Cover Letter
To Whom It May Concern:
I am currently a junior student of Mathematics from Fudan University, and I took this course of Academic Writing so as to improve my English writing ability, the weakest link of my English. This semester of writing class mainly focused on the analysis and interpretation of the four short stories we read. This is what my writing portfolio revolves around. I have enclosed three drafts of my essay on the story The Necklace, one final timed-writing and one reading log on another story named The Grass-Eaters. Besides the portfolio entries presented here, we have also accomplished another several reading logs on the stories and another two timed-writings.
This semester of writing class was never an easy one, but it also helped me grow as a writer a lot. The first and probably the most important concept of writing that our instructor Ron has introduced to us is writing in drafts. Before this semester, my writings were all one-draft ones and I just had little chance going back to rethink and revise my papers. This new idea of writing in drafts has opened up a new horizon of writing for me and I am totally fascinated by the improvements I have made during continual editing and revising. Through these three drafts and the help from the teacher and the peer classmates, I have been able to compose a final essay that I myself am satisfied with. With Ron’s instruction and help, I have developed a stronger, clearer and better thesis statement than I first did, which is a good start for my whole essay. One major problem of my first two drafts is the organization and structure which makes the supporting evidence and ideas unclear. From comments on my paper and in-class peer review, I made big changes on my third draft and got better feedbacks. In addition, I have been able to get improvements on other facets of my writing such as introducing and interpreting quotations, grammatical errors, formats, and tones. On the whole, I believe I am becoming a better writer in English as I had expected to gain in this class.
On the top of the list are the three drafts of my essay, which are the key part of this writing portfolio. As I have mentioned above, writing these drafts was a process of discovery, a zigzag journey. Teachers and students commented that they had trouble seeing a strong connection between my supporting paragraphs and the thesis statement in my first two drafts, and I found out that was because although the organization and structure was friendly for my own mind, the flow of ideas and logic were vague and unclear to other readers. Then I decided to totally change the outline of my essay. In draft three, I turned my supporting evidences into four paragraphs of comparisons, which better justified themselves in proving the thesis. After that, I was surprised to see that the revised outline was much clearer and understandable, even for my own reading.
Under those entries, I have included the final timed-writing that we finished in class at the end of this semester. It was done with the given 45 minutes and of course had many errors since I had little time to edit. Still, you can see the structure and focus on the main ideas.
The final entry is the reading log on the story The Grass-Eaters, written after I read the story. I have kept the reading log the way it was. It showed my immediate feelings and thought after reading The Grass-Eaters, and through exchanging ideas and commenting on the internet, I got better and deeper understanding of the story.
Thank you for taking your precious time to read my writings, and I hope you enjoyed them.
Sincerely,
Jason Wu
Essay Draft Three
Jason Wu
June 5, 2007
Draft Three
A Curse or a Blessing
In late nineteenth-century Paris, there was strict hierarchy in the social classes of the French society. In The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, Mathilde Louisel loses the diamond necklace she borrowed from her friend at the night of the ball. She, together with her husband, spends the following ten years of misery paying off the debt, only to find out the necklace was a paste. A curse it may seem at first, the diamond necklace, is nevertheless a blessing for Mathilde’s life.
The loss of the diamond necklace has changed Mathilde’s life dramatically in several ways, the most obvious one of which is probably the physical changes. For a woman, losing youth and beauty is normally not something to feel happy about, but in this special case of Mathilde Louisel, it is. At the beginning of the story, Mathilde is presented as a “pretty and charming” girl (38). However, the beauty is just the main source of the mismatch of her life. She is “as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks” (38). She marries a little clerk, whose social status is far from a match of her beauty. She has no dresses and jewels to put on, but “she was as unhappy as though she had really fallen from her proper station” (38). Mathilde suffers, because her beauty, grace, charm, all the sole hierarchy with a woman, is undermined under her current life and she thinks she deserves better. Ten year later, her youth, her beauty, her elegance, and her grace have all slipped away from her fingers. She looks old now, strong and hard and rough, with frowsy hair skirts askew, and red hands (43-44). She is no longer the woman of a “high rank” as she used to be, and now her physical appearance matches her social status – one of the sources of her suffering is gone.
