Before I winnow and melt into the writing of this article, I just wanted to say hello! My name is Alice, and I am a second year English student. I am absolutely delighted to be one of your columnists at the Blue for Hilary! The articles you can expect from me focus on mental health, beauty standards, the curious stumbling through female experience—often with a tendentious literary comparison!
‘Witty as well as ornamental.’ This is the quotation that breathes forth the first sparks of my thinking, converting them into roaming fireflies. It is a line from what is popularly considered THE Oxford novel, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, who was at Hertford College in the 1920s. In this line, Waugh describes in one fell swoop—a succinctly simmering reduction—the cat-tongued loveliness of Miss Julia Flyte. Julia exists on the periphery of Oxford, descending to the spired heights only to visit her brother, and otherwise idling away her days at her country estate, or listlessly perambulating London, in search of something shaped like love. Oxford is the place her brothers go: a little play-ground of honeysuckle and champagne-tinged mischief. Waugh’s Oxford is especially unscholarly. Moreover, it is thoroughly bereft of women. (My own college, like many others, only started admitting female undergraduates in 1979.)
Why, then, after forty years and the accomplishment of reams of female academics, is it still so strange being a female undergraduate at Oxford? Why still the growing pains? The peculiarities of being female here don’t feel attributable to anything large and looming. Rather they are capillaries, all folding and feeding back to red velvet valves, the weight at heart of insecurity and self-consciousness for the female undergraduate. Thin filaments of the—helpfully?—nebulously termed “female existence.” Whilst toying with the unhappy disquiet of feeling a lack of belonging, or a creeping urge to compare oneself to other people, Oxford demands uncompromisingly that you take up space. Your ideas and words must be voiced, whether you believe in them or not, whether you have courage in them or not. Seldom are you so noticeable as in a tutorial. Perhaps only three bodies in a book-lined tutor’s room, tasting your shyness.
What I am trying to get at is (me taking up space and using it, ironically, so poorly)—how long is it normal to remain afraid of Oxford? Will we always be nervous girls, fundamentally broken in with a mouse-like temperament? When will the classroom feel like an arena I can be part of, instead of a gladiator’s colosseum, with me sweating and swallowing pallidly on the side?
It is so often a case of watchfulness. Did you notice how intently you have been watching yourself in the third-person? Staring until your vision blurs, defiling and decrying the very form you inhabit, catching yourself in the pond-water reflection of a shop-window, or in the bathroom mirror of the library. Inferiority and interiority: you become caught cobwebbed in your head, again embowered by your thoughts and anxieties. How can I face this tutorial? I am too afraid to think. Afterwards, everyone goes out, perhaps to get a coffee, chat, bask in the bliss of a day’s good work and an outfit too well put together not to be seen by the city. You hastily decline—and half-run back to your room, throwing yourself onto the bed.
The ravening voyeurism of the cruelties of your mind. We easily slip into the dichotomic. Nobody cares about me is only one trip and ankle-sprain away from everybody is watching me and judging me intently. This has often been the way – even before arriving at Oxford. Your hair brushed with the precision of judgement. Who will be looking at me today, and how can I stop them hating me? Fearful thoughts encroaching every brush-stroke. How thick should the makeup be to thicken my own skin?
Oxford finds you in the soul and pokes at it, with a kind of prodding pixie’s touch. It knows you are inside, and it wants to get you out. How can you possibly want to escape your gorgeous mind—your vast and supple seas of thought, draining and dribbling into twilit rivulets, brooks of clarity and cleverness? How is academia so frightening when it is primarily formed of books and bodies—books being those unostentatious, quietly brilliant productions of mind and heart and soul and time, and bodies being the things we all have, and owe nearly everything.
Are you afraid of yourself or other people? If you had to pick, which one chills you more?
Witty and ornamental. It is a hard ask, and offers minimal margin for error. On the one hand, were you to begin to speak aloud your ideas, the shimmering artefacts of your thought process, the yield brought forth of hours of reading, when do you stop? Are you being too loud? Are you stumbling over your words? Was your point belaboured, dragging, heavy and unwieldy? So you presently shut up, and dam the little estuary of your mouth. Sitting silently in the room. But not statuesque enough for silence, not commanding enough of a beauty. Your tutor’s eyes, your tutorial partner’s eyes. Sharper and more sifting than a gardener’s rake. How can I be an ornament as well as a wit? The most desirable ornament has no thoughts at all.
We are predictably hard on ourselves, coughed up and spat out into the same chewed patterns, again and again, repeating agitatedly. I don’t quite have a solution, or not one that doesn’t require a nauseating dose of platitudes. But comforting words are generally fully and truly and gently meant. As, I am convinced, are pretty much all the students here—even if they have rote-learnt rivalry, and had a combatant attitude drilled into them. But most people are soft. Most people would be thrilled to hear you speak, to have a ticketed foray into your mind. Conversation, academic or otherwise, is a great and calcified back-bone to so much of what loops and threads people together, and keeps the germ of discovery alive, curious and respiring. Your voice in all of its prosodic uncertainties and doubts has a place within the tutorial, the classroom, the epicentres of learning and wonderment.
We are harsh (on ourselves, and, sometimes, flickeringly, in a judgmental thought about another person, momentarily terrified into lashing out). But, we are also forgivable and forgiving. There are so many things we expect of ourselves daily, and often unduly. To be physically perfect, mentally agile, unremittingly socially gregarious, to have seemingly endless time to devote to all kinds of edifying hobbies, to be illustriously productive, but never boring, or never at the cost of fun. You understand. So many rules, heavy armament, skin-tight and close-fitting, unbreathable. But there is a level of control that we have within us to exert when it comes to forming the spaces we would like to inhabit.
I have found that totally surrendering yourself, for example, to the things that other people say—complimenting your tutorial partner’s essay, really spending time with it (because, often, that is time spent by proxy with their own soul), engaging with it, annotating it, really allows you to forget yourself and focus on questioning their ideas and responses, finding the territories of agreement, and the capacity for further discourse. That is a very academic practicality.
But I think, vaguely adjacently to this, opening yourself up to the appreciation of other people often does the same for you, personally. Looking for their beauties, their golden mantles of talents and virtues and very best qualities—and realising you never have to probe far. Appreciating them keenly. The freer we are with compliments, I think, is always the better. I do not think that the quantity of compliments given is in any way proportionate to the sincerity behind them.
There is something very wonderful about utterly wrapping yourself up in the magic of other people; it feels quite medicinal. It is a reconciliation with the humanity that you might beat yourself up for, might be so strict with yourself about, making no allowances for. It is reflexive, works both ways, heals in many directions—regales other people with a greater and more gilded sheen of confidence, and yourself with a sudden instinct for human brilliance, which is never even close to perfection.