SAMPLE CRITICAL WRITE-UPS

These are sample essays that show you what a critical analysis should look like
from your chosen perspective. Notice the language that is in bold in some of
the analyses. Be sure to use language specific to your critical theory an you
analyses.

1) A New Critical / Formalist Reading of Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek"

NOTE: This is an academic exercise that takes a formalist critical approach to Sandra Cisneross short story. This is not
intended to be a well-developed critical paper, but it should prove a useful tool for examining one aspect of
Cisneross work.
If a critic were to take into account external historical and social considerations when interpreting Sandra Cisneros's
"Woman Hollering Creek," his initial natural prejudice might be to view the modern Untied States as a likelier place
for a woman to find liberation from oppressive masculinity than Mexico. However, a formalist reading of "Woman
Hollering Creek" reveals that, in this story at least, just the opposite is true. The United States town to which Clefilas
moves with her new husband casts a distorted mirror image of the town from whence she came. This juxtaposition in
the setting, as well as the characters, symbols, and point of view, all combine to amass their weight toward one
conclusion (theme): life in the United States is less liberating for the Mexican woman than life in Mexico.
That the United States town is steeped in masculinity to the exclusion of femininity is evidenced by the symbolism of
the setting as well as by the characters. The town is North of Clefilas's home town; it is upward (erect), implying
masculinity. The primary character that takes an active part in Clefilas's life, her husband, is masculine. Across the
street is Maximiliano, so macho that he "was said to have killed his wife in an ice-house brawl" (51). There is no
feminine identity for Clefilas to relate to in her neighbors; Dolores is no longer a mother and Soledad is no longer a
wife. Dolores's garden, rather than being tranquil and feminine, serves to reinforce masculine dominance; the "red
red cockscombs, fringed and bleeding a thick menstrual color" (47) foreshadow the abuse that would soon leave
Clefilas's lip split open so that it "bled an orchid of blood" (47). The town has a city hall, an image of masculine rule,
outside of which rests a large bronze pecan. In effect, it is a brass nut, an obviously masculine symbol for which the
town possesses a "silly pride" (50).
Each of these components of setting and character have their feminine mirror in the Mexican town, which is
therefore more hospitable to women. The town is South, suggesting the nether regions and therefore femininity. The
primary character who takes a part in Clefilas's life there is her father, who is more feminine than masculine, who
seems to have taken over the mothering role of Clefilas's deceased mother, making what sounds like a mother's
promise: "I am your father [read mother], I will never abandon you" (43). All of her neighbors are women, and all
have a sense of identity. There are "aunts," and an aunt is someone with both a sibling and a niece or nephew; there
are "godmothers," and a godmother is both someone's friend and someone's protector; and there is Chela, a
"girlfriend," a woman whose identity is based upon a friendship with Clefilas, a friendship in which they can relate
to one another and share dreams (44). Instead of a city hall, the town has a town center, which implies not masculine
competition and rule but feminine cooperation. Instead of a bronze pecan outside of the city hall, there is a "leafy
zcalo in the center of town" (50), suggesting fertility and therefore femininity.
In addition to providing a contrast between the feminine and the masculine, the relative settings of the towns also
create a contrast between independence and dependence, "because the towns [in the U.S.] are built so that you
have to depend on husbands" (50-51). Whereas in Mexico Clefilas is within walking distance of the cinema, her
friend's house, the church, the town center, and her family, in the United States, there is "nothing, nothing nothing of

