Judges' Comments

The judges agreed to award two prizes and an honorable mention in this round of awards due to the high quality of all three pieces, but also because they reflect the variability and scope of first-year writing at Wellesley. 

Two essays tied for first prize: Jules Gabellini’s essay, “The Intersections of Domesticity and Globalization in Vermeer's Young Woman With a Water Pitcher,” written for Barbara Lynn-Davis’s course, WRIT 107: Introduction to the Histories of Art, and Andreea Sabau’s essay, “Surrender is Sweet (Never),” written for Sarah Wall-Randell’s course, WRIT 120: Critical Interpretation. 

The quality of Gabellini’s argument, analysis, and research impressed us. Gabellini does a fantastic job explaining the stakes of her argument. Scholars tend to read Young Woman With a Water Pitcher as a companion piece to Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. In contrast, Gabellini argues that the two paintings must be read in their historical context—specifically, in the context of the emergent Dutch East India Company and the new wealth that Dutch colonialism brought into Dutch households. Understood this way, the two paintings, although similar in subject matter, are better understood in contrast: the contrasts between the paintings demonstrate, in Gabellini’s words, “Vermeer’s awareness of the effects of globalization, resulting in the marked divergence seen between the emergent Burgher class, as illustrated in Young Woman With a Water Pitcher, and the lower socioeconomic strata, such as rendered in The Milkmaid.” We were impressed by the way that Gabellini incorporated her scholarly sources to advance her original claim; we were likewise impressed with the quality of her analysis and the clarity of her prose. Her professor reports that this essay will transform the way that she will teach Vermeer in the future, indicating that Gabellini’s writing performs the best work that scholarship can do: create new knowledge. 

Sabau’s essay compares Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” with Danez Smith’s “not an elegy for Mike Brown” to explore how they depart from the traditional elegy, which seeks to resolve the passions of grief into some feeling of consolation for the loss of human life. Sabau demonstrates how these poems both refuse to “surrender” to such consolation, and she progressively deepens her analysis of this refusal throughout the course of the essay: how each poet heightens rather than dispels the reader’s sense of the violence entailed in such loss, how they question what it means to frame (and thereby diffuse) this loss as exceptional or exceptionally shocking, and how they use elegy nevertheless to affirm every human body as valuable and memorable. Sabau insightfully differentiates the way these two poems approach elegy by pointing to how systems of white privilege affect the poet’s treatment of the problem of grief and the project of memorialization. The development of Sabau’s analysis over the course of the paper as well as her engagement with literary detail was very finely done. 

Mabel Peach’s essay, “Selling vs. Truth Telling: An Analysis of Two Self-Portraits” merits honorable mention. According to her professor, Barbara Lynn-Davis, Peach’s essay is the strongest comparison essay Lynn-Davis has ever received. Peach’s comparison of Sofonisba Anguissola’s “Self-Portrait,” with Vincent Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin,” demonstrates ingenuity, creativity, and intellectual sophistication for the writer’s approach to the two paintings. If the idea of a comparison essay is to make each painting more compelling by discussing its relationship to another, then Peach succeeds in her mission, providing an example for us all to admire.