My five-year college reunion was last May, and I'm still working on my thesis.

Not literally, of course. I turned it in—and received honors for it, thankyouverymuch—five years and six months ago. But I still find myself thinking about it, in odd moments. My topic was "monstrous women in the Victorian novel", and I can still spot a monstrous woman at a hundred yards. When I'm in the Harvard Coop, I gravitate towards books that might have been useful during the research process. Consequently, I read (for fun) books with titles like The Vampire Myth In Europe and Demon Lovers (about medieval witchcraft trials).

Thinking about my topic leads me in unexpected directions. It always has. In the acknowledgments section of my thesis, I cribbed a line from Robert Fulghum, about a spelunker (explorer of caves) whose light runs out and who must turn back with many avenues yet explored It was like that. It is like that. I'm still researching and writing the damned thing, if only in my head. And it's still surprising me.

It grew out of a paper I wrote for my Victorian Gothic class—a paper on vampirism, sexuality, and gender roles in Dracula. A fifteen-pager, and after I handed it in, I sought out the professor and said, "There's more to talk about here—would you advise my thesis?"

So I sat myself down that summer and started researching. I ended up calling it Monstrous Women, and it ended up being about female monsters and ostracized women in the Victorian novel. I wrote about the original meaning of the word "monster" ("other," to simplify it greatly, and once so devoid of negative connotation that it might have been used to describe as angel as well as a demon). I wrote about the characteristics of female monsters in the Victorian gothic novel—Camilla, Ayesha of She, the vampires of Dracula. I wrote about the female characters in non-gothic novels who were given monstrous characteristics—the "other" woman, not the heroine, not the blond domestic woman who conforms to society's expectations and whom the hero saves and marries, but the other kind. The dark-haired, rebellious, sharp-tongued pusher of boundaries. I wrote my way towards the conclusion I had expected to find, following the maps left by other spelunkers: The Victorian age was the age of men. Men have the kingdoms of the earth; women are therefore "the other," by definition. Whether Madonna or whore, they are second class, and as "the other," it is easy to see them as demons on whom you can put the sins of all. This shouldn't be a huge surprise for any student of history, medieval studies, sociology, or psychology.

But then, in researching and writing the final quarter of the thesis, I shone my light into a branching I had not known was there, and found things that surprised me. I had already discovered that the monstrous woman of the novel usually drives the plot—without her actions, it would neither begin nor resolve. She dies before the novel's end, and the men (normal society) with their domestic women (the means of propagating normal society) go back to happily ever after.

The fates of Ayesha of She, Lucy of Dracula, Bertha Mason Rochester of Jane Eyre, and Maggie Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss all bear out this hypothesis. They are obvious monsters or obviously outside the boundaries of civilized society, and they die before happily ever after is achieved by the more normal characters.

But then there are the subtly monstrous women—Jane Eyre herself, Mina Harker, Elizabeth Bennett—and their fates give one pause. More than one of the scholars I read in the research phase of the thesis stated that they "die" as surely as do Ayesha, Lucy, Bertha, and Maggie—"kill" their monstrous nature and become good girls and good wives. I didn't agree then, and I still don't. Jane's sharp tongue and quick wit is what Mr. Rochester values in her—it's why he wants to marry her—and he would value her less if she met the standard of "womanliness." The exact same relationship exists between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Mina Harker's courage and intelligence is valued by all the men of Dracula. More: her elements of monstrosity enable her to lead them to the vampire's den. Without a monstrous woman, they all would have died at the monstrous villain's hands.

So the stories proceed to their end: Elizabeth trades barbs with Mr. Darcy until the two of them are able to see value in the other. Jane returns to Mr. Rochester despite his wife, only to find that the wife is dead and he is free to marry. While Jonathan and Dr. Van Helsing are wringing their hands, Mina uses her link to Dracula's mind, plus a good dose of simple analytical logic, to work out the vampire's plans and tell the men how to intercept him. And then Elizabeth marries Mr. Darcy, Jane marries Mr. Rochester, and Mina and Jonathan have a baby (a son, of course).

These women merge back into the world of men, back into women's proper place (the tending of the home and the bearing of the next generation)—but they bring a flavor of the monstrous with them. Elizabeth and Jane are still sharp-tongued, Mina is still "as intelligent as any man," and they bring that with them as they set the tone for the home and raise their children. The firelit sitting room has not changed since they went off to have their adventures—it's the same home. The same tea set. The same corsets. The same expectations But the firelit circle is a fraction larger than it has been. It has expanded, just a little, to include this new definition of proper womanhood. Through marriage, the men of the story (the normal society by which "normal" is defined) acknowledge that Jane, Elizabeth, and Mina are as much proper women as their blond helpless counterparts. The circle of firelight quivers—and reforms, just a shade larger than it was before.

The men of the story don't notice that they have expanded the definition of normal, the definition of "woman" or "person". Nor does the reader—not of one novel. It takes the reading of several to recognize the pattern—to glimpse that moment at the end when the world reforms back into normalcy, only a normalcy slightly bigger than it was. And the monstrous/domestic woman glances up from her embroidery and winks. That's the moral of Jane's story, of Mina's, of Elizabeth's.

And of Peter Jackson's—the man whose film edged Tolkein's fringe story into the mainstream. This gradual process of absorption allows stories to become legends and legends to become memes—allows fringe tales edge into the mainstream—as surely as it allows the definition of a proper woman to grow to include women who argue with men, women who fight monsters, and women who carry heavy things. And I'm not completely certain of this yet, but it just might be the meaning of life.

Because it's the moral of the John Adams story too, you see—the moral of any story where a radical or a prophet stands in the town square and shouts that there is a better way to do this, and we have to do it now, now, what are you waiting for, why are you hesitating? Come to the edge, and I'll push you, and you'll fly!

You can't follow these people without reservation—they are called radicals for a reason. If normal society followed radicals as enthusiastically as radicals led, the entire society would go careening off the cliff edge. You couldn't rush where they wanted you to go any more than you'd welcome Dracula into your sitting room and serve him tea. And yet and yet

And yet without them, the larger society would never get where it was going. Matthew Arnold wrote that "the freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next," and that sums it up pretty well. You don't go over their cliff-edge—but their compromise position is closer than you'd ever have gone to a precipice by yourself—and you get comfortable enough in the compromise position. It begins to seem normal and rational and what everyone accepts as home. The firelit circle has grown so subtly that you'd never know it if you weren't looking for the moment it trembles and changes.

The nipping radicals allow the subtle monsters to ease into the firelight when you're not looking, and before anyone realizes it, "normal" has settled down to include them. They are part of normal, accepted society—the society of men, if you will—and they bear the next generation. And the cycle starts all over again with that new generation's sons and their monsters. And that's the victory. Not the radicals convincing the conservatives to join the glad rush to the cliff-edge, but the dialogue, the stretching of the term "normal." Not the transgression of boundaries, but the expansion of them. That's the victory. Every generation achieves this victory. And maybe that's the meaning of life.