The Perks of Being an English Major

     I'll admit it: sometimes, being an English major isn't all that great. It seems that every other week Yahoo or some such site posts an article about the least marketable majors, and sadly, English is usually quite up there on the list. When you tell people that you're swamped with work, sometimes they say, "You'll be fine. English is the easiest major!" And then you begin to wonder if it really is easy, if you're just skating by in college, if maybe you made the wrong decision, if maybe you should have gone with Business or Psychology or Bio so you could do something more challenging with your 4 years in college that has more real-world significance (or, for that matter, gives you more of a chance to actually earn back all that money you paid for your fancy liberal arts education).
 
 Also, you get really paranoid when conversing or writing, wondering if you made any mistake that reflects badly on you as an English major (because, of course, majoring in English means you should have a grasp on the language by now).

A sampling of what I have to read this semester. Forgive the bad lighting.

     But then there are moments, like when I feel the sublime joy of getting lost in a story, or get excited about complex and nuanced character development, or can't resist the urge to smell a book no matter how ridiculous I look in doing so, or feel legitimately, deeply saddened at the closing of a book store, that I realize I could never be anything else.

     Plus, there are some obvious perks to being an English major, one of the most notable being CHEAP TEXTBOOKS. I cannot emphasize this enough. My poor science major friends suffer the loss of arms and legs on a regular basis because they have to pay for exorbitantly priced books. I, on the other hand, am so glad that most of my required reading, with the exception of an anthology or two, consists almost exclusively of novels which--praise the Lord!-- can be purchased used on Amazon for dirt cheap ($0.01 plus $3 shipping? Don't mind if I do!). Even if I purchased the novels brand new, they still wouldn't set me back much more than $10, if that. So here's that whole silver lining thing: even though English majors don't tend to make much money after college, at least they save money on books while in college and are thus not quite as significantly in debt as they could be upon graduating.

     Not to mention, it's always great to hang out with people who know that when Juliet says, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" she means "why are you Romeo," not "where are you Romeo?" I know this isn't important, and I'll still be your friend if you didn't know that, but the fact of the matter is I really like to geek out over writing (particularly poetry) with excessive amounts of thee, thou, hence, wherefore, anything-eth, etc., and am quite happy when I find at least one other with whom I can sufficiently share my excitement for such flowery language. So, if you enjoy John Donne and Shakespeare, talk to me.

      But really, the thing that I'm most excited about as an English major this semester is my class "The Victorian Novel." Now, sometimes Victorian novels are a struggle to get through-- they move at a very leisurely pace which is sometimes just not up to par with our impatient standards today. However, I've always been fascinated with that time period and think it's actually quite pertinent to study Victorian culture, since many of their values and fears align surprisingly well with our own. Technology and science advancing faster than we can keep up with it? Check. A new view of womanhood? Check (although our new view is much more progressive than their new view). Novels about monsters and the supernatural? Check.

     And here's where my interest lies: the cultural catalysts that have, for whatever reasons, spurned an obsession with the gothic both in the 19th century and in our own. They have Dracula; we have Edward Cullen. The question is: why? What do we have in common? Now, I might have to save that answer for my thesis or, at the very least, a nice scholarly paper, so I won't get into that now.

     Needless to say, though, when we had to sign up for a research presentation topic in class, and I spied "gothic/supernatural" as one of the available topics, I jumped at the opportunity to research something I'm actually interested in. Sometimes as an English major I feel that I'm supposed to like gritty, realistic fiction that offers a bleak view of society. However, my heart really lies with all things wildly unrealistic, so you can only imagine my excitement at the prospect of getting to look into supernatural fiction (albeit, supernatural fiction written only within the span of Queen Victoria's reign) as a legitimate assignment for school.

     As I searched for relevant source material in the library, my excitement grew as I found I had a perfectly legitimate excuse to check out books such as The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the Night and Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997. I felt like maybe it would be more appropriate to check out these books with heavy eye makeup and a hearty helping of teen angst, but no matter--IT'S FOR RESEARCH! This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I like being an English major. Because doing research for school is actually quite fun, to the extent that I feel like I'm almost getting off easy.

     Not every class may offer me an opportunity to research literary topics not usually taken seriously, but I'm okay with that, because each class offers fun new reading opportunities of its own. And I am, after all, just an avid reader at the bottom of it all. Who else just has to read a novel for homework semester after semester?

     So what if Plans A, B, and C don't work out and I have to resort to struggling to find a job for which my English major is somehow relevant or, heaven forbid, resign to teaching? For now, I'm doing what I love and hoping that good things will come from that passion. Maybe it's just because I am-- in a very non-English major-y way--a sucker for happy endings that I'm not TOO worried about what the future holds.