essay on the boston girl for film

Description

Guidelines for Paper on The Boston Girl

Length and Formatting: 5 page, double-spaced, MLA

Font: Times New Roman, 12 pt.

Source Citation Style: MLA 8

Your 5-page essay on The Boston Girl should take the form of a book review. In writing your review, you need to write as if your reader has not read the book. To do this, you need to very briefly summarize the book – the way a movie or book reviewer does, in a few sentences sometimes – and then devote most of your paper to a discussion of the book. You can offer a brief synopsis of the book in your opening paragraph and then provide more info about the book as needed in other parts of the paper. But the crucial thing to remember is that the bulk of your book review should be your assessment and analysis of the book. Don’t get bogged down in plot summary. What should you focus on when reading the book and reviewing it? Everyone’s experience of a book differs. We all bring our own experiences, biases, and perspectives to the texts we read. But for this assignment, for this course, I’d like you to comment on some of the following aspects of the book:

1. What do we learn about Boston from this book? About the North End, the neighborhood in which Addie’s family settled? About Roxbury, where the family moved to? And about other places in the city? How does Anita Diamant portray the city and its people, and life in Boston over the course of the 20th century?

2. The book is a fictionalized autobiography – a story about one woman’s life. But as with any biography and autobiography, it is also a story about the era in which the person lived. In fact, the book makes reference to and comments on actual places, people, events, and developments in the history of Boston, the region (e.g. Rockport Lodge was an actual place “founded in the 1900s to provide inexpensive chaperoned holidays to girls of modest means”), and the nation (e.g. events like World War II and campaigns to end child labor). What do we learn about 20th Century history from the book? Discuss some of the events and developments that Diamant makes reference to. What does Diamant say about them? How did these events and developments affect Addie and other people in the book?

2. What do we learn about Boston’s class structure from this book? Who are the Brahmins that Diamant refers to and who are represented in the book by Tessa Thorndike and others? How does Diamant portray them? How does their life differ from the lives of Addie and her friends and family members?

3. What do we learn about the lives of Jews in Boston? If we think of Addie’s family as a case study, in what ways does her family assimilate and make concessions to American culture? In what ways does the family retain so-called “Old World traditions” and religious practices? Judging from Addie’s experiences, did all Bostonians fully accept Jews during the period covered in the book?

4. The North End that Diamant describes was actually multiethnic, as was the both the Saturday Club that she was a member of, and the “Mixed Nuts” group that she was part of at Rockport Lodge. Her dear friend Filomena was Italian. Bearing this in mind, what does The Boston Girl tell us about the lives of Boston immigrants in general throughout the 20th century?

5. On the back of the paperback version of the book, we’re told that Anita Diamant “creates a wonderful portrait of a woman who both expresses and helps create the definition of modern woman.” What makes Addie Baum a “modern woman” What were she and some of her friends, or her sister Betty, doing that made them “modern”? One way to think about this dimension of the book is to contrast Addie’s outlook on life to her mother’s outlook. What does that contrast tell us about “modern women”? In what ways does Addie embrace that which her mother fears?

6. What does the book tell us about being a woman in Boston in general? What do we learn about gender politics (power struggles and imbalances between men and women) from Addie’s relationships with men she

dates and with whom she interacts at work (particularly at the Boston Transcript office)?

These prompts will give you something to think about as you read the book and write your review. But you may also write about other aspects of the book that resonate with you and that you find interesting.

No matter what aspects of the book you focus on, you need to support your claims and comments about The Boston Girl with specific references to the text. To persuade your reader that your assessment is accurate and valid, you could also quote brief significant passages or important exchanges between characters.

A few other tips and guidelines:

You needn’t do any outside research for this book. If you would like to know more about some of the historical events and developments that Diamant alludes to, you can Google them if you’d like, but it’s not necessary to do that in order to do well on the paper. I’m interested in your take on The Boston Girl.

When quoting passages from the book, put the page # in parentheses following the quoted sentence(s) or evidence. For this assignment, you will be using MLA style to cite (since your author will most likely be a part of your intro and thesis, you can stick to the page # format.)

Even though your review will focus on different aspects of the book, an essay like this has to be more formal than a Canvas post or class discussion. It needs a thesis statement – some general statement about the book and what it’s about and what we can learn from it – strong topic sentences, and transitions between paragraphs. See the “Essay Grading Standards” document for other specifics.

I would like to add that Boston in Literature and Film is a Writing Designated course, and that if you would like to receive feedback from me on an outline or draft of your paper, email it to me at least 2 nights before and I will return it to you with feedback in time for you to revise and submit it by the deadline.