I grew up in a house of books.
Some families wonder where they’ll fit their new couch, but my father’s constant dilemma was where to fit another bookshelf. Our walls were lined with Thoreau, Bolaño, Bronte and Dickinson. I’d drag my six-year-old finger along the spines, memorizing each cover’s design, wondering if someday I’d read the kinds of books my dad did, even though at that age, I was still content reading Mary Kate and Ashley mysteries in my pretend fort in the living room.
If there’s one thing I share with my father, it’s literature. We email each other articles from The Boston Review on writers we love. I demand that he read the most recent novel I finished for my 18th Century Novel class (if he somehow hasn’t already). And he picks apart almost every piece of writing that I do, to the point that I’m starting to become nearly immune to his brutally honest criticism.
Yet, although words have been in my blood since my dad chose Charlotte Bronte as my (semi, he says) namesake, admitting my identity as an English major took me a little longer than I would have expected. After exploring almost all the types of classes Tufts offers, I wanted to be sure.
It became a little more obvious to me when I started to keep a journal of my English professors’ most profound or most hilarious quotes. I began to notice just how much I looked forward to the process of writing my English essays. In my freshman year hall, I tried not tell too many people I was actually excited to spend hours writing about Virginia Woolf. And now my identity as an English major is so staunchly obvious to me, I have no idea how I didn’t declare it to both myself and to the rest of Tufts until sophomore year.
At one point during freshman year, everyone has the same meeting with his or her pre-major adviser. They walk in, hair frazzled and palms sweaty, demanding an answer for the ever-lingering question, “What should I major in?”
Of course, instead of telling me what to major in, my pre-major adviser simply asked me, “What’s the department that you want to align yourself with throughout your four years at Tufts?”
So I thought about it. For a while. A long while.
This question changed the way I thought about my major—it was no longer about an immediate result, or about something I could exchange for a job or a salary. Instead, it was about how I wanted to dedicate my experience at Tufts. What kind of professors did I want to be closest with? What kind of focus would I be most proud to declare? While considering the implications of a concentration in college is important, my adviser helped me realize that getting my degree was something happening right now, at that very moment. These four years only occur once, so how did I want to spend them?
I wanted to absorb myself in the Department of English, of course, located in the ancient, yet grandiose East Hall. I loved struggling through a Žižek essay during the wee hours of the night in the library. I wanted to discuss my thesis statements with my professors during office hours. I began to force myself to speak up in class. To stay up late to finish my reading for the next morning. I finally found professors that I felt I connected to on both an intellectual and personal level. All of a sudden, I could ask them questions about both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and about their experience beyond college.
Beyond strengthening an important connection with my father, and providing me with subject matter that is both stimulating and difficult, I feel that a degree in English provides me with so much more than a traditional “education” of memorizing facts and regurgitating information. It challenges me to to remove myself from the ideologies I’m so comfortable surrounding myself with, and to analyze things in an ever-changing light. With each book I read, I feel that I have more possibilities to understand both my own experience, and more importantly, the experience of others around me.
My English adviser once said, “People need resources to imagine who they want to be and who they want to become.” And literature, to me, is the most profound vessel by which to do just that that. I feel that each day I experience a small, glimpse of truth about the world inside the four walls of a classroom.
To me, a degree in English is not about directing myself to an immediate career, although I know that being able to read and write critically are skills I'll use in any future job. Selfishly, it’s a degree for myself. It’s a way to help me understand my life, what it might be, and what I want it to become. It’s a way to help me understand the world, and the problematic, constructed forces that have shaped it. Learning to read literature, and I mean really, really read, is an experience I know that I’ll carry with me each day from here on out.