Together gone with Mathilde’s beauty is her strong vanity, another underlying cause of her unhappy life. Even though she is married with a little clerk and lives a lower-middle class life, she has never stopped dreaming about “all the delicacies and all the luxuries” (38). She loves dresses and jewels, compliments and envies from other women, all those things that tickle her vanity, but she cannot have it. She suffers. Another woman of her rank will never even have been conscious of the things that tortures Mathilde: the poverty of her dwelling, the wretched look of the walls, the worn-out chairs, and the ugliness of the curtains (38). It is her vanity that makes her treat her current life and status with contempt and it is her vanity that brings her suffering. But it is gone. It is gone with the diamond necklace. It is gone with her beauty. It is gone with her sufferings.
Besides both the physical and mental changes that have undergone on Mathilde, her living environment has also been different, and under a “worse” environment, she actually lives a “better” life. At the start, her life is materially comfortable, thought not yet luxurious: she stays all day long at home, with no need to work for a living; she doesn’t have to worry about paying for food, clothing, housing; she even has a Breton peasant do all the humble housework for her (39). Under such a comfortable environment, Mathilde is still not happy. Her life is so comfortable and so free that she daydreams all day long, and she has lost her own role in the real life. Imaginary luxuries have fully occupied her life. Then all of a sudden, the thirty-four thousand franc debt took all the comfort away from Mathilde. “They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings; they rented a garret under the roof” (43). However, the burden is also a wake-up call for Mathilde, to let her know “the horrible existence of the needy” (43). What is her reaction? “She took her part…with heroism” (43). She has finally found her true role in the real life and she has to pay for her own fault. When at the end they have paid everything, Mathilde is released. Now, she is promoted from an in-debt status to a normal life, in contrast with her former falling from the upper station. Thus, even though her living environment may have become worse, her mind is happier than ever.
Finally, after experiencing all these ten years of misery, Mathilde’s attitude towards social hierarchy has altered, which shows that she can comfortably live her current life now. Before the night of the ball, Mathilde envied the rich and downgraded the poor including her own class of people. She did not like to visit her rich friend because she suffered from their discrepancy of social classes. She thought “There’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich” (40). At the ball party, she refused to put on the modest wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress (41). All those evidences prove Mathilde’s shameful feeling of her own social hierarchy and how could she be happy this way? But now, after all these ten years of misery, Mathilde had nothing to lose any more. She dresses like a woman of the people going to public places such as the fruiter, the grocer, the butcher. To look poor no longer humiliates Mathilde, and she manages to accept her role among the social classes. At the end of the story when she runs into her rich friend Mme. Forestier who are still young, still beautiful, still charming, she goes to speak to her, to tell her all about it, with no hesitation. By doing so, Mathilde is conveying a message that she has survived the trick that life plays on her and being at the bottom of social hierarchy cannot hold her from living a happy life.
Throughout the story, we see how the night of the ball has changed Mathilde’s life in ways including her physical appearances, her thoughts of strong vanity, her comfortable living conditions and her attitude towards social hierarchy. Even though at the first glance all these changes might worsen her life quality, under a close scrutiny it turns out to be a blessing for her. The facts in the story declare so. Maupassant has commented in the story: “How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!” (44). What a trick life is! There are times curses can be blessings and there are times blessings can be curses. This is life. It not only happens on Mathilde but also can happen on every one of us. What can we do? Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and let God do the rest.
Work Cited
Guy de Maupassant. “The Necklace.” 1884. Rpt. in The International Story: An Anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction. Ruth Spack. New York: St. Martin’s 1994. 38-44.
Essay Draft Two
Jason Wu
May 20, 2007
Draft Two
Title
In late nineteenth-century Paris, there is strict hierarchy in the social classes of the French society. In The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, Mathilde Louisel losses, at the night of the ball, the diamond necklace she borrowed from her friend. She, together with her husband spends the following ten years of misery paying off the debt, only to find out the necklace was a paste. A curse it may seem at first, the diamond necklace, is nevertheless a blessing for Mathilde’s life.
