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Is God Really Dead in Existentialist Belief?
By Caitlin Bould, Class of 2026
Editor’s Note: Essay on Albert Camus’ The Stranger (awarded a Scholastic Gold Key)
In The Outsider, by Albert Camus, the character of Meursault represents a personification of Camus’s own existential beliefs and is amoral at his core. Existentialist belief states clearly that “God is dead” and “life is ruled by chance,” asserting that it is trivial to observe an organized religion (Meyer). Some key examples of Existentialist Thought evident in the book include Universal Chaos, existing “without purpose or destiny,” and that “humankind can only find meaning in life through commitment (to a task or to a personal relationship)” (Meyer). Although Meursault is ostensibly an existentialist, his actions are continuously dictated by some all-consuming power rooted in religious values. The novel is rich in biblical allusions concerning Meursault and other characters. While morality is not always based on Christianity, it is a fundamental concept of faith. Meursault’s amoral belief of universal rationality contrasts the Christian beliefs represented in The Outsider as his ultimate fate.
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Spiraling into Control: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Cold War Anxieties
By Jolin Yu, Class of 2025
Editors Note: Final research essay for VI Form English elective, “Cold War, Cool Culture,” taught by Mr. Eslick on Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo.
Introduction
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo opens with a chase: a San Francisco police detective, Scottie
Ferguson, clings to a rooftop as he watches in horror his partner plunges to his death below. This scene embodies the essence of the film—its obsession with heights and falls, with control and instability, with the fragility of perception. Much like Scottie’s dizzying descent into a maelstrom of psychological and emotional turmoil, 1950s America sat on a precipice. At the height of Cold War paranoia, cultural anxieties surrounding control, conformity, and identity reverberated across all levels of society. Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece offers a profound critique of these anxieties, using its protagonist’s destructive obsession to mirror the era’s fear of instability and its relentless pursuit of ideals unattainable.
This paper argues that Vertigo critiques patriarchal control and societal constructs of identity and power, using Scottie’s obsessive recreation of Madeleine as an allegory for Cold War anxieties. Through its subversion of traditional gender dynamics, disorienting cinematography, and narrative structure, Hitchcock’s masterpiece exposes the fragility of male fantasies and the human cost of cultural repression. By situating the film within its historical and psychological context, this analysis reveals Vertigo as a layered critique of 1950s societal norms and their enduring implications.
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Reason and Passion: Epistemological Love in Pride and Prejudice
By Ariel Cheng, VI form
Editor’s Note: The Coleman Prize in English is awarded to the student, who, in the judgment of the English Department, has submitted the most outstanding essay during the academic year.
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen synthesizes the Romantic and Enlightenment ideals of truth by arguing that love requires passion tempered by reason. Elizabeth Bennet, the novel’s protagonist, embodies the Enlightenment ideal of truth; a “rational creature”, she strives to judge other characters through careful thought and active deliberation (Austen 106). In stark contrast to this portrait of reason stands Fitzwilliam Darcy, a symbol of the Romantic ideal of truth. Unlike Elizabeth, Darcy judges others based on his feelings and intuitions. In the world that Austen crafts, no character is completely correct: neither perspective is sufficient for making accurate judgements. The Romantic passion of Darcy’s proposal is not enough for Elizabeth to change her mind; likewise, Elizabeth’s use of logical reasoning leads her to misjudge Darcy’s character. Indeed, the turning point of the novel occurs when both characters acknowledge the ideological perspective they have ignored – Elizabeth appreciates the Romantic ideal of truth after she visits Pemberley, and Darcy recognizes the importance of reason as he hands Elizabeth his letter. In this way, Austen presents love as a form of knowledge: to love another is to truthfully understand their character by exercising both passion and reason.
Before introducing either reason or passion as ways of arriving at truth, Austen justifies the necessity of following these approaches. Austen’s characters do not have ready access to the truth – instead, they make do with information transmitted through conversation, colored by social standing and perspective, transmuted by the biased worldviews of individuals. This social warping of reality – symbolized by free indirect discourse – gives rise to a struggle for truth that every character must resolve. This dilemma is so central to the novel that Austen introduces it from the very beginning. The first line of Pride and Prejudice reads: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). At first glance, the tone of this opening line reads like a statement of fact, confident almost to the point of arrogance; however, a closer examination reveals a surprising layer of nuance. Here, the author does not claim that the narrator’s statement is universally true, but that it is “universally acknowledged”; Austen is not making a brass ontological claim about what exists in reality, but an epistemological one about what is believed “in the minds of the surrounding families” (Austen 1). This blurring of lines between what exists in the minds of others (beliefs) and what exists in reality (ontological truth) is not an accidental imprecision, but a comment on the difficulty of knowing accurate information in Regency England. To access ontological reality, individuals must pierce this veil of constructed truth – represented by free indirect discourse – propped up by society through exercising reason, passion, or a combination of both.