interest. Nothing one could walk to, at any rate" (50). Clefilas's only social outings are with her husband, to the ice
house, which takes the place of the church in the northern town. In the church in Mexico she could meet with other
women and engage in "huddled whispering," but in the United States "the whispering begins at sunset at the ice
house instead" and she must sit "mute beside their conversation" (48). TV and cinema are both readily available to
Clefilas in the southern town, but in the northern town she has no TV, and can only glimpse a "few episodes" of her
telenovela at Soledad's house. Even her one solid contact with a world outside her own, "her book" is thrown by her
husband "[f']rom across the room" (52).
Not only does the Mexican town provide more opportunities for independent action than the U.S. town, but it also
provides alternatives (other than a mere husband) for dependency. In Mexico, Clefilas can depend on her father,
brothers, aunts, and godmothers. In the United States, however, she has no such option; as the doctor says, "her
family's all in Mexico" (54). In the Mexican town, she can depend on God; but in the U.S. town, the ice house has
taken the place of the church, and so men have taken the place of God. And finally, in Mexico she can depend on
community. The town center implies a network of support. The city hall in the U.S., however, implies indifference or
at least distance.
These contrasts between the dependence on the masculine necessitated by the U.S. town and the independence (or
at least the variety of dependencies) afforded by the Mexican town become more clear as the story progresses.
Initially, the narrator's point of view expresses a feeling of limitation in the Mexican town:
In the town where she grew up, there isn't very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the
house of one or the other to play cards. Or walk to the cinema to see this week's film again, speckled and with one
hair quivering annoyingly on the screen. Or to the center of town to order a milk shake that will appear in a day and a
half as a pimple on her backside. Or to the girlfriend's house to watch the latest telenovela episode and try to copy
the way the women comb their hair, wear there makeup (44).
The language of this passage makes the town appear dull and limiting until it is compared with the language of a
similar passage describing the northern town:
There is no place to go. Unless one counts the neighbor ladies. Soledad on one side, Dolores on the other. Or the
creek (51).
By contrasting these passages, we can see the narrator's true point of view. The Mexican town is not limited
compared to the United States town. There are a variety of options. There is nothing to do "except . . . Or . . . Or . . .
Or . . ." In contrast, in the United States town, there is nothing to do "Unless . . . Or." Variety is evidence by the three
repetitions of "or" in the southern town verses the single "or" in the northern town. Furthermore, "except" implies
something like "well, there is an exception to my statement that there is nothing to do" whereas "unless" implies
"well, you could consider this as an option, but why would you want to?"
Finally, the narrator's point of view becomes abundantly clear as Clefilas crosses Woman Hollering Creek on her way
home to Mexico. Again, initially, the narrator's point of view is negative. When moving to her new home with her
husband, Clefilas wants to know whether "the woman has hollered from anger or pain" (46). And indeed, crossing
that river to her new home is like crossing into a world of both anger and pain. But leaving that world, and crossing
the river in order to ultimately return to Mexico, gives Clefilas a new perspective. Her companion hollers when they
cross the river, but not in either anger or pain. She hollers "like Tarzan" (55). Clefilas, the narrator tells us, had
expected "pain or rage, perhaps, but not a hoot like the one Felice had just let go" (56). Thus, "Woman Hollering
Creek," when crossing it means returning to Mexico, becomes not angry or painful, but liberating.
A vast amount of internal evidence in "Woman Hollering Creek" (the setting, symbolism, and characters) points to
the fact that Clefilas's final return to Mexico is liberating. In the masculine town of the United States, she has no
option but to submit to the male domineering of her husband. In the feminine town of Mexico, however, she has a
variety of dependency options as well as opportunities for independence. And finally, these facts are confirmed by a
shift in the narrator's point of view, which clarifies the positive aspects of the Mexican town.

2) A Psychoanalytic / Freudian Analysis of Erin McGraw's

"A Thief"
Copyright 1999, Skylar Hamilton Burris
Note: This is an academic exercise that takes a psychological critical approach to Erin McGraws short story, "A
Thief." This is not intended to be a well-developed critical paper, but it should prove a useful tool for examining one
aspect of McGraws work. It should also serve to help students learn more about the use of the psychological
(particularly Freudian) critical approach to literature.

Erin McGraw's short story, "A Thief," is susceptible to a Freudian interpretation. The main character of the story,
Evelyn, suffers from an inactive or perhaps wholly absent ego. The superego and the id, without the ego to mediate
between them by regulating "the instinctual drives of the id so that they may be released in nondestructive
behavioral patterns" (Guerin 121), inevitably clash. Because Evelyn's superego represses her sexual desires, her id
strains against it and seeks release through thievery, which eventually becomes a complete substitute for sex.
At the beginning of the story, Evelyn clearly suffers from an excessively powerful superego. In Freudian psychology,
the superego "serves to repress or inhibit the drives of the id, to block off and thrust back...those impulses toward
pleasure that society regards as unacceptable." (Guerin 120). Evelyn unconsciously regards sex as unacceptable, and
her superego will not allow her to experience such pleasure. Her dress and mannerisms reveal her inhibited nature.
The "crease in her trousers [hangs] sharp and specific;" she speaks with "unflagging diction and meticulous
pronunciation;" she even folds her dirty blouse before "placing it in the laundry basket" (18). She obviously cannot
allow herself to engage in any behaviors which might break or disturb this fastidious routine.
Yet, despite the seeming predominance of her superego at the start of the story, Evelyn's id soon begins to strain
against it. When she sees the cats copulating under the bed, she says, "It is difficult to ignore this" (18). It is difficult
for her to ignore her sexual urges. And although she technically concedes to her superego's sexual inhibition by
abstaining from sex, ironically her id leads her to find an even less morally acceptable outlet: thievery.
At first, the thievery is not a complete substitute for sex. "It [is] scarcely even thrilling" (19). However, Evelyn does
manage to escape the guilt her superego would inevitably attach to an actual sex act. "She [does] not hurry. She
behave[s] as if this were an everyday activity, something that was moral, clean," and she does at least feel "a sharp
sting of satisfaction" (19). The thievery soon becomes more sexual. When she steals the bracelet, "she [is] warm with
seamless, liquid pleasure" (19). She feels "heightened, as if charges were racing inexhaustibly over her nerve
endings" (20). Her id begins to exert itself more forcefully. "What had once been pure order had become defiance"
(21). She feels "bold and daring," and, perhaps most importantly, she escapes both the guilt and reservation that her
superego had attached to actual sex because she no longer fears "detection" (21).
Although her id becomes more apparent as the story progresses, the only evidence which can be found of the
existence of Evelyn's ego appears in her statement about the watch she steals: "One must be careful," she says, "not
to leave the watch open for long periods, since the smallest particles of dust can cause malfunction. But it is a
pleasure, from time to time, to look at a well-crafted piece of machinery" (22). Here, moderation, and not repression,
is urged. If her ego were stronger, Evelyn could handle her id when it began to assert itself. But because this is the
only time the ego even seems to make an appearance, the superego and the id are left to battle one another.
This battle is allegorized when Evelyn walks her dogs. The id strains violently against the superego, as the dogs tug
"at their leashes so hard that Evelyn [veers] acutely to the left" (22). Her superego attempts to reign in the id: "She