At the beginning of the story, Mathilde is presented as a wife of a little clerk. Her life is materially comfortable, thought not yet luxurious: she stays all day long at home, with no need to work for a living; she doesn’t have to worry about paying for food, clothing, housing; she even has a Breton peasant do all the humble housework for her (39). Then does Mathilde live a happy life? The answer is obviously negative. People shall agree that in most cases, what determines true happiness is not material affluence but psychological satisfactory.
Evidently, Mathilde’s unsatisfactory of her current status leads to her unhappy life.
Mathilde is not an average housewife of a lower-middle class family. She is pretty, charming, elegant, gracious, which in her mind counts for the sold hierarchy with a woman (38). Normally, beauty will be the biggest bless god can give to a woman, in this special case of Louisel Mathilde, however, it turns out to be a curse. In Mathilde’s world, a pretty and charming girl as she is should naturally be wedded by a rich and distinguished man, but unfortunately she isn’t. “She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herselft born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries” (38). We see that her expectation of life has been lifted high up, and her beauty will thus be one of the underlying causes of her unhappy life, as long as the expectation cannot be fulfilled. One of the immediate consequences of this is vanity, extreme vanity – another reason why Mathilde suffers. Every day when Mr.Louisel is out for work, Mathilde sits around and has nothing to do but dream about the ideal life of luxury she should have lived. The more she thinks about it, the sharper the discrepancy between her expectation and reality, and the more she suffers. Another woman of her rank will never even have been conscious of the things that tortures Mathilde: the poverty of her dwelling, the wretched look of the walls, the worn-out chairs, and the ugliness of the curtains (38). Mathilde’s body and soul are living in two different worlds, and her head is overloaded with imaginary luxury: living in a palace decorated in gold, diamonds, and ancient ornaments, chatting with men famous from top of society, and eating dainty dinners using shining silverware. This makes her neglect any good things that can happen in her real life, those she should feel satisfied about, and how can she live a happy life?
Then comes the night of the ball, the best and the worst night she ever has. At that night, she losses the diamond necklace, and from that point on, her life has been dramatically changed.
“Mme. Loisel now knew the horrible existence of the needy. She took her part, moreover, all of a sudden, with heroism. ” (43) “Suddenly” she changes, she is now determined, and she is ready to shoulder the responsibility to pay the heavy debt. Even though the Louisel have to dismiss their servant, change their lodgings, and rent a garret under the roof, defending their miserable money sou by sou (43), Mathilde’s feeling of emptiness has also ended. She has now found her part in the real life. She has to work for the food, the rent of the housing, and the debt, instead of waiting at home doing nothing every day. She has suddenly found a direction of her own life, a destination to work towards. It is as happy for her as finding a way out of a puzzling maze.
Since that sudden shift in Mathilde’s attitude towards life, many other changes have undergone on Mathilde, both physically and mentally, during the following ten years. Her youth, her beauty, her elegance, and her gracious have all slipped away from her fingers. She looks old now, strong and hard and rough, with frowsy hair skirts askew, and red hands (43-44). Now, she is no longer the woman of a “high rank” as she used to be, and her physical appearance matches her social status. Her beauty, her greatest asset for turning into upper-class overnight is gone, and the “curse” has been dispelled. Together gone is her vanity. Unlike before, Mathilde is now fully occupied with heavy housework washing from the dishes to the dirty linen, the shirts and the dishcloths (43). The needy in reality breaks the bubble of luxury in her daydreaming, and she has to forget about her “proper station” from which she had fallen (38). There is still time when Mathilde gets a chance to take a breath from her busy working days, to think of her triumph night of the ball. However, with her current position, this will now only be a second of memory flashback at most. Before, she thought she had fallen from her “proper station”, and she suffered. Now, at the end of the ten years when they have paid everything, Mathildes feels released, she is promoted from a much lower position, and she can move on to live a normal but happy life.