Having set up this struggle for truth, Austen proposes a solution in the character of Elizabeth Bennet. This character represents the Enlightenment ideal of truth, serving as a symbol of reason and rationality. Seemingly free of social pressures, Elizabeth runs to Netherfield Park in a muddy dress when Jane is sick; she even rejects the proposals of both Darcy and Mr. Collins, a radical act for a woman at that time. In both of these pivotal scenes, Elizabeth’s blatant disregard for societal convention enables her to actively deliberate and reason. But for all of Elizabeth’s rationality, she still misjudges the characters of Darcy and Wickham. Austen points out that this failure is due to her refusal to acknowledge the Romantic idea of certain truths as transcendent and unknowable. In continuing to judge both Darcy and Wickham based on their first impressions, Elizabeth commits the same error as Laplace and Newton by thinking that humans act predictably. The social world, Austen contends, is not a clockwork universe that steadily ticks forward according to a consistent set of rules: individuals are unpredictable, flawed, and should not be judged through pure reason alone. Indeed, Elizabeth only starts judging Darcy accurately after she visits the Pemberley estate; overcome by the “natural beauty”, the passion she feels in this scene serves as a signal that Darcy is a good match for her (Austen 235). This new knowledge did not come from a cognitive source, but a deeper, emotional one. It is important to note here that Austen is not unequivocally advocating for the Romantic perspective, but rather a synthesis of the Romantic approach with the Enlightenment approach. Elizabeth starts to change her mind about Darcy after she reads his letter, a wholly rational act; however, to complete this process and confirm her conclusions, she also becomes a Romantic by trusting her emotions as a source of knowledge. Like Kant, Austen acknowledges that there are limits to what truths pure reason can deliver. To overcome these limitations, she argues that it is necessary to respect some truths as unknowable and fundamentally emotional in nature. In this way, the ultimate cause of Elizabeth’s attainment of truth is rooted in both Romantic and Enlightenment ideals.
If Elizabeth represents the thesis that truth can be reached through rationality, then Fitzwilliam Darcy represents the antithesis that truth can be reached through passion. Where Elizabeth favors logic and reason as epistemological instruments, Darcy uses his emotions to judge others; for example, without any concrete information or evidence, he separates Jane and Mr. Bingley based on an intuition that Jane was not truly in love. His over-reliance on subjective feelings as a source of knowledge even led to his initial misjudgment of Elizabeth. Unimpressed and unmoved by her physical beauty, he declares that she is “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt [him]” and refuses to dance with her (Austen 13). Indeed, it is only after he sees beyond Elizabeth’s physical appearance and comes to appreciate the “liveliness of [her] mind” that he falls in love with her (Austen 359). This act in itself is a partial capitulation to the Enlightenment mode of thought; however, an aesthetic appreciation of Elizabeth’s logic is different to applying logic as a tool for attaining truth. Indeed, Darcy continues to misjudge reality throughout Elizabeth’s time at Rosings. His attempts at reaching out to her – waiting for her on her favorite paths, visiting her with Colonel Fitzwilliam, his proposal of marriage – fail due to the inherent subjectivity of his approach to truth. The Romantic conception of truth proclaims that “you create your own version of the universe”; truth is thus inherently subjective, and a particular truth is inextricable from the individual for whom that fact is true (Berlin 121). Austen’s characterization of Darcy’s awkward attempts to connect with Elizabeth can thus be read as a critique targeting the impractical subjectivity for which Romantic truth advocates. To Darcy, it is unequivocally true that he is in love with Elizabeth; he does not think it is necessary to rationally justify these subjective feelings to Elizabeth, and thus is unable to see that she is annoyed by his attempts to connect until she angrily rejects his proposal. Darcy giving Elizabeth his letter represents his realization that objective truth is important, and that reason combined with emotion is necessary for reaching accurate beliefs. By explaining his reasons and justifications for his actions to Elizabeth, Darcy grounds his “version of the universe” in the objective frame of ontological reality; the process of deliberation involved in writing the letter also makes him realize that some of his past judgments (such as his view that Jane was not in love with Mr. Bingley) are too illogical and not based enough in reason. In this sense, Darcy’s ability to make accurate judgments by the end of the novel is also a synthesis of Romantic and Enlightenment ideals.
