Lee Nevitt Wins Best Graduate Essay at ECS Conference

Current Villanova graduate English student Lee Nevitt won a prize at the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Conference for Best Graduate Essay. The conference is organized annually by the Gender and Women's Studies program and showcases the work of undergraduates and graduate students from area schools.

Lee's paper focused on the novels The Good Soldier and Mrs. Dalloway, particularly paying attention to the repressed homosexuality of the characters John Dowell and Septimus Smith. He argued that the investment of both protagonists in war service and its attendant social values (upholding the institution of marriage, fostering the imperial myth, and valuing a violent masculine identity) is at odds with their socially prohibited desire, resulting in characters who are fundamentally at war with themselves: a fact that is crystallized in their inability to feel grief and express desire through language.