This morning (or, if we’re going to get technical about it, this afternoon), after I woke up and wasted 45 minutes on the computer and showered and did all those morning-type things, I firmly told myself that just because it’s Sunday of midterm break, I shouldn’t allow my standard of dress to lapse. I’ve realized this semester that making an effort to dress not just in clothes that are clean, but clothes that match and look nice, has a positive psychological effect on my work ethic and my self-image—mindful of this and of the necessity of being productive over break, I put on halfway decent trousers, a reasonably stylish sweater, my favorite corduroy blazer, and even (gasp!) socks that match the rest of my clothes. Becoming preoccupied with how much sweater sleeve extends beyond jacket sleeve is a great way to avoid thinking about actually relevant things, like the paper I need to write this week, and so it was with this in mind that I grabbed a book and a notebook to write things about the book in, and strode through the Holder cloister to lunch. When I wear my corduroy jacket, and a reasonably stylish sweater and halfway decent trousers, I stride. I don’t trudge. It’s great.

I suppose it only hit me about 20 minutes later, sitting in the dining hall eating my scrambled eggs with a fork and knife as I peered at a book about Alice in Wonderland in the context of Lewis Carroll’s Oxford (it’s for a paper), how ridiculous I am. Most of the undergrads who stay on campus over break are athletes, and it was they, in their muscle shirts and sweatpants, whose loud chatter filtered through the hall to my seat at the last table. They were banging their fists on the tables and laughing with abandon; I was learning about the debates over the liberalization of Christ Church under the Deanship of Henry Liddell and fiddling self-consciously with my sweater sleeves. I do this a fair amount, in the dining hall; I think I must be in perfect keeping with the self-conscious Anglophilia (and, specifically, Oxoniphilia, to coin a word) that pervades much of Princeton’s architecture and early history. The Ivy League is all about trying to attain some idealized, romanticized vision of what British elite higher education is like or ought to be like—and, I’m beginning to think, this is particularly true at Princeton, which, although it was founded in 1746, didn’t come into its own until the late 19th century, when Oxford and Cambridge were both developing their modern institutional culture and when, in my reductive understanding, romanticized versions of cultural institutions seemed to proliferate on both sides of the Atlantic. As ridiculous as it may be, and as out-of-sync with any modern conception of elite higher education anywhere (boisterous athletes or no boisterous athletes), it’s not entirely inappropriate to spend a lunchtime sitting at one of those long wooden tables in a self-consciously constructed college dining hall, reading about Victorian Oxford and fiddling with sweater sleeves. It’s not Princeton today, but it was certainly at least one aspect of Princeton 100 years ago.

It’s easy, therefore, to be an Anglophile at Princeton, but I’ve admittedly been one all my life. In fact, I’ve probably been an Oxoniphile all my life, or at least for as long as I’ve known about Oxford—why else would I construct a Princeton that is totally out-of-keeping with reality? Why else am I keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll get to study abroad at Oxford—not just in England, but at Oxford—next year? It’s a strange coincidence that is maybe not entirely coincidental that, when I chose to write about Lewis Carroll for my seminar on biography because I thought the Alice books might bear on my final project about my own childhood, I found myself rather unwittingly coming back to the politics and institutional culture of Oxford. Because it seems, ever-increasingly, that I always do.

The last time I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass must have been before I was nine, because I can’t remember reading it at all after my family moved from Georgia to California. But I do have powerful memories of being dwarfed by the rows upon rows of shelves in the university library where I went with my dad to check out an edition that contained both books with the Tenniel illustrations. It might, even, have been the same edition I found in the stacks of a university library yesterday, as I started to read for this paper. I couldn’t believe the things that came back to me about the text that I hadn’t thought about in ten or so years, like the “Pig and Pepper” chapter or the part of the trial scene where the guinea pigs are suppressed. I can remember sitting in my old bedroom, reading that trial scene, thinking that probably stuffing rodents in a bag and sitting on them is probably not really how disruptions are suppressed in a courtroom, but giggling at the image all the same. And now I step outside of myself to see myself, ten years and a seeming lifetime later, drinking coffee, wearing corduroy blazers instead of dresses, and devouring a satirical subtext about the politics of a developing modern Oxford that I would never have understood, much less discovered, ten years ago.

