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74| Appendix 1: Sample Proposals

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

A Sample Humanities Research Proposal

Note: The author has included her name, address, phone number, e-mail address,

and the date of submission on the title page. Since many thesis proposals are often

received in the ALM office at the same time, it is important that this information be

on the title page in case the proposals become separated from their cover letters or

envelopes.

Appendix 1:

Sample Research Proposals

All of the following research proposals are based on actual proposals submitted by ALM candidates.

The original annotated bibliographies have been abridged in some cases to conserve space. Some notes on

the main features of the first proposal, but relevant to all of them, follow each section.

Sample Research Proposals

Humanities

English and American Literature and Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75

History of Art and Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95

Social Sciences

Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127

History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147

History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .165

Archaeology/Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .175

Behavioral Science

Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .185

Biological Sciences

Biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .203

Appendix 1: Sample Proposals |75

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

Proposal

for a Thesis in the Field of

English and American Literature and Language

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Master of Liberal Arts Degree

Harvard University

Extension School

June 1, 2002

Nancy Kelley

9 Western Avenue

Milburn, MA 02899

[email protected]

(617) 555-1212

76| Appendix 1: Sample Proposals

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

Note: The statement of the research problem is concise. It presents one or more

well-focused questions; the author’s hypothesis or answers to these questions; the

type of evidence that the author intends to use in order to test the hypothesis; the

anticipated result, which further extends the hypothesis and considers its broader

implications. The author does make use of the first person, but not in an obtrusive

manner.

Appendix 1: Sample Proposals |77

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

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Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press,

1975).

Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1967) 1.

I .

Tentative Title:

“On the Home Front: Gender Disruption and the Great War”

II.

Research Problem

One of the contributions of recent feminist literary scholarship has been to question the

absence of female authorial representation from the widely acknowledged canon of World War I

literature. This canon has been established and upheld by substantial and well known critical

studies including Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory

and Stanley Cooperman’s

World War I and the American Novel.

The implication is that the “classic” writers of the Great

War are not only male, but soldiers as well, and that women’s contributions have largely been

ignored or dismissed.

In this thesis, I will analyze selected works of three major female writers of the 20th

century—Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf—which thematize and are set against

the background of World War I: Cather’s novels One of Ours and The Professor’s House;

Wharton’s novels A Son at the Front and The Marne as well as the short stories “Coming Home,”

The Refugees,” and “Writing a War Story”; and Woolf’s novels Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To

the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts.

The chief questions I will investigate are: Why have female writers been excluded from

the WWI canon? What contributions has each writer in this investigation made to modernism?

How did the war enable her to articulate the problems of being female, of being a female artist?

78| Appendix 1: Sample Proposals

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

Note: Both terms with precise historical meanings (“The Great War”) and poten-

tially ambiguous ones (“Modernism” and “The New Woman”) are defined. These

are not the only possible definitions, but are the ones chosen by the author to fit her

own needs in the thesis.

Appendix 1: Sample Proposals |79

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

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How did the female artist respond to male war texts? How do the selected works illuminate her

work as a whole? Is there a feminine response to violence and war?

While male-authored WWI texts are marked by states of alienation, despair, nihilism, and

impotence—in other words, a lamentation of the obsolescence of individual male agency, I

hypothesize that the female-authored texts in this study are marked by a sense of female power.

This is evidenced by the appropriation of a masculinist tradition (the sheer act of writing about

the war at all), and by the emergence of some common themes—the effect of war on the commu-

nity, the preservation of culture through art, and a critique of the patriarchy. These themes are

worked out through an exploration of the effects of socially constructed notions of masculinity

and femininity. As such, they represent a uniquely feminine contribution to modernism.

In testing my hypothesis, I will compare and contrast selected short stories and novels,

analyzing each for the social and psychological implications of war in the context of gender rela-

tions. I will include autobiographical materials that directly contribute to the artist’s oeuvre on war,

and such secondary sources as biographies and critical studies. My anticipated conclusion is that

each artist in her own way used the war between nations to examine the nature of war between the

sexes, a war which endorses gender polarization with direct consequences for both women and men.

