The Essays Archives - The Watchful Scribe

22/04/202303/12/2023

“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”— Henry James’ Solution to the Novel Problem

When, in his 1884 essay ‘The Art of Fiction’, American novelist Henry James proposed his memorable mantra ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’, he was writing at a pivotal time for the novel form. Two centuries earlier, Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and John Locke had turned their backs on rigid, pre-established traditions of thought to instead ‘Look at the facts and think for […]

22/02/202320/07/2023

Eleanor’s Absolute Reality: The Enrapturing Sublimity of Hill House

The opening line of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House states that the eponymous structure exists ‘under conditions of absolute reality’,[1] which are incompatible with the existence of live organisms. The concept of an absolute reality, a state of being that transcends the limited reach of human cognition, has provoked much philosophical and psychoanalytical debate across the centuries; by applying some of this discussion to the novel, we […]

07/11/202220/07/2023

Cycles of Rejuvenation in Chaucer’s ‘The House of Fame’ and ‘Piers Plowman’

The interpretation of dreams is a subject that has fascinated scholars across time and provided inspiration for countless works of literature. Dante Alighieri’s eminent The Divine Comedy begins with its narrator ‘so full of sleep’ that he finds himself lost in a ‘great forest’, whilst Cicero ends his De Republica, a dialogue so rooted in the complex, rational politics of the Roman Republic, with a Platonic dream vision promising a […]

17/10/202220/07/2023

‘Who art thou that disputest with God’: The Satanic Pursuit of Purpose in ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’

If there was an era in which it could be argued that the mind of the modern man was born, it would be the Enlightenment period. As Pagden writes, the era ‘[stood] for the claim that all individuals have the right to shape their own end for themselves rather than let others do it for them’,[1] and as philosophers like Voltaire denounced monoliths like Christianity as a ‘long-standing infection’ whose […]