Carroll’s children’s books have been subject to enough critical study that I’m sure I have nothing new to say about them, but I’m nevertheless tempted to read the Alice books as a view of Oxford through a child’s eyes, the way that a child would write her life, where she is the center of her own story and her Dean of Christ Church father is the King of Hearts in a pack of cards (as one of the secondary sources I’m reading suggests). It makes me wonder what it means for a child to write her life, or for a somewhat childlike adult (as Carroll was, another secondary source posits) to write her life for her. A child’s life is writ small, a child’s world limited. And so Alice dreams that a chess set comes to life in a looking-glass world, and nine-year-old me creates a proliferation of universes and characters to inhabit them alongside myself. Whether it’s Alice telling her story to her cat, or me telling mine to my dolls and stuffed animals, children write themselves the heroes of their own lives, of adventures where the fairies at the bottoms of gardens are real. It’s what we do, and it’s why kids are still reading Alice.

As far as Lewis Carroll was concerned, Wonderland appeared to cease to exist when his child-friends grew up. Other Victorian children’s authors seem to agree; I’m reminded of that preoccupation with “growing up” in Peter Pan. But I’m not so sure. It’s three months till I’ll have completed my second decade (check out that future perfect construction!) and I’m still chasing an English and Oxonian fantasy universe, superimposing it upon reality when I get close enough to snatch at it and hang onto it. I laugh at myself, here at university in America: what remains of my proper, pre-teenage childhood has long since been relegated to boxes in my family’s garage, and yet I’m still longing for a rabbit-hole and a shortcut to Wonderland.

At some point in the first semester of my senior year of high school, I started to ask my teachers whether they would write letters of recommendation for my college applications. I was (and still am!) very close to some of my teachers, and I wanted to be fair to everyone; I didn’t want any of the teachers I approached to feel as if I was burdening them, nor did I want any of the teachers I didn’t approach to feel left out. I remember in particular asking one English teacher whether a history teacher would be offended if I didn’t ask him for a recommendation.

“No, I think that’s fine,” the English teacher said. “You want to do English, right?”

I didn’t quite meet his eyes. Yes, I was our quizbowl team’s acknowledged “lit person,” and yes, I had always done well in and enjoyed my English classes (the good ones, anyway) and the books we read in them. But I knew even then that I didn’t want to be an English major; I think I knew on some level since middle school that I wanted to do history, and that I wanted to study the people (not the texts) who populate our world. So I told my English teacher, “Yeah, I guess,” and he wrote some of my recommendations. And I applied to seven colleges, and I was accepted to four, and I came to Princeton.

Freshman year, I considered and then quickly discarded sociology. I realized I actually have very little interest in quantitative analysis and charts and graphs and all the other markings of social science methodology. I realized I’m more interested in who people are and were and how they interact and interacted—particularly over a given span of time. I took a class spring semester called Gender and Sexuality in Modern America, and I realized with exciting unequivocality that I really wanted to Study, on some sort of a permanent basis, Gender and Sexuality in Modern America. And so that was it: I started telling people that I’m going to be a history major.