III.

Definition of Terms

“The Great War”: World War I (WWI), general armed conflict between the Allies and the

Central Powers, 1914-1918.

“Modernism”: a post-Victorian artistic and literary movement marked by disillusionment

with industrialism and imperialism, by the rise of capitalism and commercialism, and by the

decline of religious certainty in an age of anxiety.

“The New Woman”: a term coined around the turn of the century to denote the emer-

gence of women into the public sphere, a term closely associated with the suffrage movement,

and connoting profound social transformations of the time.

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A Guide to the ALM Thesis

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Lynn Hanley, Writing War: Fiction, Gender & Memory (Amherst: University of Massa-

chusetts Press, 1991) 6.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land, vols. 1 and 2 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1988, 1989).

Helen Cooper et al., eds., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representa-

tion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Margaret Higonnet et al., eds.,

Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987);

Mark Hussey, ed., Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse: Syracuse

University Press, 1991).

IV.

Background

One of the many contributions of recent feminist scholarship has been the documentation of

an enormous range of female-authored texts written during and shortly after World War I.

For

instance, novelists Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, Radclyffe Hall, Rebecca West, May

Sinclair, Winifred Holtby, H.D., and poets Isabel Eccleston McKay, Alice Meynell, and Jessie Pope

are just some of the female artists included in Sandra Gilbert

and Susan Gubar’s comprehensive

two-volume study No Man’s Land. That these texts have been missing from the literary “canon” of

the Great War has been cause for little questioning. Over the last decade, this issue has been and

continues to be redressed by provocative new analysis, included in such collected essays as Arms

and the Woman, Behind the Lines, and Virginia Woolf and War.

However, in my research I have not

located a comprehensive study of Cather, Wharton, and Woolf in relation to one another. I am

interested in these three because they are contemporaneous, early practitioners of modernism, each

having published her first work at the turn of the century. This thesis, therefore, will be an opportu-

nity to examine the responses of three major women writers to the historic event of their time, which

eclipsed an equally compelling social phenomenon, the rise of the “New Woman.”

The years which preceded the war are critical to understanding feminine literary re-

sponses to it. The Victorian legacy of gender polarization, which relegated women to the private

sphere and men to the public, was coming to an end. By the late 19th century, women were

Appendix 1: Sample Proposals |81

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

-4-

Gilbert and Gubar,vol. 1, 20-21.

Gilbert and Gubar, vol. 2, 129.

Higonnet, et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars 4.

Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: Double Lives (New York: Vintage Books 1989) 167-68.

entering new fields in greater numbers than ever before—in factories, in education, in letters, and

to some degree, the professions. Despite other important social phenomena associated with

modernism (the discontents spawned by industrialization, the rise of commercialism, loss of

empire, and the decline of religious faith) it was the “woman problem” which permeated every

aspect of society.

The very fabric of life as it was known was shredding, and the symbol of its

undoing was represented, namely, by the suffrage movement and its archetype of revolt against

masculine dominance and cultural feminization,

the “New Woman.” In other words, a battle of

the sexes was being waged at the turn of the century. Because war itself is a gendering activity

which reinforces gender polarization,

the resulting tension became the subject of much of

feminine war literature. This body of literature, as Gilbert and Gubar have documented in No

Man’s Land, represents a variety of responses to war. Some texts exhibit susceptibility to propa-

ganda. Some reveal disillusionment and despair. Some show women’s empowerment. Most,

however, were critical of patriarchal society to some degree. Furthermore, what they had in

common was an experience of war different from that of men.

In this thesis I am interested in exploring the responses of Cather, Wharton, and Woolf to

the Great War and to the underlying crisis of gender disruptions. I will interpret these responses in

the context of current critical opinion and biographical information, identifying major recurring

themes and where those themes overlap among the three authors. I will devote one section to each

author for a discussion of the selected works specified above.

Despite its Pulitzer Prize, Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922) was harshly criticized by

such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis for a perceived

romantic glorification of war.

Even feminist critics have noted that One of Ours can be read as

82| Appendix 1: Sample Proposals

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

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Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1986) 124.

