As a new semester begins, and as I have no
classes to teach (since I have been awarded a Ballard-Seashore Fellowship), I
thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process of writing a dissertation
chapter (since I am starting to write one today—that’s the last parenthetical (Maybe)).
I like to think of writing a chapter in geologic terms. A chapter is a
creation, after all, and, not to be too grandiose about my own work, but its magnitude
resembles the earth itself. Its development resembles the history of the earth.
For example, a lot of stuff happens before the actual writing. It is mainly
gathering all the disparate elements of a chapter into one place. All the dusty
books on the topic once scattered throughout the library, through a
gravitational process of selection, recalling, and making some poor undergrad
get my books for me, slowly converge on my place of study and revolve around me
(not literally. Well, sometimes it seems like it). It is a process of
accretion, and takes what feels like eons.
Once a sufficient amount of
information has accumulated, I feel a core of knowledge has been obtained.
Then,
a new phase begins: the rapid-fire flow of ideas to write about. These ideas
just bubble up to the surface, erupting like so many volcanoes (I’m thinking of
that scene from The Tree of Life here--5 minutes in).
Once I have settled on a cool idea, everything starts to
solidify, and I develop a thin outline. When I get a first draft done, I promptly
(prematurely) send off to my committee who slices it up like moon from earth.
Once
the dust settles after that, the chapter is more focused, and I can get into
revisions. The argument flourishes with nuance, crackling with wit and verve, evolving
in sophistication and sustaining greater and more compelling argumentative life.
Then, when I feel I’ve read it so much that it’s a dinosaur, I send it off to
my committee again …
Canon Confidential Time:
“Ladie
Astrey” was the famous personification of justice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who fled the earth during
the brutality and carnage of the Iron Age. In Arthur Golding’s translation she
is the “last of heavenly virtues, from this earth in
slaughter drownèd passed” (1.169-70). The original Latin is “virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit,”
and Golding seems to misread uirgo,
maiden, as uirtus, virtue, but it
still works (1.149-50 in Ovid). Astraea, or Lady Justice, shares her name with an
unlikely author, Aphra Behn. She used it as her code name when she worked as an
agent for the Crown during the Restoration. Behn got her start during the
Interregnum, likely as a copyist for noted spymaster Thomas Killigrew, who went
on to become one of Charles II’s preferred courtiers. During his reign she
traveled to Dutch-held Suriname with her family and immediately got involved with
the unsavory character William Scot, the son of Thomas Scot, who was executed
for regicide. William was a person the Crown was anxious to keep eyes on. She
is referred to as Astrea by other spies on Suriname and in correspondence from
Antwerp, another home of exiled relatives of regicides. After getting fed up
with spy work, Behn from Antwerp “passed” to England. She chose to keep the name
Astrea as her nom de plume, smoothly transitioning from spy to writer as she translated
her espionage experience into plays about slavery, rebellion, intrigue,
romance, and kings. She was a wildly successful playwright (the theater was
likely a good fit for her because the theater is a world of surveillance, with spectators
spying from behind the fourth wall, spying occurring onstage to further the
plot, and actors going about their business in their various disguises—it’s
like what Spottswoode somewhat reductively says to Gary in Team America: World Police, “That’s all spying is: acting”). Her time as
a spy furnished her with not only plots and counterplots to write about, but
also a unique perspective on justice and its relationship to the practices of
spying and slavery. 
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