This decision has not been without some resistance, both actual and perceived. I am interested in literature, and in many of the questions literature engenders, and the methods used to read it, as well. I have taken a couple English classes, and in some ways have enjoyed them more than some of my history classes. I think some people are simply surprised that I’m not interested in making the English department my own, given my obvious enthusiasm for reading—and writing. My friends in the English department frequently tease me that theirs is the better discipline, too, and although I know they don’t actually harbor any ill will towards me for my choice of major, I can’t help but feel sometimes as if I have chosen the “lesser” discipline. Sometimes, in the academic blogosphere, for example, and in some conversations I’ve had on campus, there is a higher moral weight placed on academic conversations that deal in abstractions. Some people, I sense, consider it better evidence of intelligence to take an interest in theory-and-criticism type thinking, whether that be through the lens of literature specifically or else in a more amorphous universe of something like queer studies or cultural studies. At Princeton, because the structure of our departments means that there are fewer ways to easily be interdisciplinary (at the undergrad level), many of the folks interested in theory therefore cluster in the literature and language departments. History is seen as solid and unyielding. History is seen as, well, historical, not prone to revolutionary new ways of thinking—and not prone to the more “intellectual” abstraction of literature.

Of course, this is nothing anyone has said to me specifically. But just as it was once assumed that I, the only girl on our quizbowl team, would be the “lit person,” and that the half-dozen boys on the team would cover history and politics and math-science, I feel as if some sort of essential characteristic of my identity is leading people to assume that I Am an English Major. My mother studied literature in her higher education; my father’s field not dissimilarly deals with the very close examination of a specific set of texts. I have been friends with English teachers, English professors, and English students all my life (in, perhaps it should be noted, both senses of “English.” For some reason American anglophiles often seem drawn to literature, though of course I’m no less an anglophile despite doing American history). But I think all this gentle nudging of my academic interests towards literature has caused me to shy away, to do something that’s different from, though still overlaps with, what my friends and my family are doing. Even though I am zeroing in on a really fascinating and rewarding subject for my independent work that’s very history-rooted, I think that my choice of major is as much reactionary, as much not-literature, as anything else. I mean, it’s important work; I think history is very important and I’m proud to be training up, as it were, to contribute to the discipline. But in the back of my mind there’s always this “Everyone expects me to be doing literature; I should be doing literature right now” dynamic.

Today, two different people—English professors, as it happens, whose work and teaching skill and intelligence I value enormously—told me that it’s perfectly all right that I’m planning to study history. That’s been one of the Themes of the Week, in fact, and particularly because my English professors are telling me this. One of them is teaching an American studies course, and I talked with him today about what it means to be part of an interdisciplinary field, and the practice of doing interdisciplinary scholarship. I started thinking about how it’s perfectly acceptable to sit somewhere between straight English and straight history (I use the word “straight” with tongue totally in cheek, because my academic interests are in no way “straight”!) and to use the one to inform the other. It made me realize that although I have chosen history, it doesn’t mean forsaking English. Although I have chosen archives, it doesn’t mean forsaking fiction.

Since I started at university, I’ve learned a great deal from my literature classes and my literary friends not just about how to read but also about how to link abstractions like literary theory to reality, or rather to all sorts of realities. I’m learning not to fear theory, because in certain ways and when not carried to extremes, the abstract extrapolations about the patterns of the world’s function build the bridges between all the fields that I love. It makes it much easier to connect my history to my English to my American studies to my political theory to my anthropology (to name the subjects in which I’m taking classes this semester) and have everything work together in this great intellectual system. It’s actually quite mind-boggling, and of course this is the whole reason I’ve committed myself to the higher education system for the forseeable future. In the ivory tower, this is the sort of thing that can happen.

I think that in high school we’re encouraged to see disciplines as very rigid and immutable. You take six (or however many, in my case it was six) classes in quite well-established subjects that have essentially not changed since they were first instituted in the high-school curriculum. When I asked my English teacher for a letter of recommendation, I was taking English, math, civics/political science, French, computer science, and stagecraft. In other years, I would have taken a lab science instead of comp sci, or a world or European or American history class instead of poli sci, or music instead of theater. But these categories are unquestioned. There is no disagreement in high school about What English Is. There is no disagreement about What Math Is. There is no disagreement about What History Is, or What Poli Sci Is, or What Theater/Performance Is.

