Corina's paper, "Violence and the Mechanism of Testing," was written for a class she took with Dr. Alice Dailey, who said: "Corina studies how in three texts—Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Pericles— male characters invent testing plots to exert control over their wives and daughters.
"These include the test by which Chaucer’s Griselde proves her patience and obedience by surrendering her children up to her sadistic husband; in The Merchant of Venice, the test by which Portia’s suitors are emasculated, dismissed, or rewarded according to her dead father’s will; and in Pericles, the pseudo-test by which men seeking to marry the princess of Antioch end up losing their heads, whether they pass or fail, so that her father can continue his incestuous abuse of his daughter.
"Corina argues that in this literature, the test is a mechanism for “mystifying” violence, by which she means that the test plots cover up aggression against women or other men, and instead re-present that aggression as a seemingly benign game, riddle, or challenge.
"In her meticulous, nuanced analysis of the test plots, her work uncovers the troubling way women characters are made to function as “mediums” through whom toxic masculinity is “exercised and performed.” Corina’s essay exemplifies the astute, penetrating, beautifully written analysis that has characterized her work throughout her time at Villanova."
For the first time ever, the judges this year picked a second paper for an honorable mention, Gracie Stagliano's "For the Love of Light Skin: The Dangerous Mulatta in Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress," which she wrote while serving as a teaching assistant for Dr. Jean Lutes's class, "Crime Fiction and Gender."
Dr Lutes said: "Gracie's paper examines a figure she calls “the dangerous mulatta” -- a figure that
repudiates racist representations of mixed-race heroines by offering an
alternative vision, a female character who refuses to be tragic.
"Gracie’s paper
is especially impressive because of its nuanced analysis of whiteness, or
relative proximity to whiteness, as a tremendous asset when operating in a
racist system.
"She makes an instructive comparison between the mixed-race women
featured in these two very different crime novels, and she calls attention not
only to the racial and moral ambiguities these characters embody, but also to the
oppression of the patriarchal legal world they inhabit and resist."
