SAMPLE CHAPTER THE CURIOUS WRITER, Concise Edition © 2007 Bruce Ballenger ISBN 0-321-43781-0 Visit www.ablongman.com/replocator to contact your local Allyn & Bacon/Longman representative. Chapter begins on next page >> SAMPLE CHAPTER The pages of this Sample Chapter may have slight variations in final published form. ALLYN & BACON/LONGMAN www.ablongman.com The poet, Grace Butcher, pictured here at a reading in Ohio, sometimes writes about crows, which are quite ordinary birds, unless they fly through the imagination of a writer like Butcher. The best literature often finds the extraordinary significance in familiar things. 8 Writing a Critical Essay WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE A voice mail message on my machine from Katie, who works the English department office, said that she had received a message meant for me. “Stay on and you can listen to it,” she said. “Hello,” said a stranger’s voice. “This is Grace Butcher. And I’m looking for the Bruce Ballenger or Michelle Payne who edited a collection called The Curious Reader. There’s an essay about me in it.” My heart sank. Oh God, I thought, maybe we made some mistake and she’s angry. But I didn’t sense that from the sound of her voice; it sounded velvety, warm. “I’m calling because I wanted to tell the student who wrote the essay how delighted and moved I was by her piece. I’d like to know how to get in touch with the student, Peggy Jordan.” I suddenly remembered. Peggy Jordan, a former student of my colleague Michelle, had written an autobiographical/critical essay about the poet Grace Butcher in The Curious Reader, a book I recently co-authored with Michelle. Jordan wrote about attending a reading by Butcher when she was sixteen, and now, twenty-eight years later, finds herself returning to those poems as she struggles with middle age. It’s a brutally honest essay—Jordan says there’s little to like about growing older, that even if you have a good attitude about it, the body is a nagging reminder of new limitations. But Butcher’s poetry, particularly one poem, “What the Crow Does Is Not Singing,” helped Peggy Jordan find a new voice, and new wings, which will carry her more gracefully into old age. I reread the Jordan essay and thought—this is what literature can do. Reading essays, stories, and poems can help us slowly unroll What You’ll Learn in This Chapter ■How literary texts differ from other kinds of writing. ■Methods for finding the questions that drive a critical essay. ■Common literary devices. ■How to analyze literary nonfiction. ■Useful sources for writing about literature. 273 274 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay the tightly bound threads of feeling—our fears, joys, desires, or sorrows— and help us follow them back to the heart and out into the world. Literature helps us to understand ourselves, and in attending to the experiences of others as they are represented in strings of words, we can see how we’re delicately tethered to others. Peggy Jordan can see in Butcher’s poems that there is a way to grow older that she hadn’t yet imagined. But would she have seen this as clearly if she hadn’t written about it? I don’t think so. MOTIVES FOR WRITING A CRITICAL ESSAY By now you understand that writing is a means of thinking and learning, so when your writing comes in contact with the writing of others, the conversation illuminates them both. Sometimes, this dialogue has very personal dimensions. It did for Peggy Jordan because she reread Grace Butcher’s poem with an open heart and mind, and because Jordan chose a form of the critical essay—autobiographical criticism—that actively encourages such personal connections. But even more formal critical essays, those that don’t involve self-disclosure or first-person writing, can offer personal revelation. After all, what draws you to a certain author, essay, story, or poem is often a feeling; a response that is initially closer to the heart than the head. From there you sustain an intimate encounter with the material, reading closely and reflecting on what it might mean. It isn’t necessary that the story you’re writing about be an experience you can relate to, or even about a person anything like you. Reading about different lives, strangely, can help us understand ourselves in unexpected ways. Like a carnival mirror, stories, essays, and poems about others can cause us to reflect on ourselves in ways that make us seem strange, sometimes almost unrecognizable, to ourselves. We see ourselves as others see us. We might read James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” and understand how an African American might have felt in the 1950s or 1960s when seeing an approaching white face; a sense, Baldwin writes, that “one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.” Of course, if we’re white we learn a little something about being black in America, but we also learn something about how our own faces might appear to someone who is black. Suddenly, the familiar seems strange. These are personal reasons for writing about literature, but there are other motives as well. One is that the writing can, simply, help us to understand what we read, and appreciate it much more. You’ve already practiced methods such as the double-entry journal, in which you create conversations with all kinds of texts—essays, excerpts, and even photographs. When it works, this process helps you to figure out what you think and what you might want to say about the thing you’re looking at. This is also The Critical Essay and Academic Writing 275 true when that thing is a literary text, and it becomes even more important to structure these written conversations because what makes texts literary is their