Last but not least, after experiencing all these ten years of misery, Mathilde’s attitude towards social hierarchy has altered, which shows that she can comfortably live her current life now. Before the night of the ball, Mathilde envied the rich and downgraded the poor including her own class of people. She did not like to visit her rich friend because she suffered from their discrepancy of social classes. She thought “There’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich” (40). At the ball party, she refused to put on the modest wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress (41). All those evidences prove Mathilde’s shameful feeling of her own social hierarchy and how could she be happy this way? But now, after all these ten years of misery, Mathilde had nothing to lose any more. She dresses like a woman of the people going to public places like the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher. To look poor no longer humiliates Mathilde, and she manages to accept her role among the social classes. At the end of the story when she runs into her rich friend Mme. Forestier who are still young, still beautiful, still charming, she goes to speak to her, to tell her all about it, with no hesitation. By doing so, Mathilde is conveying a message that she has survived the trick that life plays on her and being at the bottom of social hierarchy cannot hold her from living a happy life.
Conclusion
Work Cited
Essay Draft One
Jason Wu
May 8, 2007
Draft One
Title
In late nineteenth-century Paris, there is strict hierarchy in the social classes of the French society. In The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, Mathilde Louisel lost, at the night of the ball, the diamond necklace she borrowed from her friend. She, together with her husband spent the following ten years of misery paying off the debt, only to find out the necklace was a paste. A curse it may seem at first, the diamond necklace, is nevertheless a blessing for Mathilde’s life.
At the beginning of the story, Mathilde is presented as a wife of a little clerk. Her life was materially comfortable, thought not yet luxurious: she stayed all day long at home, with no need to work for a living; she didn’t have to worry about food, clothing, housing, etc; she even had a Breton peasant do all the humble housework for her (39). However, her life was by no means a happy one.
Mathilde was not an average housewife of a lower-middle class family. She was pretty, charming, elegant and gracious. In the late nineteenth-century Paris, there was neither caste nor rank with women: natural fineness, instinct for what is elegant, suppleness of wit, was the sole hierarchy (38). Therefore, Mathilde’s beauty was her strongest asset, her asset for dreaming about upper-class life of luxury, and it made her unsatisfied with her current status, her current life. “She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herselft born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries” (38). Her beauty guaranteed her with extraordinary vanity, and thus led to her unsatisfactory of all her surrounding life. Another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious of the things that tortured Mathilde: the poverty of her dwelling, the wretched look of the walls, the worn-out chairs, the ugliness of the curtains, and etc (38). On the contrary, her ideal life that she had dreamed about even a million times were the silent antechambers hung with Oreiental tapestry, the long salons fitted up with ancient silk, the delicate furniture, the coquettish perfumed boudoirs, and etc (39). The above evidence presents a sharp contrast between Mathilde’s expectation and the reality, and that’s why she suffered. Moreover, this can also be viewed from comparison to her husband reaction towards their current status. For example, once at the dinner table, Mr. Louisel declared with an enchanted air that the soup was the best he had ever had, while Mathilde was thinking about dainty dinners with shining silverware…
There is no doubt that the loss of the diamond necklace had dramatically changed Mathilde’s life. One first major change is that she had finally woken up from her whole life of daydreaming about all the delicacies and luxuries, and she now knew the horrible existence of the needy (43). Her once nothing-to-worry-about life had now gone. They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings; they rented a garret under the roof, defending their miserable money sou by sou (43). With the heavy burden of debt on her own shoulder, Mathilde’s life was now fulfilled with the needy in reality instead of the illusion of luxury in daydreaming. For that time, she had to forget about her “proper station” from which she had fallen (38), to be a woman of the people – to do heavy housework and the odious cares of the kitchen, to wash the dished, the dirty linen, the shirts, and the dishcloths, to go visit the fruiter, the grocer on her own (43).
When Mathilde got a chance to take a breath from her busy working days, she would still sometimes think of her triumph night of the ball, how she was second to none in beauty. However, this would now only be a second of memory flashback, and would not last, because she had changed, both physically and mentally. Her youth, her beauty, her elegance, and her gracious had all slipped from her fingers. She looked old now, strong and hard and rough, with frowsy hair skirts askew, and red hands. Now, her last hope of being upper-class had been taken away, and she began to realize there was no use to daydream anymore.