[gives] a sharp snap, and [the dogs slouch] back onto the sidewalk." (22). But the superego's attempt is futile; the
assertion of her id through the thievery is "not just a fluke...The order of her life [has] opened up like huge jaws," and
soon the dogs (her id) are "straining again, intent and urgent" (22-23). Motivated by her superego's concern that if
she continues to indulge them (the dogs and her passions), they will "dig until [they] hang [themselves]," she calls
them twice, "the second time so sharply that they [slink] back to her as one penitent body" (23). But soon the dogs
straining again, this time in three directions, and she indulges her id, flaring "her own nostrils experimentally" like the
dogs and feeling that "she wanted to pound the softest flesh of her body against stone and sand for the pure
pleasure of touch" (23). She yearns to completely indulge her id, engaging in fierce sex, going down with the dogs
"until she was shoulder deep, deeper" (23).
Finally, the id releases itself in an orgasmic frenzy. With a stolen pen, Evelyn engages in an act which is clearly sexual.
The pen is phallic, "full between her fingers" with a "barrel" and a "nib narrowed to a point of such tense delicacy
that Evelyn could hear as well as see the ink flow" (24). In her unoccupied guest house, she writes with the pen,
bearing "down until the pen quivers] in her hand and its tip rip[s] through the page," an obvious metaphor for sexual
penetration (27). However, after the orgasmic experience, when the ink (representative of semen) puddles on the
"clean floor," Evelyn's superego reasserts itself, and she stops, "dropping the pen" and realizing that if "she didn't
hurry, she would have to spend hours scrubbing at the blue stain on her floor" (27). The superego reintroduces guilt
into the sex act, and she quickly scurries to catch the ink on paper. Having achieved orgasm, she is able to relax; she
lays "her cheek to the page and" sleeps (27).
Despite this orgasmic experience, the id has not yet found a complete substitute for sex. Evelyn's sexual urges are
motivated partly by her unconscious desire to have a baby. The narrator makes repeated references to children. The
art teacher to whom Evelyn rented the guest house calls her students her children and herself has a baby boy (25-26).
Evelyn's sister stays with her baby boy in the guest house (25). Indeed, it is the emptiness of the guest house which
motivates Evelyn to engage in the orgasmic writing experience, because it is "a shame that such a house should
remain unoccupied" (27). It is a shame that Evelyn herself cannot have a baby. Sex is the logical way to obtain a baby.
Earlier, she had realized that "Digging [sex] was the way to find treasures [babies]" (23). But the id's substitute for sex,
thievery, has not yet brought Evelyn that treasure.
The id finally finds a complete substitute for sex when Evelyn actually steals a baby. She tells the baby the house,
the house that was shamefully empty, is "a good house for babies" (30). She confesses that she can not overcome
her desires. "People will tell you," she say to the baby, "that you outgrow desires, but they're wrong" (30).
Unconsciously, she has long desired not just sex, but the product of sex, a baby. "We aren't meant," she says, "we
never were, to live alone" (30).
The stealing of the baby is the climax of the story because it at last represents the id's triumph. Without an ego to
release her desire in a healthy manner, Evelyn must give in either to her id or to her superego. In a sense, she fools
her superego to indulge her id. Because her superego does not permit her to have sex, the id enables her to find a
complete substitute, and the end result, ironically, is far worse than any illicit sex; it is kidnapping. Evelyn looks
"down at the child" and waits "for it, the wave of exhilaration that would come crashing down on her with the force
of a lifetime" (30). At last, all her desires are fulfilled, if not through the sex act, then at least through thievery.

3) A Marxist Reading of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

The following essay was published in the New Orleans Review , vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 27-32. Students and
teachers are free to copy and quote it for scholarly purposes, but publishers should contact me before they reprint it
for profit. Students should discuss the essay with each other and in their classrooms. Please do not ask me to
answer your classroom essay questions for you; it defeats the purpose of your instructor having given you the
assignment.