complexity. Most of us are pretty literal, which is why one response to reading, say, a short story is to simply declare, “It’s just a story! Why do we have to squeeze some deep meaning out of it?” It’s a pretty common view that English teachers have created an industry out of squeezing To fully appreciate what water from stones, of demanding that readers look more deeply authors are saying or at the things they read and consider what might be implied what effects they’re tryrather than what is explicit. It’s true that this can be annoying at ing to create in an essay, times, but the intentions are good. To fully appreciate what authors are saying or what effects they’re trying to create in an espoem or story, you often say, poem, or story, you often need to look closely, and in doing need to look closely, and so, you see beyond the obvious. When you make this reading an in doing so, you see beact of imagination you will consider possible meanings that yond the obvious. weren’t necessarily immediately apparent. It is in the conversation between what a text says and what it might be saying that you discover fresh understandings of what you read. You share these discoveries by writing about them. This is not really impersonal, even if you never mention yourself in your essay, because to do this well you need to bring yourself to the encounter. Whatever interpretations or ideas you discover about a poem, story, or essay is shaped by who you are—the personal experiences, the feelings, the dreams, and the ideas—that lead you to notice some things but not others in a text. You imagine in your own particular ways. How productive this is, however, depends on how you read and how you use writing to help you understand and interpret texts. The process of reading and writing about literary texts, the subject of this chapter, involves a range of choices, something that you can individualize, too. THE CRITICAL ESSAY AND ACADEMIC WRITING Summarizing a work, something that made Cliff Notes an industry, is a useful activity, and often is a step in the process, but rarely is it the purpose of a critical essay. Most forms of critical essays are organized around the writer’s ideas about a text. In that sense, a critical essay is like most of the other inquiry projects we’ve discussed so far, with one important difference: the main source of information for the writing is a text, usually a work of literature. Yet the process of thinking and writing is much the same with critical essays as it is in a personal essay, an argument, and a review: You begin with questions, explore possible answers, make judgments and interpretations, and offer evidence that supports, qualifies, or complicates your judgments. 276 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay In that sense, writing critical essays prepares you for many other kinds of academic writing, especially if it involves working with published texts. You will encounter various forms of the critical essay mostly in English classes. They might include the following: • Short response papers. As an initial response to reading, you may be asked to write fairly brief analytical, exploratory, or personal responses. These, by our definition, are essentially sketches that may or may not lead to longer essays. Sometimes a response paper focuses on explication of a certain aspect of the essay, poem, or story, like explaining or analyzing use of metaphor or character. • Autobiographical criticism. Personal and sometimes fairly open- ended responses to literary works, such as Peggy Jordan’s essay mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, are sometimes encouraged by English instructors. This type of personal criticism makes the critic’s emotional relationship to texts explicit, but seeks to illuminate both the writer and the text. • Formal critical analysis. Among the most common forms is the criti- cal essay that makes an argument about the text. Like all other forms, these essays begin with questions: Does Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest use Big Nurse as a misogynistic symbol? Does E. B. White’s essay, “Once More to the Lake,” comment on mortality and identity? These critical essays generally offer a central claim or thesis, and then, using the literary text as evidence, try to make that claim or thesis convincing. John Greusser’s brief critical essay, “Animal Imagery in �Everyday Use,’ ” that follows later in the chapter is a good example of this. FEATURES OF THE FORM While the critical essay can exhibit considerable variation, certain conventions hold true for the form. These include: • The text is the most important source of information. In a personal re- sponse, you might write about how a particular experience helps you understand some aspect of an essay, story, or poem, but even then, everything must be anchored firmly to the text you’re writing about or things (letters, interviews, and so on) the writer has said about it. While so-called secondary sources—books or articles written by other critics—may be useful in supporting your interpretation, the best evidence in a critical essay is nearly always material (quotes of passages, summaries, and so on) drawn directly from text or author you’re writing about. • Most critical essays make an argument. Most critical essays are built around a main idea, claim, or interpretation you are making Short Story about a text. It’s like interpreting a painting, however, instead of looking at things such as line, hierarchy, and color, you’ll be using literary devices such as theme, character, symbol, scene, and other literary concepts to support and develop your ideas. Response essays may be more exploratory and open-ended rather