Inside Oxford's Hardest and Weirdest Exam (pt. 2)
One of the drawbacks of not having won a seven-year fellowship at All Souls College is that I now have a big girl job instead. The interest I once had in writing about history has been supplanted by my newfound dedication to writing emails.
On the plus side, I’m now a seasoned and semi-proficient email writer, who no longer spends entire afternoons weighing up the pros and cons of different email sign-offs (I’ve cut it down to five minutes tops).
I’ve also been paralysed by the fear that corporate talk has pervaded my language to the point that I can no longer be trusted to write anything else. I recently caught myself beginning a (double) text with the phrase ‘just a quick follow-up’ and, soon after, informing friends that I would be able to ‘confirm lunch plans by EOD’. The tone of my communications, I worry, has been irreparably reconfigured for sending passive aggressive chase emails and terse Slack channel messages.
Ironically, part 2 of this piece was the bit I actually wanted to write in the first place. Part 1 was a necessary bit of scene-setting. Now, it’s been over six months since I actually took the All Souls exam and it’s a bit of a haze, but here’s my attempt to reconstruct some of what I wrote.
Luckily, All Souls actively recommends that applicants write summaries of their answers soon after the exams. They advise this in case you end up one of the few candidates shortlisted and invited to a ‘viva voce examination’. In other words, a 25-minute interrogation about your exam answers in front of fifty(!) All Souls Fellows.
Dutifully – and, on reflection, optimistically – I followed the advice. Except that I was so exhausted and sick of writing at the end of back-to-back exam days that instead of summarising my answers in writing, I recorded a series of rambling voice notes instead. Listening back to these now it’s apparent that, even then, I wasn’t entirely convinced by my answers. At points in the narration, I’m quite explicit about the quality of my responses – ‘then things started to get a bit lost’, ‘I don’t really know what I was trying to achieve with that’ – and my tone of voice becomes abjectly apologetic.
To recap, the All Souls exam involves two ‘specialist’ papers (for me, history papers) and two ‘general’ papers. Most of my history essays were pretty commonplace, but it was in the general papers that things began to unravel.
At the time, I do remember thinking that some of my general paper arguments were a little unorthodox, but looking back now, they were just unhinged.
In my defence, though, the questions were kind of unhinged themselves. Whoever set the papers must have been indulging in the academic equivalent of
So before we get into my answers, here are a few honourable mentions for most unnerving questions:
To deny that Bach is better than Britney is simply to play into the hands of consumer capitalism.’ Discuss.
I had a lot to say about Britney, but markedly less to say about Bach, and I worried that this would quickly become apparent if I attempted an essay on the topic.
Would the capacity to lay eggs change the debate on abortion?
It’s safe to say that GSCE religious studies hadn’t prepared me for this.
‘We should be no less horrified at the idea of eating a dead chicken than at the idea of eating live monkey brains.’ Discuss.
The question wasn’t necessarily that daunting but, Pret chicken Caesar and bacon baguette still making it’s way through my system, I didn’t have the stomach for it.
So what questions did I decide I was equipped to answer? …
WHAT IS LOVE?
Yes, I, a woman who has arguably never been in love, decided that this was MY moment.
Initially I scoffed at the idea that anyone would attempt this question. But then, something terrible happened. The chorus of Haddaway’s ‘What Is Love’ started playing on repeat in my head and, soon, I couldn’t focus on anything else: the earworm compelled me to answer.
I started off by pointing out that love is often a site of contestation. The very act of posing the question ‘What is love?’ suggests that it’s open to multiple and potentially conflicting perspectives. Love, I wrote, is not the seamless merging of bodies, minds and souls presented in Plato’s Symposium. Confession: I’ve never actually read Plato’s Symposium but I did once listen to a whole In Our Time episode on it so I might as well have?
I argued that two contrasting literary genres in the medieval period – ‘courtly love’ and ‘courts of love’ – reflect love’s fundamentally contested nature.
In courtly love literature, a man purses an aloof female object of desire. She is typically uninterested or sometimes actively concerned by his attention, but he continues pursuit of his ‘love’ relentlessly. This dynamic finds a more extreme parallel in medieval pastourelle poems, comedic lyrics that depict a knight becoming enamoured with and subsequently sexually assaulting a peasant woman. The farce of the pastourelle lay precisely in the disjunction between the attitudes of the two parties. What the chivalric gentleman calls love, the peasant woman calls threat.
The courts of love genre approached love from a different perspective. These literary works depicted female subjects bringing their personal amorous woes to law courts and seeking redress, as well as – often – making a collective case for womankind and their treatment by men. This literary trope was reflected in the reality of the medieval English legal system, with records showing that women brought hundreds of amorous complaints against male defendants to royal jurisdictions.
While medieval men treated courtly love as a law unto itself, medieval women actively sought to bring objective legal standards into the domain of romance as a means of securing protection and official remedy.
I thought I was getting somewhere with this essay but things started to unravel when I went on a long tangent comparing medieval knights to modern-day incels. I’m still no closer to figuring out what love is.
‘ACADEMICS ARE LIKE PRIESTS: THEY DISGUISE TRUISMS IN JARGON TO CLAIM AUTHORITY OVER OTHERS.’ DISCUSS.
My answer was based around an identity that I claimed problematised the discrete categories of academic and priest implied by the question’s opening simile: namely, the preponderance of priest-academics (i.e. individuals who were both academics and clergymen) in pre-modern Europe. I used notable priest-academics of the Reformation (Calvin, Vermigli, Knox, Goodman, etc.) to test and ultimately refute the claim that both priests and academics ‘disguise truisms in jargon to claim authority over others’. Perhaps stress had awoken my dormant Church of England upbringing or perhaps I was simply running out of things to say but, as my answer went on, I found myself becoming strangely and belligerently protective over priests, finishing on some variation of the point that ‘academics could learn a lot from priests actually!!’.
I was pretty smug about my approach to the question at the time, but looking back, I’m sure at least five people in the room thought they’d had the same brilliantly original idea.
‘SATIRISING THE SUPER RICH IS NOT ART; IT IS SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL.’ DISCUSS.
The problem with my attempt at this question was that I’d spent the period before the exam consuming significantly more Netflix than I had novels.
As a consequence, about four fifths of my answer was dedicated to me explaining that Squid Game, Succession, White Lotus and Triangle of Sadness were, in fact, super good, and the other fifth making tenuous connections between my watch history and an obscure Tudor poet called John Skelton.
Needless to say, my conclusion that ‘the fish might be more slippery than we think’ (yes, I actually wrote this) didn’t pack enough rhetorical punch to save my argument’s lack of evidentiary quality.
HISTORICISE SHAME.
I decided to write about women’s shame and its fleshy manifestations. There are genuinely intelligent things to say about this topic and lots of very impressive literature has been written on it but, by this point in the exam, brain rot had well and truly set in. I could try to reconstruct my answer but I think my ‘plan’ speaks for itself:
Whatever I had to say about hiding tampons, I have a sneaking suspicion that it failed to impress the All Souls dons.