Sharon O’Brien, “Combat Envy and Survivor Guilt: Willa Cather’s ‘Manly Battle

Yarn,’” Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: University

of North Carolina Press, 1989) 137.

Maureen Ryan, “No Woman’s Land: Gender in Willa Cather’s One of Ours,” Studies in

American Fiction 18 (Spring 1990): 70.

Lee 178.

Lee 171.

Benstock 27.

either soliciting support for the war

or for presenting war as the means for bringing purpose to a

mediocre life.

Many scholars, however, have discovered other meanings which I will explore. Citing the

critical work of Susan Rosowski, Gilbert and Gubar, Blanche Gelfant, Maureen Ryan and others,

I will link Cather’s romanticism to her desire to be free from constraints of feminization. Usurp-

ing the masculinist tradition, she creates her own male/soldier hero. She rewrites that tradition by

portraying female desire and possibilities in relation to society’s (men’s) fatal idealization of

women.

It is not Cather who is romantic; it is the hero whose romanticism will ultimately lead

to his death. As Cather’s biographer Hermione Lee states, One of Ours is a story of a “knight’s

quest for redemption through renunciation in the wasteland.”

While Cather longs for a new

quest to replace that of the spiritual pioneer of her earlier works,

her modernism now locates the

quest in renunciation of gender roles and in an attainment of androgyny. Her feminized hero

rejects masculine rituals, heterosexual love, and homoerotic possibilities for ideals beyond sex

roles and sexual antagonism. This is a major theme that I will explore in the thesis, following its

development in her later novel The Professor’s House (1925). In the Wharton section, my primary

focus will be A Son at the Front (1923). Like Cather, Wharton has been criticized by males for a

perspective on war “too distant” to be relative.

Also as with Cather, critics note Wharton’s

Appendix 1: Sample Proposals |83

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

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Gilbert and Gubar, vol. 2, 283.

Judith Sensibar, “Behind the Lines” in Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front: Rewriting a

Masculinist T radition,” Journal of American Studies 24 (August 1990): 70.

Sensibar 189.

Gilbert and Gubar, vol. 2, 157.

Sensibar 188n.

Barbara A. White, Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne

Publishers, 1991) 85.

enthusiasm for the war effort

while still others have argued against the novel’s naive idealism.

Judith Sensibar, however, takes on critics of this work (R.W.B. Lewis, Cynthia Wolff, and Shari

Benstock), and sees it as marking the beginning of an experimental later period.

During this

period Wharton attempts to say the “unsayable,” a term Gilbert and Gubar use in their discussion

of Wharton’s ghost stories.

In this case, the unsayable is the homoerotic content of the father/son

story. Whereas Cather rewrote the male soldier/hero story in the context of her own female desire,

Wharton rewrites an essential masculinist trope of WWI stories and poetry—homoeroticism—by

suggesting that it is not the result of male bonding in a gender polarized war, but has a “perennial

presence in a homophobic world.”

That she appropriates the valorized relationship of father and

son, and encodes it with the father’s possessiveness, commodification, and idealization of the son

is as significant for its critique of consumerism as it is for its incestuous homoeroticism. I will

explore similar themes as they are played out in The Marne (1918).

In addition, I will analyze Wharton’s three short stories as a reflection of concerns about

herself and her writing at the time

—including anxiety over female authorship within a

masculinist tradition in “Writing a War Story” (1919), paternal corruption and female desire in

“Coming Home” (1916), and the tension between sympathy for the war effort and the artist’s

need for distance in “The Refugees” (1930).

84| Appendix 1: Sample Proposals

A Guide to the ALM Thesis

Note: The author has situated her research problem against a wider historical and

intellectual background. She has, in a sense, looked through her chosen “window”

and described what lies beyond, the broader context that further helps to illuminate

the fiction of Cather, Wharton, and Woolf. The author has also explained the need

for this study by addressing the work on this subject that has preceded her own.

Her footnotes are also in the proper form (See Chapter 3, “Guidelines for Bibliog-

raphy and Notes”).