In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery"
was published in the June 28, 1948 issue of the New Yorker it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever
received": hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned
abuse."1 It is not hard to account for this response: Jackson's story portrays an "average" New England village with
"average" citizens engaged in a deadly rite, the annual selection of a sacrificial victim by means of a public lottery,
and does so quite deviously: not until well along in the story do we suspect that the "winner" will be stoned to death
by the rest of the villagers. One can imagine the average reader of Jackson's story protesting: But we engage in no
such inhuman practices. Why are you accusing us of this?
Admittedly, this response was not exactly the one that Jackson had hoped for. In the July 22, 1948 issue of the San
Francisco Chronicle she broke down and said the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about
her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a
particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to chock the story's readers with a graphic
dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."2 Shock them she did, but
probably owing to the symbolic complexity of her tale, they responded defensively and were not enlightened.
The first part of Jackson's remark in the Chronicle, I suspect, was at once true and coy. Jackson's husband, Stanley
Edgar Hyman, has written in his introduction to a posthumous anthology of her short stories that "she consistently
refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit
of the Sunday supplements."3 Jackson did not say in the Chronicle that it was impossible for her to explain
approximately what her story was about, only that it was "difficult." That she thought it meant something, and
something subversive, moreover, she revealed in her response to the Union of South Africa's banning of "The
Lottery": "She felt," Hyman says, "that they at least understood."4
A survey of what little has been written about "The Lottery" reveals two general critical attitudes: first, that it is
about man's ineradicable primitive aggressivity, or what Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren call his "all-toohuman tendency to seize upon a scapegoat"; second, that it describes man's victimization by, in Helen Nebeker's
words, "unexamined and unchanging traditions which he could easily change if he only realized their
implications."5 Missing from both of these approaches, however, is a careful analysis of the abundance of social
detail that links the lottery to the ordinary social practices of the village. No mere "irrational" tradition, the lottery is
an ideological mechanism. It serves to reinforce the village's hierarchical social order by instilling the villages with
an unconscious fear that if they resist this order they might be selected in the next lottery. In the process of creating
this fear, it also reproduces the ideology necessary for the smooth functioning of that social order, despite its
inherent inequities. What is surprising in the work of an author who has never been identified as a Marxist is that
this social order and ideology are essentially capitalist.
I think we need to take seriously Shirley Jackson's suggestion that the world of the lottery is her reader's world,
however reduced in scale for the sake of economy. The village in which the lottery takes place has a bank, a post

office, a grocery store, a coal business, a school system; its women are housewives rather than field workers or
writers; and its men talk of "tractors and taxes."6 More importantly, however, the village exhibits the same socioeconomic stratification that most people take for granted in a modern, capitalist society.
Let me begin by describing the top of the social ladder and save the lower rungs for later. The village's most
powerful man, Mr. Summers, owns the village's largest business (a coal concern) and is also its mayor, since he has,
Jackson writes, more "time and energy [read money and leisure] to devote to civic activities" than others (p.
292). (Summers' very name suggests that he has become a man of leisure through his wealth.) Next in line is Mr.
Graves, the village's second most powerful government official--its postmaster. (His name may suggest the gravity of
officialism.) And beneath Mr. Graves is Mr. Martin, who has the economically advantageous position of being the
grocer in a village of three hundred.
These three most powerful men who control the town, economically as well as politically, also happen to administer
the lottery. Mr. Summers is its official, sworn in yearly by Mr. Graves (p. 294). Mr. Graves helps Mr. Summers make
up the lottery slips (p. 293). And Mr. Martin steadies the lottery box as the slips are stirred (p. 292). In the off season,
the lottery box is stored either at their places of business or their residences: "It had spent on year in Mr. Graves'
barn and another year underfoot in the post-office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left
there" (p. 293). Who controls the town, then, also controls the lottery. it is no coincidence that the lottery takes
place in the village square "between the post-office and the bank"--two buildings which represent government and
finance, the institutions from which Summers, Graves, and Martin derive their power.
However important Mr. Graves and Mr. Martin may be, Mr. Summers is still the most powerful man in town. Here
we have to ask a Marxist question: what relationship is there between his interests as the town's wealthiest
businessman and his officiating the lottery? That such a relationship does exist is suggested by one of the most
revealing lines of the text. When Bill Hutchinson forces his wife Tessie to open her lottery slip to the crowd, Jackson
writes, "It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with [a] heavy pencil in [his]
coal-company office" (p. 301). At the very moment when the lottery's victim is revealed, Jackson appends a
subordinate clause in which we see the blackness (evil) of Mr. Summers' (coal) business being transferred to the
black dot on the lottery slip. At one level at least, evil in Jackson's text is linked to a disorder, promoted by
capitalism, in the material organization of modern society. But it still remains to be explained how the evil of the
lottery is tied to this disorder of capitalist social organization.
Let me sketch the five major points of my answer to this question. First, the lottery's rules of participation reflect
and codify a rigid social hierarchy based upon an inequitable social division of labor. Second, the fact that
everyone participates in the lottery and understands consciously that its outcome is pure chance give it a certain
"democratic" aura that obscures its first codifying function. Third, the villagers believe unconsciously that their
commitment to a work ethic will grant them some magical immunity from selection. Fourth, this work ethic
prevents them from understanding that the lottery's actual function is not to encourage work per se but to
reinforce an inequitable social division of labor. Finally, after working through these points, it will be easier to
explain how Jackson's choice of Tessie Hutchinson as the lottery's victim/scapegoat reveals the lottery to be an
ideological mechanism which serves to defuse the average villager's deep, inarticulate dissatisfaction with the
social order in which he lives by channeling it into anger directed at the victims of that social order. It is reenacted
year after year, then, not because it is a mere "tradition," as Helen Nebeker argues, but because it serves the
repressive ideological function of purging the social body of all resistance so that business (capitalism) can go on as
usual and the Summers, the Graves and the Martins can remain in power.
Implicit in the first and second points above is a distinction between universal participation in the lottery and what I
have called its rules of participation. The first of these rules I have already explained, of course: those who control
the village economically and politically also administer the lottery. The remaining rules also tell us much about who
has and who doesn't have power in the village's social hierarchy. These remaining rules determine who gets to
choose slips in the lottery's first, second and third rounds. Before the lottery, lists are "[made] up of heads of families
[who choose in the first round], heads of households [who choose in the second round], [and] members of each
household in each family [who choose in the last round]" (p. 294). The second round is missing from the story