than argumentative. • What has already been said often forms the context for the writer’s question. Typically, a critical essay initially establishes what other critics have claimed about the aspect of the essay, poem, or story on which the writer is focusing. How, for example, have other critics interpreted the haunting song that ends “Lullaby,” Leslie Silko’s short story? These other sources provide the context for putting forward your own take on the question, and establish the on-going conversation (if any) about the writer or the work. • Most critical essays assume readers are not familiar with the text. Unless the literary work is extremely well-known, critics generally assume an audience needs to have its memory refreshed. That means that there may be some background information on the essay, story, or poem, and possibly on the author and her other similar works. Frequently this means adding a summary of the story or background on the poem or novel. However, in certain circumstances, such as those involving response essays about a text your entire class has read, this assumption about audience will not apply. SHORT STORY Leslie Marmon Silko was raised on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, a place she came to know through stories that were told to her by her father, her aunt, and her grandmother. The storytelling tradition, much of it oral rather than written, is often a powerful element in Native American tribes, preserving certain ways of knowing and helping members recognize their connection to the tribe. But these stories are often living things, adapting and changing to reflect tribal members’ struggles to adapt to an often hostile world. They can even be a source of healing, as in the short story “Lullaby” you’re about to read here. Silko is widely recognized as one of the finest living Native American writers, and her novel Ceremony, published in 1977, received critical acclaim. She’s also a talented poet and essayist. Above all, Leslie Marmon Silko is a storyteller in the Laguna tradition, using a kind of narrative that in many ways will be familiar to nonnative readers. There are characters and scenes and a significant event, but also notice how landscape figures into the telling of this story, and in particular what the narrator’s relationship is with the natural world. One of the motives for telling a story like this is to deal with loss by seeking recovery 277 278 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay through balance or harmony. This may not be at all obvious when you read this story, which on the surface is an unrelentingly sad tale. Do you see redemption or perhaps resistance here? LULLABY Leslie Marmon Silko 1 2 3 The sun had gone down but the snow in the wind gave off its own light. It came in thick tufts like new wool—washed before the weaver spins it. Ayah reached out for it like her own babies had, and she smiled when she remembered how she had laughed at them. She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. She sat down with her back against the wide cottonwood tree, feeling the rough bark on her back bones; she faced east and listened to the wind and snow sing a high-pitched Yeibechei song. Out of the wind she felt warmer, and she could watch the wide fluffy snow fill in her tracks, steadily, until the direction she had come from was gone. By the light of the snow she could see the dark outline of the big arroyo a few feet away. She was sitting on the edge of Cebolleta Creek, where in the springtime the thin cows would graze on a grass already chewed flat to the ground. In the wide deep creek bed where only a trickle of water flowed in the summer, the skinny cows would wander, looking for new grass along winding paths splashed with manure. Ayah pulled the old Army blanket over her head like a shawl. Jimmie’s blanket—the one he had sent to her. That was long time ago and the green wool was faded, and it was unraveling on the edges. She did not want to think about Jimmie. So she thought about the weaving and the way her mother had done it. On the tall wooden loom set into the sand under a tamarack tree for shade. She could see it clearly. She had been only a little girl when her grandma gave her the wooden combs to pull the twigs and burrs from the raw, freshly washed wool. And while she combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns dyed bright yellow and red and gold. She watched them dye the yarn in boiling black pots full of beeweed petals, juniper berries, and sage.The blankets her mother made were soft and woven so tight that rain rolled off them like birds’ feathers. Ayah remembered sleeping warm on cold windy nights, wrapped in her mother’s blankets on the hogan’s sandy floor. The snow drifted now, with the northwest wind hurling it in gusts. It drifted up around her black overshoes—old ones with little metal buckles. She smiled at the snow which was trying to cover her little by little. She could Short Story remember when they had no black rubber overshoes; only the high buckskin leggings that they wrapped over their elkhide moccasins. If the snow was dry or frozen, a person could walk all day and not get wet; and in the evenings the beams of the ceiling would hang with lengths of pale buckskin leggings, drying out slowly. She felt peaceful remembering. She didn’t feel cold any more. Jimmie’s blanket seemed warmer than it had ever been. And she could remember the morning he was born. She could remember whispering to her mother, who was sleeping on the other side of the hogan, to tell her it was time now. She did not want to wake the others. The second time she called to her, her mother stood up and pulled on her shoes; she knew. They walked to