Throughout the novel, the epistemological journeys of Darcy and Elizabeth parallel the development of their romance – Darcy only acts on his love for Elizabeth after he hands her the letter (his first use of reason to reach truth), and Elizabeth only falls in love with Darcy after she visits Pemberley (her first use of passion to reach truth). Austen uses this characterization of Darcy and Elizabeth to argue that both reason and passion combined are necessary to reach truth. This synthesis of Romantic and Enlightenment ideals aside, Austen has a larger point to make: she reframes love as an epistemological activity. For Austen’s characters, love functionally acts as a form of knowledge because knowing someone’s character is a necessary – even sufficient – condition for romance. Darcy falls for Elizabeth as soon as he fully understands her intellectual character; likewise, Elizabeth starts feeling affection for Darcy after she comes to appreciate his kindness. In this way, Pride and Prejudice also reveals that sometimes, the search for ontological truth and the search for romantic love are one and the same.
Ariel Cheng is a VI Former. She wrote this essay in her V form year as part of an English assignment.
References
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Penguin Classics, 2014.
Berlin, Isaiah. Roots of Romanticism. Princeton University Press, 2013.
The Coleman Prize in English: The Transformative Symbolism of White Flowers: Innocence or Guilt?
By Kelly Yang, Class of 2023
The Transformative Symbolism of White Flowers: Innocence or Guilt?
Editor’s Note: The Coleman Prize in English is awarded to the student, who, in the judgment of the English Department, has submitted the most outstanding essay during the academic year.
If Dorian Gray were a flower, what kind of flower would he be? In the “Picture of Dorian Gray,” Oscar Wilde uses the Victorian language of flowers to comment implicitly on aestheticism and moral corruption. He reveals the corrupting influence of purely aesthetic lives through the symbol of white flowers. From daisy to narcissus, orchid, and rose, the transformative symbolism of white flowers charts Dorian Gray’s trajectory from a figure of innocence to one of degradation.
Before Dorian Gray is corrupted by a purely aesthetic life, Wilde chooses the symbol of the white daisy to represent Dorian’s innocence and youth. Even before Dorian Gray enters the story, Wilde uses the white daisy to foreshadow Dorian’s loss of innocence. The symbol of the white daisy first appears in a garden, alluding to the Garden of Eden. Just as the Devil corrupts Adam and Eve, Wilde implies that Dorian Gray is doomed to be corrupted by the aesthetic philosophy that Lord Henry inculcates in him. In the grass of the religiously symbolic garden, “white daisies [are] tremulous” (Wilde 6). Daisies are drought-resistant wildflowers that thrive without needing much cultivation (Southern Living Editors). Intentionally placing the wild daisies in the “Garden of Eden,” Wilde suggests the unaffected nature of Dorian Gray, who has not yet been exposed to Lord Henry’s corrupting influence. By using the word “tremulous,” Wilde personifies the daisy, implying that Dorian Gray’s ethical principles are unstable and impressionable, and his understanding of his beauty will be easily subverted by Lord Henry. The symbolism of the white daisy reappears when Lord Henry preaches the significance of vanity and beauty. When Lord Henry mocks Mrs. Hallward as “a peacock in everything but beauty,” he symbolically “pulls the daisies to bits” with his fingers (Wilde 8). By comparing women to peacocks in this simile, Lord Henry dehumanizes women as vain animals that flaunt their tails. His word choice “but” in the phrase “everything but beauty” also disdainfully expresses that he only sees aesthetic values in the external beauty of women and nothing else (Wilde 8; emphasis added). When Lord Henry expresses his philosophy of aestheticism, the daisies, which represent innocence and a lack of worldliness, are torn into pieces, foreshadowing Dorian’s self-destruction due to his indulgent pursuit of beauty (Kirkby 43).
(more…)The Redmond Prize for English Narrative: The Color Of Absurdism
By Ariel Cheng, IV Form
The Color of Absurdism
The Redmond Prize for English Narrative, presented in memory of Henry S. Redmond, Class of 1923, is awarded to the student, who, in the judgment of the English Department, has submitted the outstanding piece of narrative during this academic year.
There you are. Just stay perched on the platform, like a bird about to take flight, for a little while longer. I’ll wade through the dusty coats and heavy smoke and excessive coffee stains. I’ll push past the glowing vending machines and clicking suitcases. While you wait, let me tell you a story.