because the family patriarch who selects the dot in the first round--Bill Hutchinson--has no married male
offspring. When her family is chosen in the first round, Tessie Hutchinson objects that her daughter and son-in-law
didn't "take their chance." Mr. Summers has to remind her, "Daughters draw with their husbands' families" .
In stoning Tessie, the villagers treat her as a scapegoat onto which they can project and through with they can
"purge"--actually, the term repress is better, since the impulse is conserved rather than eliminated--their own
temptations to rebel. The only places we can see these rebellious impulses are in Tessie, in Mr. and Mrs. Adams'
suggestion, squelched by Warner, that the lottery might be given up, and in the laughter of the crowd. (The crowd's
nervous laughter is ambivalent: it expresses uncertainty about the validity of the taboos that Tessie breaks.) But
ultimately these rebellious impulses are channeled by the lottery and its attendant ideology away from their proper
objects--capitalism and capitalist patriarchs--into anger at the rebellious victims of capitalist social organization. Like
Tessie, the villagers cannot articulate their rebellion because the massive force of ideology stands in the way.
The lottery functions, then, to terrorize the village into accepting, in the name of work and democracy, the
inequitable social division of labor and power on which its social order depends. When Tessie is selected, and before
she is stoned, Mr. Summers asks her husband to "show [people] her paper" (p. 301). By holding up the slip, Bill
Hutchinson reasserts his dominance over his wayward wife and simultaneous transforms her into a symbol to others
of the perils of disobedience.
Here I would like to point out a curious crux in Jackson's treatment of the theme of scapegoating in "The Lottery": the
conflict between the lottery's arbitrariness and the utter appropriateness of its victim. Admittedly, Tessie is a curious
kind of scapegoat, since the village does not literally choose her, single her out. An act of scapegoating that is
unmotivated is difficult to conceive. The crux disappears, however, once we realize that the lottery is a metaphor for
the unconscious ideological mechanisms of scapegoating. In choosing Tessie through the lottery, Jackson has
attempted to show us whom the village might have chosen if the lottery had been in fact an election. But by
presenting this election as an arbitrary lottery, she gives us an image of the village's blindness to its own motives.
Possibly the most depressing thing about "The Lottery" is how early Jackson represents this blindness as
beginning. Even the village children have been socialized into the ideology that victimizes Tessie. When they are
introduced in the second paragraph of the story, they are anxious that summer has let them out of school: "The
feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them" (p. 291). Like their parents, they have learned that leisure and play
are suspect. As if to quell this anxiety, the village boys engage in the play/labor of collecting stones for the
lottery. Moreover, they follow the lead of Bobby Martin, the one boy in the story whose father is a member of the
village ruling class (Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves have no boys), in hoarding and fighting over these stones as if they
were money. While the boys do this, the village girls stand off to the side and watch, just as they will be expected to
remain outside of the work force and dependent on their working husbands when they grow up.
As dismal as this picture seems, the one thing we ought not do is make it into proof of the innate depravity of
man. The first line of the second paragraph--"The children assembled first, of course" (p. 291)--does not imply that
children take a "natural" and primitive joy in stoning people to death.10 The closer we look at their behavior, the
more we realize that they learned it from their parents, whom they imitate in their play. In order to facilitate her
reader's grasp of this point, Jackson has included at least one genuinely innocent child in the story--Davy
Hutchinson. When he has to choose his lottery ticket, the adults help him while he looks at them "wonderingly" (p.
300). And when Tessie is finally to be stoned, "someone" has to "[give] Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles" (p. 301) to
stone his mother. The village makes sure that Davy learns what he is supposed to do before he understands why he
does it or the consequences. But this does not mean that he could not learn otherwise.
Even the village adults are not entirely hopeless. Before Old Man Warner cuts them off, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, whose
last name suggests a humanity that has not been entirely effaced, briefly mention other villages that are either
talking of giving up the lottery or have already done so. Probably out of deep-seated fear, they do not suggest that
their village give it up; but that they hint at the possibility, however furtively, indicates a reservation--a vague sense
of guilt--about what they are about to do. The Adams's represent the village's best, humane impulses, impulses,
however, which the lottery represses.

How do we take such a pessimistic vision of the possibility of social transformation? If anything can be said against
"The Lottery," it is probably that it exaggerates the monolithic character of capitalist ideological hegemony. No
doubt, capitalism has subtle ways of redirecting the frustrations it engenders away from a critique of capitalism
itself. Yet if in order to promote itself it has to make promises of freedom, prosperity and fulfillment on which it
cannot deliver, pockets of resistance grow up among the disillusioned. Perhaps it is not Jackson's intention to deny
this, but to shock her complacent reader with an exaggerated image of the ideological modus operandi of capitalism:
accusing those whom it cannot or will not employ of being lazy, promoting "the family" as the essential social unit in
order to discourage broader associations and identifications, offering men power over their wives as a consolation
for their powerlessness in the labor market, and pitting workers against each other and against the unemployed. It is
our fault as readers if our own complacent pessimism makes us read Jackson's story pessimistically as a parable of
man's innate depravity.