Then you get to college, and you realize that these are questions that do not have answers, or at least have so many possible answers that it’s quite impossible to settle on just one. And you realize that living in the thick of intellectual forment just generates more of these really fundamental questions, and what’s more, you realize that it’s perfectly acceptable to work through them and to not have answers to them. It’s perfectly acceptable to declare your concentration and start planning your thesis in history, and yet discover and embrace the practice of reading fiction as if for the first time. It’s perfectly acceptable to let history inform literature, and literature inform history. I love it. I am so profoundly grateful. And what’s more, I feel like I belong here; I don’t feel shut out by some sort of more-theoretical-than-thou dynamic. I get the sense that, in ten or so years, when I’m a little better-educated, I will be an academic with something to contribute to the humanitarian (in the sense of “the humanities”) discourse. That’s a heady feeling—and it’s a feeling for which I’m profoundly grateful.

I guess it would have been about two years ago now that I looked down and muttered when asked, “You want to do English, right?” I had no idea then how much my world would be utterly, utterly changed.

Every day, I’m aghast by how many books there are that I haven’t read, that I should read. Every time I go to a bookstore (which is relatively often at times like now, when I’m living in a city with good independent bookstores), I come out with more books that sit piled on my desk, or occasionally actually do get read. Every time I go into a library, I check out armfuls, and too often they come due before I’ve read them. I’m painfully aware of how little I’ve read, particularly the painfully obvious things that someone who wants to do what I want to do should be reading. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve smiled and nodded and pretended to know what’s going on when someone references Foucault, for example.

Sometimes I blame my post-Prop. 13 California public school for my under-read nature. I thought only this could explain my glaring gaps in classic British and American literature in comparison to my peers from east-coast schools. But maybe it’s just that I’m lazy; the internet, with its easy access to blogs, newspapers and magazines, means that I read fewer novels. I also favor the esoteric over the edifying; I’ve been meaning to read Jane Eyre for months, but every time I think I finally will go get it from the library, I get sidetracked by another memoir of gay life in the 1970s.

The British academic-humor novelist David Lodge writes about characters who play a game called “Humiliation,” wherein they try to win by naming the most embarrassing work of literature they haven’t read—one English professor wins by confessing that he’s never read Hamlet. Well, I’ve read Hamlet (and I was, if I say so myself, a very good Horatio in my 12th-grade English class’s reading), but I could think up a dozen equally embarrassing things I’ve never read. Jane Eyre, for instance, as I mentioned above. Pride and Prejudice, or indeed anything else by Austen. The Grapes of Wrath (which I faked my way through having read when it was assigned in 11th-grade English). Anything by Hemingway. I started One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but never finished it. I’ve never read one of the more “grown-up” Dickenses—just A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield. Never read a Russian novel.

I also have to read theory, the stuff I need to talk about gender and sexuality with my friends and peers. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been told that something I wrote related to an idea advanced by Judith Butler—but I’ve never read Butler. Never read Eve Sedgwick. Never, as I mentioned above, read Foucault. Or Freud. I purport to be an American cultural history major, but I never finished Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and as far as most other famous American historians are concerned, I can only recognize names and titles. I came to American countercultures, queer theory, and literary history through the Beats, but of Kerouac I’ve only read On the Road. Of Burroughs I’ve only read Naked Lunch. I have, however, read quite a lot of Ginsberg.

Of course, it does me little good complaining if I keep bringing home book after book that I never read. This summer, partly thanks to my daily commute on the bus, I’ve rediscovered reading for pleasure, and it’s been incredibly exciting—I can’t think of the last time I read so many books in one summer, but it must have been before high school, before I was really reading only adult books. But as I take on the task of catching up in the adult world of cultural literacy and start the background reading I’ll need to dive into my independent work at school, I’m daunted by how much there is to go. I’m sure that when I’m really an adult, I’ll still have glaring gaps in my literary consumption—everyone does; that is, after all, why “Humiliation” is such a successful joke in Lodge’s writing—but it would be nice to think that I’ll eventually catch up to the wide breadth of literature that my friends and family are able to reference.