In the crowd there is a man cupping an orange. Do you see him? From my perspective it looks like a sun, attracting the rush-hour like a moth to a flame. We are in its orbit. Our stares swallow and gulp at the bright flesh, desperate for light and sweat and cold. Now it is sliding down his throat, peeling away like a rollercoaster over a track. But why am I still looking? The man is gone, the orange is gone, their shadows are gone. The train is gone. There and gone.
What is orange, you ask? Have they not covered this in school yet? Orange is a color, a fruit, a symbol of prosperity. But your experience of orange – the orange you see, feel, taste – is unique. I can never know what an orange tastes like for you, or for that lady with the stroller. We are all forever stuck in the cages of our own imaginations.
(more…)The William Otis Smith Prize for English Verse: “Vignette”
By Ariel Cheng, IV Form
The William Otis Smith Prize for English Verse: “Vignette”
Editor’s Note: The William Otis Smith Prize for English Verse is given in memory of a member of the Class of 1907 and is awarded to one student, who, in the judgment of the English Department, has submitted the outstanding verse during the past year.
Vignette
Sand
washing you down (washing
you out) wearing you
like a necklace. I try to lace
rope, a net, a knot
your fingers, twisted. Twisting.
Laughing. A broken fan, cards everywhere,
soap opera murmuring.
In a room with peeling walls
we were honest.
One Viable Option: Examining Composure as a Means of Survival in The Handmaid’s Tale
By Jonathan D. Hernández, V Form
One Viable Option: Examining Composure as a Means of Survival in The Handmaid’s Tale
Student-Submitted Note: For my American Literature class, students were tasked with submitting a creative project of our choosing (such as but not limited to poem, painting, or video) to take an idea, theme, or motif from Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and remake it or interpret through imaginative means. Along with the artistic project, students were required to write a three-page analysis of the idea used and their multimedia project and how the two relate to each other. For my project, I wrote a poem about composure and how in the novel composure is a means of survival for characters such as Offred, the novel’s protagonist. The poem is written from the perspective of a Gileadean scholar and is meant to act as instructions for each member of the dystopian society. It is a reminder of the duty of each member to compose themselves to conform to the society’s standards. In addition to the written poem (after the essay), there is a physical visual representation to better illustrate the theme of composure and duty.
In her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood presents a dystopian future where the Republic of Gilead supersedes the United States of America. The new totalitarian state forces its citizens into strict gender roles. Gilead subjugates fecund women to the role of Handmaid, requiring them to serve as surrogates for the Commanders, the Gileadean patriarchs. The new state concurrently pushes sterile women into the roles of Martha, Wife, Econowife, or Aunt. Throughout the novel, the audience interprets life in Gilead through the eyes of Offred, a Handmaid who remembers life before Gilead and lives through the nation’s reconstruction. Before the Ceremony, a “sacred” insemination ritual, Offred describes that “I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born” (Attwood 66). While Offred refers to the need to compose herself for the Ceremony, she speaks to the larger issue at hand. She is informing the reader about how in the Republic of Gilead, women must compose their speech, actions, and bodies. They must watch what they say and be mindful to not stray from what is deemed acceptable by Gileadean social norms. Similarly, the poem Composure is centered around the idea of composure in Gilead and is meant to reflect how in Gilead each person is directed to abide by cultural norms in the name of duty. This need for composure, Offred reveals, results from necessity and cultural expectations in the Republic of Gilead.
(more…)The William Otis Smith Prize for English Verse: “blue break of dawn”
By Sophie Chiang, V Form
The William Otis Smith Prize for English Verse: “blue break of dawn”
The William Otis Smith Prize for English Verse is given in memory of a member of the Class of 1907 and is awarded to one student, who, in the judgment of the English Department, has submitted the outstanding verse during the past year.
“blue break of dawn”
no one ever crosses the cracked crosswalks
in the blue break of dawn. your mind flickers
into a sea-bloom of blue lights and credit cards,
of white powder and rolled-up dollar bills. you’ve
never been too cautious, these mannequins seem
to hold a gaze so intense it’s like you’re 17 and
speeding past red & blue flashes all over again.
you cry out and pick at your scalp, the one thing
holding together everything you’re made of,
the one thing you’ve ever been terrified to grasp.
there’s not much room to hold your new life next to
your mother’s faltering punch and your father’s
drunken breath. you wonder if this is universal. you
wonder if this is where it starts for people like you. you
wonder if that’s why when it matters, no one ever
crosses the concrete where you come from.
LEO 