the old stone hogan together,Ayah walking a step behind her mother. She waited alone, learning the rhythms of the pains while her mother went to call the old woman to help them. The morning was already warm even before dawn and Ayah smelled the bee flowers blooming and the young willow growing at the springs. She could remember that so clearly, but his birth merged into the births of the other children and to her it became all the same birth.They named him for the summer morning and in English they called him Jimmie. It wasn’t like Jimmie died. He just never came back, and one day a dark blue sedan with white writing on its doors pulled up in front of the boxcar shack where the rancher let the Indians live. A man in a khaki uniform trimmed in gold gave them a yellow piece of paper and told them that Jimmie was dead. He said the Army would try to get the body back and then it would be shipped to them; but it wasn’t likely because the helicopter had burned after it crashed. All of this was told to Chato because he could understand English. She stood inside the doorway holding the baby while Chato listened. Chato spoke English like a white man and he spoke Spanish too. He was taller than the white man and he stood straighter too. Chato didn’t explain why; he just told the military man they could keep the body if they found it.The white man looked bewildered; he nodded his head and he left.Then Chato looked at her and shook his head, and then he told her, “Jimmie isn’t coming home anymore,” and when he spoke, he used the words to speak of the dead. She didn’t cry then, but she hurt inside with anger. And she mourned him as the years passed, when a horse fell with Chato and broke his leg, and the white rancher told them he wouldn’t pay Chato until he could work again. She mourned Jimmie because he would have worked for his father then; he would have saddled the big bay horse and ridden the fence lines each day, with wire cutters and heavy gloves, fixing the breaks in the barbed wire and putting the stray cattle back inside again. She mourned him after the white doctors came to take Danny and Ella away. She was at the shack alone that day they came. It was back in the days 4 5 6 279 280 CHAPTER 8 7 8 9 ■Writing a Critical Essay before they hired Navajo women to go with them as interpreters. She recognized one of the doctors. She had seen him at the children’s clinic at Cañoncito about a month ago.They were wearing khaki uniforms and they waved papers at her and a black ball-point pen, trying to make her understand their English words. She was frightened by the way they looked at the children, like the lizard watches the fly. Danny was swinging on the tire swing on the elm tree behind the rancher’s house, and Ella was toddling around the front door, dragging the broomstick horse Chato made for her. Ayah could see they wanted her to sign the papers, and Chato had taught her to sign her name. It was something she was proud of. She only wanted them to go, and to take their eyes away from her children. She took the pen from the man without looking at his face and she signed the papers in three different places he pointed to. She stared at the ground by their feet and waited for them to leave. But they stood there and began to point and gesture at the children. Danny stopped swinging. Ayah could see his fear. She moved suddenly and grabbed Ella into her arms; the child squirmed, trying to get back to her toys. Ayah ran with the baby toward Danny; she screamed for him to run and then she grabbed him around his chest and carried him too. She ran south into the foothills of juniper trees and black lava rock. Behind her she heard the doctors running, but they had been taken by surprise, and as the hills became stepper and the cholla cactus were thicker, they stopped. When she reached the top of the hill, she stopped to listen in case they were circling around her. But in a few minutes she heard a car engine start and they drove away. The children had been too surprised to cry while she ran with them. Danny was shaking and Ella’s little fingers were gripping Ayah’s blouse. She stayed up in the hills for the rest of the day, sitting on a black lava boulder in the sunshine where she could see for miles all around her.The sky was light blue and cloudless, and it was warm for late April. The sun warmth relaxed her and took the fear and anger away. She lay back on the rock and watched the sky. It seemed to her that she could walk into the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly. Danny played with little pebbles and stones, pretending they were birds eggs and then little rabbits. Ella sat at her feet and dropped fistfuls of dirt into the breeze, watching the dust and particles of sand intently. Ayah watched a hawk soar high above them, dark wings gliding; hunting or only watching, she did not know. The hawk was patient and he circled all afternoon before he disappeared around the high volcanic peak the Mexicans called Guadalupe. Late in the afternoon, Ayah looked down at the gray boxcar shack with the paint all peeled from the wood; the stove pipe on the roof was rusted and crooked.The fire she had built that morning in the oil drum stove had burned out. Short Story Ella was asleep in her lap now and Danny sat close to her, complaining that he was hungry; he asked when they would go to the house. “We will stay up here until your father comes,” she told him, “because those white men were chasing us.” The boy remembered then and he nodded at her silently. If Jimmie had been there he could have read those papers and explained to her what they said.Ayah would have known then, never to sign them.The doctors came back the next day and they brought a