As the song goes, don't it [the article] just make ya wanna cry, wanna lay down and die? If I beat anyone the way this young woman beats this metaphor, I'd be imprisoned for life with absolutely no possibility of parole. Or langue for that matter.
Read "Sent To The Chopping Block"
Sent To The Chopping BlockIn my corner of academe, English Renaissance drama, New Historicists dominated the 1980s and '90s. Their research often involved speculating about who might symbolize Elizabeth I in any given play, preferably by Shakespeare. Was it Portia in The Merchant of Venice? In Hamlet, was it Gertrude? Or Hamlet himself?
But all of those guesses were wrong. As it turns out, my dissertation director is Queen Elizabeth. And I've been sent to the chopping block.
My adviser -- let's call him Brad Torey -- sports a Palm Pilot and tenure rather than a scepter and divine right, and, sadly, geometric-print rayon shirts instead of ermine robes. But his rule bears a startling resemblance to Elizabeth's court, where the monarch -- flirtatious, unobtainable, and more than a little vain -- demanded that courtiers woo her and be wooed. To do business with the queen was to offer undying love and to hope for tokens of affection in exchange -- a dance, perhaps, or maybe a shipbuilding contract.
Brad's dominion over his students is similarly romantic. I got chocolate from England; my fellow doctoral student, Jane, got candy from Scotland. He sends cards, sometimes with endearments -- "honey," "sweetheart," "darling." He meets us in casually chic restaurants and bars.
When he presented me with a copy of the Oxford Classical Dictionary and gave Jane an old television set, we giggled, trying to figure out what that meant.
Somehow, sex always rears its ugly, lovely head in the Torey court: office-hours conversations about how Monica Lewinsky might have gotten exactly what she wanted, about student-professor affairs. (I couldn't help noting, perhaps paranoiacally, that during my comprehensive exams Brad used the word "arousing" no less than five times. At no point were we talking about sex.)
Our monarch is frank about his history with other women: the mother who preferred his brother, the devout high-school girlfriend, the woman who turned him down for a date with a ludicrous excuse (she was busy for lunch that year), the nurse, the schoolteacher, the bruising divorce, and finally, the dissertation student who married him a few years ago. She had to give up her teaching career, of course. Brad, our Virgin King, does not wear a wedding ring.
Elizabeth was frequently accused of miserliness; her first earl of Essex, along with two of her chief knights, Hatton and Walsingham, died as broke as any grad students. Brad himself doesn't much like handing out money to his ladies in waiting.
We've taught his classes and edited his manuscripts, yet received no compensation in return. When he was in England, Jane drove without complaint to his large, sparkling house, taking care of cats and plants -- unpaid, as usual.
But I don't really think Elizabeth was just stingy, and I don't think Brad is either. His reluctance to put things on a financial footing, rather, shows a desire for his subjects' absolute fealty. By agreeing to do these things for him gratis, even as we take out more and more student loans, we are forced to admit our need and desire to please him.
Brad, though, sees it differently: The graduate students he advises are his friends, he says. We're all partners with him in a joint venture, right? Yes, Brad. If you say so, Brad. You're the boss.
At any rate, Brad asks for his students' love, and he gets it. We felt the knife when he had surgery one semester, winced along with him when his fittingly Tudor gout flared up. We listen sympathetically, trying not to let our reactions give anything away, when he wonders aloud whether he's too old for his students to find him attractive. (As Elizabeth aged, needing reassurance, she demanded more and more wooing from her courtiers, to less and less effect.)
But I wish Brad would spend a bit less time in the English Renaissance with Elizabeth and a bit more in the Italian Renaissance with Machiavelli, who wrote that it was better to be feared than to be loved. Because whatever Brad thinks, it's fear, not love, that he wants.
It took a few years for me to feel the treacherous shoals of the intimacy Brad had offered, to see the bearded jaw tighten in anger, to hear that California-tinged voice drop and get a little husky with rage. The queen's young favorites inevitably presumed too much intimacy; so did I.
Last semester, after waiting three years for Brad to read a chapter draft (my departmental stipend had expired in the meantime), I asked for more feedback in a tone that wasn't exactly courtly. And I implied -- in public -- that one of Brad's suggestions for my dissertation might not work.
Those were fatal errors.
Today I can no longer call Brad my director at all. He resigned from my committee with a curt note, and though he had approved my dissertation prospectus and passed me for my comps, he refused to sign the paperwork that would get me into doctoral candidacy and didn't bother telling me.
The queen had her critics maimed and executed; I merely got dumped. But man, even without having my entrails drawn out of my still-living body and fed to waiting dogs, I sure do feel eviscerated.
The department hasn't quite kicked me out. I've found a new dissertation director, recently tenured. Brad seems to know everyone and to head every important committee, though, and I'm not too optimistic about my career.
As for his other courtiers, Jane and our friend Laura keep soldiering along in Brad's service. His wife, Mary, still lives with him. Doris didn't try for an academic job after her decade or so in the graduate program; instead, she works alongside Mary in an office on campus. Alice got the kind of plum tenure-track position we were all supposed to try for, but things haven't gone so well for her. Unable to produce a dissertation that Brad would sign until years after she was hired, her tenure case looks bad. Like Queen Elizabeth, Brad will leave no heirs to the throne.
Meanwhile, I'm still sans doctorate. I've left Brad's kingdom for adjunct work in a rural state adjoining the one where I grew up. I'd call it "exile," but that sounds a little grand.
Actually this small Southern town isn't so bad. From here, I correspond occasionally with my undergraduate adviser, a man of many kindnesses. And sometimes I take walks in the oldest local cemetery. In the spring rains, the cemetery looks suitably romantic, with the artificial flowers blown across the gray-green grass. Some of the names on the gravestones seem to come from a period only a few generations after the earl of Essex's head must have thudded on his queen's scaffold. But I can't quite make out the dates on the weathered granite. They could be 17th century, or 21st.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Ana Forbes is the pseudonym of an adjunct instructor of English at a university in the South.
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