Brighid Flynn

The close relationships I have formed with the faculty members of the English department heightened my positive experiences during these last four years. Each teacher had a strong interest in his or her students, truly wanting them to succeed and set and reach their own academic and personal goals. It is because of my teachers that I have found the courage and self-confidence to prosper in the literature concentration. Because of them, I have recently decided to pursue a future in teaching. It’s the clichéd story of being inspired by a teacher and wanting to go out and teach. But it’s true. They are brilliant. They are kind, personable. They make students reach their true potential and find their brilliant light.
Going forward, I feel confident that I can harness what my teachers instilled in me. I feel as though I have become an individual with creative and intellectually-stimulating ideas in the world of English literature. I hope to continue my education. To feel this same degree of acceptance and drive that I have been so fortunate enough to experience during my time at Elizabethtown College.

During the spring of 2014, my junior year at Elizabethtown College, I was approached by a faculty member of the English department and offered the opportunity to embark on a year-long project to achieve Honors in the Discipline. After having accepted the offer, I proceeded to compile my committee of mentors. I wrote a proposal for my intended course of research and asked three faculty members in the literature track to work alongside me as I set out to write a comprehensible thesis of at least 45 pages.

I proposed a literary research paper in which I planned to look at the effects of child abuse in Victorian literature and its inherent significance on the shaping of bildungsromane. I examined the effects and portrayals of child abuse on the main characters from childhood to adulthood, focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850). Within these novels, abuse is manifested through malnourishment of the soul and body, imprisonment or isolation, physical beatings, and sexual invasiveness. All of these forms of maltreatment were combined to ensure that the child felt worthless or beneath the abusers, to guarantee a sense of insignificance and insubordination. The title characters within these novels exemplify the psychological journey of a bildungsroman, as relayed to readers through first-person narrative retrospection.

This honors project was the ultimate capstone to a rewarding undergraduate career. Literature and my desire to delve deep into its countless offerings was the driving force behind my decision to attend Elizabethtown and remains the motivation behind my decision to pursue graduate school with the aspirations to one day teach at the collegiate level. My passions lead me in the right direction, as I trust they will do this time around as well.

During my graduate career, I hope to further pursue the topic of child abuse and the redefining of the bildungsroman. Broadening my research to include Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss would allow me deepen my examinations, perhaps bringing in trauma theory in addition to theories concerning the “other” and gender roles.

Despite my ardor for literature, I have not and do not intend to rule out the possibility of pursuing a career in professional writing. I have experience in copy editing, writing, and formatting for professional documents and have taken many professional writing courses that have ignited in me a keen interest in the digital humanities. My experiences in tutoring and managing make me a well-rounded candidate for a teacher’s assistant and is a field of work that I am deeply interested. In fact, I have already taken a graduate course at LaSalle University and received an assistantship there as well. In the fall semester of 2015, I wrote articles for the English graduate department’s blog, exemplifying my ability to write for a professional platform and not just in the literary realm.

My goal for graduate school is to nourish my love for English, specifically in literary studies, in hopes of one day earning my Ph.D. and becoming a professor. I believe the best teachers are also the best learners; and so far, learning seems to be something that I’m good at, that continues to interest me, and never fails to light a spark in me.

Reading, crafting (painting, collaging, etc.), exploring the world of cosmetics, paddle boarding, writing/journaling, going to Target/shopping