4) A short analysis of feminist perspectives on Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby.

by Stefaan Steyn
(Disclaimer: This material is intended to provide at secondary students with a model of applied feminist theory, and is not offered as an
academic paper.)

Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby is an ambivalent re-codification of patriarchy. The text critiques the
objectification of women: both Tom Buchanans treatment of his mistress Myrtle and his wife Daisy, and
Gatsbys idealization and manipulation of Daisy. It also expresses some conditional admiration for the increasing
social and economic emancipation of women.
However, the text does reaffirm the male gaze, and continues to romanticize the exploitative power
relationships between men and women. Nick the male narrator admires the grand schemes of Gatsby and
facilitates his pursuit of Daisy. Though critical of Tom Buchanan, Nick the narrator is complicit in Toms ways of
dealing with women. If the text presents a critical perspective on the bigoted views of Tom Buchanan on the
one hand, it nonetheless affirms many mainstream patriarchal values. The text deconstructs the erotic
power of the princess-like Daisy over the initially marginal male victim Gatsby, as much as it examines the
negation of women. It explores the one-sided, egotistic nature of relationships.
Much of the text is equally concerned with whether Gatsby himself, similar to Daisy, has any essential self
independent of the fantasy he has built around a projected goddess. In this sense Fitzgerald provides his readers
with insight into the disempowerment of men who accede to the patriarchal myth of idealized women,
and the men who make their lives a quest for validity through the pursuit of women. Fitzgerald explores a
central irony of patriarchy, that men exploit the women they idealize and use the process of idealization
to justify that exploitation. Gatsbys entire life is based on being authenticated through his relationship with
Daisy, without him, like Tom, considering her in the process.
If Fitzgeralds text is a conditional critique of patriarchy this is most centrally seen in the nature of his narrator,
who provides a biased, and conditional perspective on the relationship between men and women, and the social
structures that determine these relationships. Most tellingly, Nick is unable to relate to the emancipated
Jordan Baker on an equal basis, and interprets her pragmatism in morally critical ways, without conceding
that he himself practices the same pragmatism.
The tragic consequences flowing from the experimental breaking of the standard patriarchal moral norms also
suggest a reaffirmation of patriarchy. While the text is a critique of the Cinderella myth in the light of
changing modern social and economic conditions, it suggests that stepping outside of traditional social structures
is fraught with dangers. In this sense this is a conservative text.
A critique of the behavior of individuals is not necessarily a critique of social structures and norms. If individuals
who break social norms are the focus of Fitzgeralds critique, then those mainstream norms are in effect
reaffirmed. This is certainly the case when Nick reflects on the relationship between Tom and Myrtle, and Tom
and Daisy. Tom exploits and abuses Myrtle, and dominates and controls his wife. Aberrant
behavior, rather than social structures are the subject of Fitzgeralds critique. Tom objectifies both women and
uses his social, physical and financial dominance to lord it over them. Toms public violence towards Myrtle,
aimed at keeping her in line defines the social norm. Men are in control. Fitzgerald does appear
somewhat critical of this social norm, in providing us with Nicks somewhat dispassionate, somewhat disengaged
understanding of these relationships. This dispassionate neutrality cannot, however, be read as Fitzgerald taking
an explicit stance in the debate on patriarchy.

If Fitzgerald is somewhat critical of the male exercise of power, then he is equally critical of the complicity of
some of his female characters. Fitzgerald offers us a definitive critique of complicit bad faith in Nicks critical
analysis of Daisys character and the choices she makes in relation to her initial relationship with Gatsby, and
her subsequent relationship with Tom. If Nick is critical of Daisys incapacity to have any independent
sense of self, his critique of Gatsbys construction of self follows a similar pattern.
The power struggles between Myrtle and George, and Myrtle and Tom, explore the tensions between
women and men as they have to negotiate the power changes within relationships subsequent to socioeconomic change. This can be seen in the stereotypical portrayal of the emancipated Jordan as morally
questionable while Nick the narrator is left to define the moral high ground in the power struggle between
the two. If The Great Gatsby is an important novel, it is exactly because it reflects something of the critical
redefinition of gender roles and personal identity in the early part of the twentieth century in an
exploratory way. That Fitzgerald is cautiously open to these changes can be seen in his examination of what
motivates the choices of his characters.
If Myrtle chooses to extend her own independence sexually and economically it is still framed within belonging
to, and being defined in terms of her relationship with a man. Tellingly, Tom shuts her up when she
asserts her independence. The portrayal of the cuckolded George also implies that his negated status as the man
on top is centrally related to an unacceptable inversion of the accepted social order. Georges desperate
revenge of his wifes death can also be read as an attempt to reaffirm his status as her husband, an attempt to
recover his own self by proxy. Identity in Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby is demonstrably related to the tropes
(figures of speech like metaphor, simile, metonymy, etc) of gender and relational status. Daisys choice to stay
with Tom for the sake of financial interests, and Toms hypocritical assertion of his conjugal rights over Daisy
while retaining a liaison with Myrtle, expresses the gendered nature of characters choices. Gatsby, Tom
and George are presented as broken men who have tragically destroyed themselves and their victims by a
hubristic assertion of their masculinity while Myrtle and Daisy, powerful as desirable women but weak in their
own right, have failed to renegotiate their status.
Women and men alike are shown to be victims of social norms and cultural paradigms (philosophical or
theoretical frameworks) that they have unsuccessfully redefined. The attempt to redefine self and society in a
new way in terms of gender relations is presented as a precarious adventure by Fitzgerald, and his text is thus
a conservative cautionary one in terms of the renegotiation of gender.

5) Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bront Critical Essays A Postcolonial Approach to the Novel
As a theoretical approach, postcolonialism asks readers to consider the way colonialist and anti-colonialist messages
are presented in literary texts. It argues that Western culture is Eurocentric, meaning it presents European values as
natural and universal, while Eastern ideas are, for example, inferior, immoral, or "savage." A postcolonial approach to
Jane Eyre might begin by considering the following questions: What does the novel reveal about the way cultural
difference was represented in Victorian culture? How did Britain justify its colonialist project by imaging the East
as "savage" or uncivilized? What idea does the text create of "proper" British behavior? Tentative answers to these
questions can be discovered by examining the novel's representation of foreign women, especially Bertha Mason,
and the colonialist doctrines of Jane and of St. John Rivers.
One of the colonialist goals of this novel is to create a prototype of the proper English woman, someone like Jane
who is frank, sincere, and lacking in personal vanity. This ideal is created by Jane's attempt to contrast herself with
the foreign women in the text. For example, both Cline Varens and her daughter are constantly criticized in the
novel for their supposed superficiality and materialism. According to Rochester, Cline Varens charmed the "English
gold" out of his "British breeches," a comment that emphasizes his supposedly British innocence and her wily French
ways. Supporting this idea, Jane comments that Adle has a superficiality of character, "hardly congenial to an
English mind." Jane's final ethnocentric comments in relation to little Adle are significant: "a sound English
education corrected in a great measure her French defects." Only through a good English lifestyle has Adle
avoided her mother's tragic flaws: materialism and sensuality, characteristics the novel specifically associates with
foreign women. Jane's comments imply that the English, unlike their French neighbors, are deep rather than
superficial, spiritual rather than materialistic.
But Jane's position is more conflicted than Rochester's: As a woman she is also a member of a colonized group, but
as a specifically British woman, she is a colonizer. When she claims Rochester gives her a smile such as a sultan would
"bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched," she emphasizes the colonized status of all women. Insisting
that he prefers his "one little English girl" to the "Grand Turk's whole seraglio," Rochester points to Jane's
powerlessness, her reduction to sex slave. Rather than becoming slave, Jane insists she will become a missionary,
preaching liberty to women enslaved in harems. Her comments show the dual position of European women: both
colonized and colonizers. While Rochester reduces her to a colonized "doll" or "performing ape," her comments
show her Eurocentric understanding of Eastern culture: She implies that she'll be the enlightened Englishwoman
coming to the rescue of poor, abused Turkish women. All women are enslaved by male despotism, but the British
woman claims a moral and spiritual superiority over her Eastern sisters.
This difference becomes intense in Jane's representation of Bertha Mason. Bertha's vampiric appearance suggests
she is sucking the lifeblood away from the innocent Rochester, who tells Jane he was as innocent as she is until he
turned twenty-one and was married to Bertha: His goodness was taken by this savage woman. An insane Creole
woman, Bertha represents British fears of both foreigners and women. The "blood-red" moon, a symbol of
women's menstrual cycles, is reflected in her eyes, suggesting her feminine, sexual potency. Unlike Jane, Bertha
refuses to be controlled; a woman whose stature almost equals her husband's, she fights with him, displaying a
"virile" force that almost masters Rochester. Post-colonial critics argue that Bertha, the foreign woman, is sacrificed
so that British Jane can achieve self-identity. Their arguments suggest Rochester isn't as innocent as he claims; as a
colonialist, he was in the West Indies to make money and to overpower colonized men and women. Notice how both

Jane and Rochester emphasize his ability to control Bertha's brother, Richard. Much of Rochester's critique of Bertha
hinges on her sexuality and exotic excess. When he first met her, Rochester's senses were aroused by her dazzle,
splendor, and lusciousness. But he later found her debauchery to be his "Indian Messalina's attribute." Thus, the
characteristics that first attract her to him, her sensual excesses, soon repulse him.
The representation of Bertha presents native peoples in the colonies as coarse, lascivious, and ignorant, thus
justifying St. John's missionary role: Bertha is a foreign "savage" in need of British guidance and enlightenment.
Just as Jane retrains the minds of her lower-class students in England, St. John will reform the values of the pagans in
India. Both characters perpetuate a belief in British, Christian-based moral and spiritual superiority. But St. John's
inability to "renounce his wide field of mission warfare" shows that his colonialist impulse isn't based on compassion
or mutual understanding, but on violence violating the minds of native peoples, if not their bodies. For twentyfirst-century readers, St. John's missionary zeal is morally suspect, because it shows his participation in the colonialist
project, which resulted in violence against and violation of native peoples. St. John's coldheartedness suggests the
brutality and self-serving function of colonialism. Jane claims St. John "forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of
little people, in pursing his own large views"; imagine the damage he will inflict on any native people who resist him.
Like Jane, they will be repressed by his merciless egotism. St. John spends the rest of his life laboring for "his race" in
India. A great warrior, St. John sternly clears the "painful way to improvement" for the natives, slaying their
prejudices of "creed and caste," though obviously not his own. In his zealous Christianity, he sees the Indians as an
inferior race and hopes to implant British values in their supposedly deficient minds.

