial writers and artists celebrated the Pacific as an untouched Eden, yet beneath that celebration lay the projection of repressed European desires—particularly homoerotic and “feminine” longings—onto the islands and their inhabitants. In other words, the Pacific was cast both as an eroticized geography and as a canvas for European anxieties: the land itself became a sensual, liberating backdrop, and Pacific people were figured as exotic “Others” through whom taboo desires could be explored or disavowed.

There Is Only What There Is: Intuition and Intention in Art-as-Report

by Elia Smith

Gerhard Richter describes a quotation by Francis Bacon as “well-suited” to his practice: “I believe that art is recording; I think it’s reporting.” Richter’s series of paintings 18 October 1977 (the October cycle), created in 1988, consists of fifteen black-and-white works painted from newspaper and police photographs (Richter, Daily Practice of Painting 198). Taken together, they serve as a visual record of the events of the cycle’s titular date: the ostensible suicides of three members of the militant, left wing Red Army Faction in West Germany’s Stammheim Prison. The October cycle strips the RAF suicides of the ideological narrative imposed on them by both the militants themselves and by the state they sought to destroy. The images, morbid yet bloodless, render the violence of Baader’s death senseless when removed from their political context; the report lacks a message.

‘Crotesques et Corps Monstrueux’: On the Relationship of Montaigne’s Essays to the Grotesque

by Anna Terry

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, first published in 1580, investigates the nature of humankind through a philosophical lens. In the opening lines of “De l’Amitié” (“On Friendship”), the 28th chapter in the first volume of Essays—a numerical position that situates it at nearly the exact center of the work’s primary volume—Montaigne establishes a relationship between the textual body of the Essays and that body’s pluralistic constitution. In doing so, he defines his own work as a textual embodiment of the grotesque. Montaigne writes, “Que sont-ce icy aussi, à la verité, que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n’ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite?” (“What are these, in truth, but grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together from various members, without certain shape, having no order, sequence of proportions other than fortuitous?”)

The Body Language Complex of The American

by John Cody Gilbert

Henry James reflects the surfaces of life in his early novel The American, confronting the problem of finding depth in Christopher Newman’s anti-romantic quest for “completion.” If James does not offer an answer directly, it is because he instead seeks to represent the complex patterns which weave together that typically American problem of individualistic egotism, nonetheless aware of itself, in the confrontation with an unfamiliar aesthetic and social order. To represent these patterns, James hybridizes genres. By understanding genre in terms of Bhaktin’s chronotope, we can unpack the role of hybridization in the overarching narrative and the various spaces Newman occupies throughout. In representing the patterns of psychology, James represents time through the experience of history itself, conditioned by habitually sublimated elements of culture, expressed without total volition. The complex expression of all these elements occurs through a knotting of the body and language in the fabric of the narrative itself.

‘Effort and the Struggle’: Heroic Cycles in Bernard’s Final Soliloquy in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

by Kai Speirs

Writing The Waves was the most difficult literary task Virginia Woolf ever undertook. She began writing with “no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty” (A Writer’s Diary 142) but finished the novel in a state of “intensity and intoxication” and declared in her diary: “How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!” (Diary 7 Feb. 1931). Her diaries and letters from July 1929 – July 1931 (the period when the novel was composed and finalized) record numerous intense cycles of creative laboring that move from despair and misgivings to periods of remarkable pertinacity and conviction, from bouts of incapacitating illness to good health and daily walks (Letters xxi). The low points to these cycles, however, were not simply periods of inaction where Woolf’s progress was completely halted; rather, in varying ways the disillusionment, illness, drawing into isolation, or feelings of grief and despair become, as Woolf often attested, the very prerequisites for the clearer understanding, greater sense of effort, and bursting creative powers that followed.

Letting The Waves Wash Over: The Rhythm of Non-being

by Jaden Schapiro

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a rhizome—a Gestalt project to the extreme. The novel is an exercise in simultaneity. The characters are both one and many through Woolf and the self-aware narrator. They direct the wormholes between people, descriptions, and feelings. Scholars, like Molly Hite, will point out that each character in The Waves is also one of Woolf’s close friends, family members, or idols. Louis might represent T. S. Eliot, Susan as Vanessa Bell, Perival as Thoby Stephen, et cetera. Yet, what makes this novel so delicately layered is how the characters are not just Woolf herself, not just representations of people in her life, but also manifestations of her own philosophical theories. Woolf’s philosophies are her friends and her friends are outlets for her philosophies. From The Waves’ dramatis personæ, one character sticks out the most: Rhoda. She is by far the most complex and mysterious out of the group. The rest of the cast is still important, but they lack as much dimensionality and err toward archetypes. When we examine Rhoda’s complexities, we understand them to be representations of “non-being” or the banality of life in between important moments in our lives.