Katherine Lovell -- The Satire of a Line's Place in Flatland


   I think you have a lot of good things to say in this essay and you 
   have appreciated the satirical aspects of Flatland very well.  The 
   major criticism I have is that the essay as a whole is rather shapeless.  
   You have long, overstuffed paragraphs that make a lot of points but there
   is not much structure or flow to what you are saying.  It seems almost
   as though once you got started this just poured out and you did not
   go back and try to mold it into a more satisfying form.  For example, 
   I don't think there is much new in the paragraph that starts "Abbott
   continues to use satire in his mental repression of women ... " at
   at the bottom of page 4.  It seems the beginning of that is mostly rehashing
   things you have said before, so that is not really adding very much.
   The discussion of the passage on page 40 where the Square says that
   talking down to women to the extent they have to is causing men's brains
   to atrophy also duplicates things we said in class.  That also indicates 
   that it is probably not needed.

   It might be hard to appreciate for students today, but the kinds 
   of things A. Square says are also not all that far from things one
   used to hear all the time.  Look at the first seasons of the TV show 
   "Mad Men" (set in the early 1960's) for an pretty realistic example of this. 
   Similarly, when I was growing up I remember hearing serious discussions 
   from "talking heads" about how women were too emotional and unstable to 
   be trusted with the sorts of decisions a President would have to make.  

   Content:  A-

   Mechanics: B+