English & Writing & Grammar, Oh My!

I have a deep and undying love for The Princess Diaries, and I will go to my grave insisting that they are great feminist works. This may be difficult for some to understand, but I will do my best to convince them otherwise.          If you're unfamiliar with the movies, I'll provide a quick rundown. In the first movie, Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway) is a nerdy high school student who is entirely blindsided when told that she's a princess. She struggles with this fact throughout the movie, but decides that she will accept her royal responsibilities at the end of the movie. In the second movie, she is told that she must become queen of Genovia in her grandmother's (Julie Andrews) place. However, to do so, the law states that she must be married. She decides to marry a royal that she has absolutely no romantic connection with and begins to form a relationship with Nicholas (Chris Pine), who is trying to get the throne due to his uncle's persistence. In the end, she c

Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is secretly about Cotton-Eyed Joe. We often talk about how poems resemble songs, so why can't the plots of short stories do the same? In the case of "Bartleby", I think that he as a person can easily be likened to our dear old pal CE Joe. We don't know where he came from, we don't know where he went (in the biblical sense). He has an air of mystery about him. He messes with the narrator's personal life. I know that this is silly, but I think it's fun to relate things that you don't necessarily enjoy to things that you do. If anyone can think of other parallels between the two, please feel free to comment them below.