--The Wife of Bath's Tale

I still haven't written that essay I referred to in my last entry, which means that it's automatically lost one letter grade; if I hand it in on Monday and it's utterly perfect, I'll end up with a B. Oh, well.

The problem is that I'm still not sure what I want to write about. Well, that's not exactly it; the problem is that I have a general idea of what I want to explore, but I haven't yet figured out what my point is. And without that, I don't have an essay.

What's a bit annoying is that there are a few obvious topics (which, I imagine, half the class opted for) that I probably could scribble down a few pages on pretty quickly: stuff we've spent time on in class, like comparing Beckett's "Catastrophe" with one of the other plays we covered that are variations on the same theme, or looking at the effects of colonialism in Conde's "The Tropical Breeze Hotel." But, putting aside the fact that everybody else is gonna be doing that, those ideas just don't interest me that much. For that matter, most of the plays we've done just don't interest me that much. When you come right down to it, I'm going to be writing about "The Tropical Breeze Hotel" simply because it's the least uninteresting of the bunch.

I didn't mean that to sound as bitter as I think it may have.

Anyway. In the play in question, I've noticed an interesting aspect to the interpersonal dynamic between the two characters. And it strongly reminds me of the Wife of Bath's tale, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And I think there's something there, and it's hovering around the edges of my counsciousness, but I still haven't figured out what it is, and whether it can really support a full essay.

It had better kick in soon, or I'm sunk.

I don't like turkey, anyway.