Important evidences that she was now released from vanity can be found in change of her attitude towards being rich and poor. Before, she suffered from being poor and that annoyed her. She did not like to visit her rich friend because she suffered from their discrepancy of social classes. She thought “There’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich” (40). At the ball party, she refused to put on the modest wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress (41). All those evidences proved Mathilde’s strong vanity. But now, after all these ten years of misery, Mathilde had nothing to lose any more. When she ran into her rich friend Mme. Forestier who were still young, still beautiful, still charming, she went to speak to her, to tell her all about it, with no hesitation. We can clearly see that Mathilde could now accept her status and no longer suffered from being poor and only with such attitude directly facing the reality could she go on to live a happy life.
Moreover, the incident also made Mathilde a determined woman. (Evidence: “She took her part, moreover, all of a sudden, with heroism.&rdquo
Work Cited
Final-timed Writing
0418059
Jason Wu
June 21, 2007
Timed Writing Three
Directions: If you were to create a filmed advertisement for a movie based on The Grass-Eaters, which scene would you select? Why? Discuss ways in which you might film the scene. (100%)
If I were the director of this trailer, I would like to pick the very last scene of The Grass-Eaters where one-leg-and-one-ear Ajit Babu holds his wife on their roof, barely covered with clothes, chewing a mouthful of grass, looking down at the noisy streets and then they smile. The reasons why I choose this scene go as follows:
The first reason is that this scene best matches the theme of the film and contains most key elements of The Grass-Eaters. Therefore, it can give the audience an overall idea about the film outline. Coming first is the environment where the film is set. It covers the roof where Ajit Babu and his wife live their unusual life and the bigger environment of poor and massy India. Following the environment are the heroes of the film, Ajit Babu and his wife. The scene describes both the physical appearances and the mental status of the characters – what their living conditions are and what their attitude towards life is. And they are eating grass, which answer why the film is named “The Grass-Eaters”.
Besides the theme factor, this particular scene leaves a bunch of doubts and suspicions to the viewers. Questions like “how did the hero Ajit Babu lose one of his legs and one of his ears?”, “why do they barely wear things?”, “how can they be happy about their current life?” and of course “why do they eat grass?” would keep appearing in the audiences’ heads, and these doubts will attract them to watch the movie to find out the answers by themselves.
The third factor why I select the last scene is for aesthetical reasons. In this very last scene, there are a lot of sharp contrasts and seemingly disharmonies, but they actually make the scene beautiful. It is the contrasts like the heroes’ poor living conditions and their happy attitude and the massy streets downstairs and the peaceful harmony of the couple on the roof that finally brings all good and evil thins together to form this beautiful last scene.
As for the ways to film this scene, I prefer to start from Ajit Babu’s leg with dirt all over. Then it moves up, and shows the full settings of their home – the roof, the poor furniture, and the decorations. In the middle of the picture are the two heroes, Ajit Babu and his wife, holding each other, covering their bodies with their arms. After that, the camera moves to the window and focus on the streets downstairs where people fighting each others on the massy ground. Finally, the camera turns back to the two heroes: Ajit’s wife mildly kisses him on his missing ear and they smile.
Reading Log
Reading Log on The Grass-Eaters
The moment I finished this story, I was shocked at the poor life Ajit Babu and his wife have led. After I rethought about it, I began to wonder how a person can be materially poor and spiritually wealthy at the same time. That led to my thinking about what really makes a happy life.
Look around, and you will find that we are living in a material world today. Students spend thousands monthly buying all kinds of stuff from clothing to up-to-date electronic devices, and some of them taxi to school and back home. They act as if this makes them happy. Well, it does at first, but what afterwards? Some of those billionaires are not happy with all the wealth and they simply feel empty inside. Ajit Babu's life may seem miserable and even embarrassing to some people: they have no stable home, they eat grass for meal and they even barely have clothes to wear. However, judging from the story, they live a quiet and peaceful life happily and are content with what they have.
True happiness has little to do with material affluence, while it is your attitude towards life that really matters. You can actually decide whether to live a happy life or not. Just like Ajit Babu, start to think about those at the bottom of the society and their unfortunate life, and you will appreciate what you have got now.