It is not fun to watch stressed-out teenagers try to wriggle out of
working. But I was a student recently enough to know that it is
better to watch one than to be one. Take many such students, add a
full-time course load, part-time jobs, the absolute necessity of
drinking, sleeping and screwing at every opportunity, and you have a
ready-made market for term paper mills, those businesses that either
commission or stockpile term papers for students to recycle. These days
there are thousands of term papers instantly available to download from
the Web (Erin Carlson maintains a
list of free term paper sites). Could any of
my students have handed in such phony baloney? Would I have caught it?
Curious, I set out to find a paper that matched one assignment for my
course: an eight-pager interpreting Jane’s artwork in Charlotte
Brontk’s novel “Jane Eyre.” The result? As one site disarmingly
acknowledged, “beggers can’t be chosers.”

Needless to say, term paper Web sites all include disclaimers
insisting that their papers are available “for research purposes only”
and they are not intended to be handed in as a student’s own work.
Despite names like Evil House of Cheat and
SchoolSucks, these sites do not condone plagiarism.

Oh no. Never. The double talk is impressive, since the reality is
usually one click away. If you “aggree” [sic] to the disclaimer on
ReportzNet, you will find instructions on how to search
the essay database, download a paper and “hand it in to your teacher the
next day.” Many of the sites go so far as to insist they are providing a
public service in the name of educational reform. SchoolSucks’ Kenny
Sahr, among others, argues that his site prevents lazy teachers from
recycling the same old paper topics, though why it is preferable for
students to recycle the same old papers is unclear. They assert that
students can use the papers as models, but students truly seeking model
essays would do better asking their teachers for one that more closely
reflects what is expected of them.

So, what do you get for your trouble? Not much. A
few sites, like Cyber Essays or
Essay.org, work smoothly, but most are badly organized and chock-full of redundant or dead-end links. You can spend as much time navigating them as you would have spent writing your own paper. Searching their databases often results in unalphabetized, uninformative lists that tell you little about each paper. Worse, they are filled with typos, to put it charitably. Indeed, a less charitable person might think that these Web entrepreneurs and ardent school reformers have yet
to master the basics of English grammar and syntax. Papers on “The
Illiad,” “Hamlet as a Revenged Tragedy” and “Death: A Common Element in
Poetry” (I am not making these up!) do not reassure.

Besides, my search for term papers on “Jane Eyre” yielded nothing
that anyone could have used for my course assignment on Charlotte
Brontk’s novel. SchoolSucks produced only the unpromising “Nature in
‘Jane Eyre’ by Emily Brontk.” Evil House of Cheat produced about 12
essays with annoying titles like “p118.txt,” though once you get to the
papers themselves they helpfully note the level of the course it was
assigned for and the original teacher’s comments. The most popular
paper topic for “Jane Eyre” was definitely Jane-as-feminist, and one of
these college-level papers from Evil House of Cheat was well-focused and
properly documented, but another high-school paper inauspiciously opened
by comparing Jane Eyre to a caterpillar who would soon become a
butterfly. Cyber Essays yielded another paper on nature in “Jane
Eyre” (the second-place topic) that included one plausible paragraph
interpreting Jane’s landscape paintings, but that would not an eight-page
paper make. In short, I can now rest assured that any dedicated
plagiarizer in my class would have had to shell out from $64 to $500 for
a custom-written paper.

When SchoolSucks debuted in 1996 it provoked widespread debate in
the media and the
academy about the ethics of paper mill Web sites, but these free sites ultimately seem too pathetic to be much of a threat to universities. Ironically, the larger threat of plagiarized papers may come from the universities themselves: Online
courses often require that students post their work on the Web, so more
and more student papers will be available free to the savvy surfer.
Already a simple Alta Vista search on “Jane Eyre” results in thousands of
links, including some to
Professor George Landow’s Victorian Web, a
growing Brown University site devoted to the literature and culture of
Victorian England that boasts more than 100 informative essays on
“Jane Eyre.” And when students post research papers on their own personal
Web pages like Harvard student Dorian Berger’s oft-cited
paper archive, the search engines
will find them, and their unscrupulous peers will steal them.

The very nature of these controversies over student plagiarism may change as certain notions of authorship and what constitutes intellectual property continue to evolve. Some radical writing teachers are
using the Internet to question the notion of individual authorship. They argue that intellectual property and copyright are relatively recent phenomena, which encourage the mistaken assumption that writing is “authored” by one hand and mind. By making it difficult to trace the origins of a text or idea, the Internet reminds us that writing is a collaborative process. If these ideas gain ground, crediting someone with “ownership” of intellectual property may begin to seem absurd, and plagiarism may become obsolete — through its sheer acceptance.

Until then, however, online term-paper sites will continue to serve a growing population of desperate students. And teachers like me will have to keep one eye cocked for pilfered prose on poor dear Jane Eyre.

Thirty-one, the daughter of a rural Anglican clergyman, unmarried, inexperienced, diminutive, shy and “plain” as her heroine Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontk, like her romantic hero Lord Byron, “awoke one morning to find herself famous.” Since its initial publication, this fame has never abated. “Jane Eyre” has been continuously in print and has long been established as a classic of English literature (alongside another brilliant first novel, “Wuthering Heights,” by “Ellis Bell,” Charlotte’s younger sister Emily, also published in 1847). Significantly, it is the sole novel of its era to be reprinted in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking 1985 Norton anthology, “Literature by Women.”

