Benchmark

I hit ten thousand words this morning! Even though that's only between an eighth and a tenth of the final product, I feel pleased. As it stands, I believe the chapter is about two-thirds complete; if I put my all into it, I think I could even have a finished penultimate draft by the end of the week.

One of the greatest problems I've faced is the order in which I present my argument. I feel as though I have four competing themes throughout the chapter - sword-fighting vs. masculinity vs. classicism vs. the seventeenth century - and I've spent a lot of time with my beloved whiteboard in an attempt to find a solution that will best suit what I'm trying to say. Do I start chronologically and discuss Greek and Roman literature and philosophy before leaping forward to the sixteenth century to talk about humanism and the flurry of literature inspired by antiquity? Do I put ideas about masculinity at the forefront and discuss their development through time?

I've settled on trying to give all four aspects fairly equal "page-time", although classicism and the seventeenth century are discussed more as influencing factors in the development of sword-fighting which is in turn an expression of masculinity. Much has been made of the post-Renaissance evolution of the "self-fashioned man", and self-fashioning (I think) was reliant on violence. All the great, powerful, and righteous protagonists of classical literature were invariably warriors who used violence outside of war to achieve their personal ends.

Odysseus' slaughter of the Suitors is a good example of this. He could have returned home and declared his presence to them (he is King of Ithaca, after all, and a renowned warrior), but he must display his cunning by tricking the Suitors, show his skills in battle by shooting an arrow through the axe heads, and finally kill them all for dishonouring him in his own. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is filled with allusions to and variations on the classical world; I argue that it also represents young men as following in the violent, self-serving tradition of Odysseus.

The subsequent backlash against literary heroes of this kind is what I want to look at in the rest of my thesis...