6) A literary analysis of Mary Shellys tragedy Frankenstein.

An Archetypal Analysis of Kate Chopins The Story of an Hour
There are several methods of critiquing literary works, all of which rely on the way each person interprets and
responds to the material. In some cases interpretations vary greatly, such as when one reviews the material from a
reader response approach. Other interpretations, such as the archetypal approach, are more widely related among
readers as it is made up of viewpoints that are the foundation for human nature. Often stories that incorporate such
images capture the readers interest and make the story or poem more personal and meaningful. Having read Kate
Chopins The Story of an Hour, I was intrigued by the depth of the imagery created for the main character as she
experiences a journey through the grief process which can be universally understood through an archetypal analysis.
True emotions can often get buried beneath stereotypical obligations and our own sense of propriety. Society, family,
friends, even the expectations of ones gender can force us into a status quo, replacing what is deep rooted and
heartfelt for what is appropriate. In The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, the main character Mrs. Mallard, after
learning of her husbands sudden death, is overcome with a whirlwind of emotions that ranges from shock and
disbelieve to a hard realization of relief and release from her role as a wife. I was drawn to this story by the use of
imagery to depict how this exchange of emotion takes place and breaks Mrs. Mallard from her acceptance of the
status quo. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully [] she felt it, creeping out of
the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air (as cited in Clugston, 2010,
sec. 2.2). What comes to Mrs. Mallard is her own realization that with her husbands death comes her freedom to
live her life as she pleases. Chopins use of personification gives the realization a sense of tangibility. Since thoughts
cannot be held they can figuratively slip away, therefore the tangible quality that Chopin describes takes a firmer and
more permanent hold over her character. Such a shift in thought and the breakout from the repression that is
described of Mrs. Mallard is monumental is expressing the general quest for freedom and happiness that we all seek,
and is primary in what captured my interest in this story.
The archetypal approach to analyzing this story draws on what we know about our own humanity in terms of goals,
dreams, fears, and common responses to dilemmas. Archetypes in literature determine the structure of the story
and the meaning that is implied, based on both ancient and current cultural mythology (Delahoyde, 2011). Myths
and the cultures amongst societies provide a general understanding of the meaning and purpose in the elements
presented in a story. For instance, the term tomorrow is a new day would be considered trite and obvious if it was
not laden with the meaning that we can always start over, or try again when we are met with failure or difficulty.
Analyzing literature by way of the archetypal foundations laid within the work allows the concept to be unanimously
understood and therefore makes the literature itself more relatable.
Kate Chopin uses several archetypal images in The Story of an Hour. In the third paragraph the narrator describes
Mrs. Mallards reaction to her hearing her husbands death, stating When the storm of grief had spent itself she
went away to her room alone (as cited in Clugston, 2010, sec. 2.2). The reference to a storm is significant in
understand the feelings she had, how they came, and how they seemingly left her empty. The archaic
understanding of a storm in literature dictates emotion, and the wild frenzy that is creates in us. Additionally,
storms represent a spiritual cleaning that is necessary after a significant disruption in life (Chopin, 2001). This
renewal is seen when Mrs. Mallard leaves to her room where she sits in solitude and silence before accepting a
fulfillment of new emotions. She is left empty and sits with what is explained as a blank stare before being seemingly
grabbed by the enlightenment of freedom.
In having come to such a state, the narrator describes Mrs. Mallard thoughts of spring days, and summer days, and
all sorts of days that would be her own (as cited in Clugston, 2010, sec. 2.2). The image of spring and summer days
are symbolic of new life and optimism, as found in ancient mythology. In the characters case, such new life is
symbolic of her release, or rebirth, from repression (Chopin, 2001). This concept is widely understood. It is of
particular interests that the fall and winter are not mentioned as being seasons Mrs. Mallard looks forward to, as

mythology suggests these seasons as the time of death, solitude, and confinement indoors which would be
contradictory to the anticipation of freedom that Mrs. Mallard is expressing.
Mrs. Mallard alone is an archetype that is symbolic of the martyr. In the finality of the story, she descends
the stairs with a sense of poise, self-confidence, and affirmation in her new found perception of life only to be stuck
dead by the sudden shock, and ironically a great grief, of finding her husband alive and well staring back at her. It is
the nature and timing of her death that makes her a martyr as she held true a new sense of self, or spirituality, so
strong that the sudden loss of it caused her a heart attack. Her freedom was given and robbed from her, jarring her
between a life servitude, to independence, and back again. Her death speaks for feminism and the general view
society has of women, particularly in the late 19th century when this story was written.
Kate Chopins main character and experience through the grief process in The Story of an Hour was written
with the use of several metaphors, and personification of inanimate objects and thoughts, that filled the story with
meaning. The use of archetypal imagery made the moral timeless and universally understood. Mrs. Mallard may be
personally relatable to both men and women; whether in the 19th century or the 21st, every person mourns the loss
of their freedom in some regards. Release is found in the moments, as fleeting as they may be, when weights are
removed and we are able to live for ourselves. Such a philosophy is what captured my attention and what lays the
archetypal foundation into this this story.