Julie Wu, in her final PoH research essay “Weapons of the Weak,” confronts Zhang Yimou’s twentieth-century masterpiece Raise the Red Lantern with Ban Zhao’s second-century BCE Lessons for Women, with illuminating results. She adroitly harnesses the essay’s broad guidelines—put two course texts “into meaningful conversation”—to serve her specific critical interest: the exploration of Chinese women’s “apparent obedience” to Confucian patriarchy, one nonetheless riddled by “paradoxical” motives and consequences. In doing so, Julie expertly fulfills our PoH’s fundamental essay-writing “musts”: thesis statement is driven by tension and conflict, even “danger”; essay organization unfolds in a tightly knit line of reasoning such that no paragraph may be moved; paragraph main claims all line up sequentially to form the essay’s “spine”; and the conclusion meaningfully addresses the significance—the “So what?”—of the essay’s key insight.
Julie wisely, if ambitiously, chose two texts in which she perceived a consequential, not tangential, relationship, though nearly two thousand years separate them. Even, her essay’s analysis comes to give explicit, even painful, relevance to that wide historical spread, laudably avoiding the ever-present fault line in simplistic “compare and contrast” essays: a mere enumeration of similarities and differences. Instead, aggravated by her sense of paradox in the words and actions of the women in her study—Ban Zhao and Songlian—and their outcomes, Julie plunges into the dark realm of Chinese gender oppression and its costly compromise at once psychological, social and, ultimately, political.
The result is highly original, even daring. Julie’s tight organization and the interconnected, intense unfolding of her argument—each sequential paragraph rooted in meticulous, probing analysis and highly relevant evidence—powerfully anchor the courage and strength of her essay’s closing insight. Extending beyond a historically contingent analysis of gender, Julie finds the “omnipresent Confucianism that Ban and Songlian submit to sneakily [expressed] in contemporary China, encroaching upon everyone.” Arriving at this conclusion, I exclaimed “Wow!” And thoroughly expect many who read Julie Wu’s essay will too.
—Amy Goldman, Clinical Professor in the Writing Program