The most immediate surprise of “Jane Eyre” for today’s readers is the directness, even bluntness, of the young heroine’s voice. Here is no prissy little-girl sensibility, but a startlingly independent, even skeptical perspective. At the age of 10, the orphan Jane already sees through the hypocrisy of her self-righteous Christian elders. She tells her bullying Aunt Reed, “People think you a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!” and “I am glad you are no relative of mine; I will never call you aunt again so long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say that the very thought of you makes me sick.” (In fact, when her aunt is elderly and dying, Jane does return to visit her, and forgives her. But that’s far in the future.) With the logic of a mature philosopher, in fact rather like Friedrich Nietzsche to come, Jane protests the basic admonitions of Christianity as a schoolgirl: “I must resist those who … persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel that it is deserved.” And this bold declaration, which would have struck readers of 1847 (in fact, of 1947) as radical and “infeminine”:

“Restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes … Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.”

Instead, the novel begins with the seemingly disappointed statement: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that [rainy] day,” and counters almost immediately with, “I was glad of it; I never liked long walks.” When excluded from Christmas revelries in the Reed household, the child Jane says, “To speak the truth, I had not the least wish to go into company.” Jane’s defiance, which doesn’t exclude childlike fears, strikes us as forthright in the way of the adolescent temperaments of other famous literary voices — Jo March of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and their now-countless younger siblings. Here is a voice, we believe, we can trust; and our trust is not misplaced.

Another surprise of “Jane Eyre” is the seemingly “real”– that is, non-romantic — nature of the lovers-to-be. “Jane Eyre” is many times described as small, plain, undistinguished; her mysterious, Byronic-tempered employer Rochester is pointedly not “handsome or heroic looking”; their conversations are, from the start, marked by an unusual directness, surely rare in 19th-century women’s fiction, with the underlying premise, which is never questioned, that the penniless Jane and the wealthy Rochester are equals in intelligence, character and worth. Their attraction to, and developing love for, each other is immediate, yet grows as naturally as it might in real life, characterized by such remarks as Rochester’s to Jane, “You are not pretty any more than I am handsome,” and at the novel’s end, after the lovers have been parted for a year, and suffered losses, an exchange that must have made readers gasp, and perhaps shed a tear:

“Am I hideous, Jane?”

“Yes, sir: you always were, you know.”

Today’s readers will find in “Jane Eyre” mysteries and surprises that Brontk’s contemporaries would have taken for granted: the strange, harsh treatment of mental illness (as a consequence apparently of syphilis); the “double standard” of sexual behavior (in which men like Rochester were allowed a kind of gentlemanly promiscuity while unmarried women like Jane had to conform to a narrow code of chastity); the unyielding conviction with which Jane Eyre, though she loves Rochester, flees him, even to the point of wandering homeless, and nearly starving, in the novel’s most disturbing, existential scenes of Chapter 28 when Jane is reduced to begging crusts of bread and ravenously devouring swill scorned by hungry hogs. (What a boldly non-Romantic portrayal of female, human want, to present to genteel English readers!)

Of course, “Jane Eyre” has a “happy” ending. Yet it is made to feel like a natural, even inevitable ending, though there are numerous melodramatic twists of the plot and coincidences beforehand. It is typical of Jane that she declares, “Reader, I married him.” (Not “He married me.”) It is typical of Jane that, though married at last to the man she loves, and now a mother, she looks back upon her still-young life from the perspective of mature wisdom. Why does “Jane Eyre” retain its appeal after so many decades, and so many intervening novels of virginal young heroines, Byronic moody mysterious elder men, and melodramatic disclosures? One answer is, simply, the quality of Jane’s and Rochester’s characters. They are believable. They are intelligent, yet emotional, superior beings who are human, even flawed; as the 19th-century reader would have discerned, they are models for us all.

I also want to say the dictionary is a best, any unabridged dictionary. I read lists of words as though they were stories. Within their nuances, I see possibilities. Like many writers, I am passionate about words. To this day, I love reading dictionaries, including lexicons of dead languages. I love the sounds and shapes of words, the way that certain consonant blends conjure up related images — glow, glisten, glimmer, glen versus flabby, flap, flop, flotsam, flatter, flatulence. I am fascinated with the origins of words, when they first came into being, how they were used. Within their histories are stories. The dictionary for me is my Scheherazade. Plus it can spell Scheherazade.

There’s also “Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich and “Annie John” by Jamaica Kincaid. I have reread each of those books many times. And as with the first times, I am always inspired to think about the narrative qualities I cherish in stories. “Love Medicine” is the book that made me want to find my own voice. It inspired my early attempts at writing fiction.

Finally, we get to the compulsory litmus test of literature. If stranded on a desert island, what book, other than “How to Get Off a Desert Island,” would I read? As an endlessly entertaining literary companion I would chose the annotated edition of “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov (published by Vintage, with notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.)

I often reread passages of “Lolita” for its exquisite language. To me, “Lolita” has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life. He also provides the truest definition of pornography I’ve ever found, likening it to mediocre literature and the “copulation of cliches.” I’ll keep this in mind if I ever get around to seeing the latest makeover of “Lolita” on film.

I’ve also read Nabokov’s lectures, interviews, essays and letters. And while I often admire his opinions as a writer, particularly his distaste for literary deconstructionism, I probably wouldn’t have liked him in person. His tone makes him come across as arrogant and mocking, an intellectual elitist. Yet his very nastiness makes me like “Lolita” all the more — or rather, I like the fact that his work overshadows his public persona. In the ideal world of literature, that is the way it should be. The work stands for itself, neither improved nor desecrated by literary analysis, film adaptations or exposes of the author.