The Action and Glamour of Graduate Study in English

As many of you know or could surmise, I spent most of the fall of 2001 holed up in my old bedroom at my parents’ house in Bethel Park. There, when I was not reading the fiction of Henry James, Edith Wharton, or W.E.B. DuBois, I tried to compose my own fiction or respond to the stories of others in my graduate program at Pitt with constructive criticism based upon thoughtful reading of their work. If someone were to adapt what I just described into a movie, much of it would consist of me sitting there, not moving, except for my eyes from line to line and the occasional action of the hand to turn a page. Say what you will about the educational rewards I garnered from this period of my life, but it was neither action-packed nor glamorous. It was the graduate study of English.

I only bring up the aforementioned semester to illustrate the Herculean task successfully undertaken by the film Possession. That movie made the graduate study of English both action-packed and glamorous. The action began in casting, with the selection of Aaron Eckhart as protagonist Roland Mitchell. This is the same guy who played Miami Sharks Offensive Coordinator Nick Crozier in Any Given Sunday, a role which placed him square in the middle of a screaming match between the characters of LL Cool J and Al Pacino, the chief opponents in Crozier’s quest to modernize the offense Willie Beamen style. This is the guy they picked to play Professor Blackadder’s research assistant in Possession. There’s even a fistfight slash wrestling match toward the end of the film, when Mitchell and Maud Bailey (played by the glamorous Gwyneth Paltrow) discover bad-guy literary acquisitionist Cropper exhuming the corpse of a literary figure to unearth certain previously unread documents. I sure as hell didn’t have any corpse-inspired fistfights over undiscovered Victorian manuscripts during my tenure as a graduate student in the English department at Pitt.

Oh yes, and one must not forget the glamorous parts. The whole film, much like A.S. Byatt’s masterpiece novel upon which it was based, is quite glamorous, and details the parallel romances of Maud Bailey / Roland Mitchell and the fictional Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The romance of Bailey and Mitchell centers around their discoveries about the relationship between the two Victorians I just mentioned, and it suggests that the graduate study of English can be sexy as well as romantic. The lines upon lines of believably Victorian verse that Byatt composed for the novel come across fabulously when read aloud in the film; they suggest a sensuousness, an urgency, and a passion rarely associated with poetry these days. Needless to say, there was no romance during that semester I described above. Mariah was in Montana finishing her first two undergraduate degrees, and I was in Pittsburgh reading either depressing tales of failed upper-class romance or awful stories of horrid racism. It certainly wasn’t naked Gwyneth Paltrow reading aloud from hot and sexy undiscovered poems that would rock literary circles worldwide upon publication.

Ah, well; at least I have the DVD.