BIA policeman with them. They told Chato they had her signature and that was all they needed. Except for the kids. She listened to Chato sullenly; she hated him when he told her it was the old woman who died in the winter, spitting blood; it was her old grandma who had given the children this disease. “They don’t spit blood,” she said coldly. “The whites lie.” She held Ella and Danny close to her, ready to run to the hills again. “I want a medicine man first,” she said to Chato, not looking at him. He shook his head. “It’s too late now.The policeman is with them.You signed the paper.” His voice was gentle. It was worse than if they had died: to lose the children and to know that somewhere, in a place called Colorado, in a place full of sick and dying strangers, her children were without her.There had been babies that died soon after they were born, and one that died before he could walk. She had carried them herself, up to the boulders and great pieces of the cliff that long ago crashed down from Long Mesa; she laid them in the crevices of sandstone and buried them in fine brown sand with round quartz pebbles that washed down the hills in the rain. She had endured it because they had been with her. But she could not bear this pain. She did not sleep for a long time after they took her children. She stayed on the hill where they had fled the first time, and she slept rolled up in the blanket Jimmie had sent her. She carried the pain in her belly and it was fed by everything she saw: the blue sky of their last day together and the dust and pebbles they played with; the swing in the elm tree and broom stick horse choked life from her. The pain filled her stomach and there was no room for food or for her lungs to fill with air. The air and the food would have been theirs. She hated Chato, not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you. She slept alone on the hill until the middle of November when the first snows came.Then she made a bed for herself where the children had slept. She did not lie down beside Chato again until many years later, when he was sick and shivering and only her body could keep him warm.The illness came after the white rancher told Chato he was too old to work for him anymore, and Chato and his old woman should be out of the shack by the next afternoon because the rancher had hired 10 11 12 281 282 CHAPTER 8 13 14 15 16 ■Writing a Critical Essay new people to work there.That had satisfied her.To see how the white man repaid Chato’s years of loyalty and work. All of Chato’s fine-sounding English talk didn’t change things. It snowed steadily and the luminous light from the snow gradually diminished into the darkness. Somewhere in Cebolleta a dog barked and other village dogs joined with it. Ayah looked in the direction she had come, from the bar where Chato was buying the wine. Sometimes he told her to go on ahead and wait; and then he never came. And when she finally went back looking for him, she would find him passed out at the bottom of the wooden steps at Azzie’s Bar. All the wine would be gone and most of the money too, from the pale blue check that came to them once a month in a government envelope. It was then that she would look at his face and his hands, scarred by ropes and the barbed wire of all those years, and she would think, this man is a stranger; for forty years she had smiled at him and cooked his food, but he remained a stranger. She stood up again, with the snow almost to her knees, and she walked back to find Chato. It was hard to walk in the deep snow and she felt the air burn in her lungs. She stopped a short distance from the bar to rest and readjust the blanket. But this time he wasn’t waiting for her on the bottom step with his old Stetson hat pulled down and his shoulders hunched up in his long wool overcoat. She was careful not to slip on the wooden steps. When she pushed the door open, warm air and cigarette smoke hit her face. She looked around slowly and deliberately, in every corner, in every dark place that the old man might find to sleep. The bar owner didn’t like Indians in there, especially Navajos, but he let Chato come in because he could talk Spanish like he was one of them.The men at the bar stared at her, and the bartender saw that she left the door open wide. Snowflakes were flying inside like moths and melting into a puddle on the oiled wood floor. He motioned to her to close the door, but she did not see him. She held herself straight and walked across the room slowly, searching the room with every step. The snow in her hair melted and she could feel it on her forehead. At the far corner of the room, she saw red flames at the mica window of the old stove door; she looked behind the stove just to make sure.The bar got quiet except for the Spanish polka music playing on the jukebox. She stood by the stove and shook the snow from her blanket and held it near the stove to dry. The wet wool smell reminded her of newborn goats in early March, brought inside to warm near the fire. She felt calm. In past years they would have told her to get out. But her hair was white now and her faced was wrinkled. They looked at her like she was a spider crawling slowly across the room.They were afraid; she could feel the fear. She looked at their faces steadily. They reminded her of the first time the white people brought her children back to her that winter. Danny had been shy and Short Story hid behind the thin white woman who brought them. And the baby had not known her until Ayah took her into her arms, and then Ella had nuzzled close to her as she had when she was nursing. The blonde woman was nervous and kept looking at a dainty gold watch on her wrist. She sat on the bench near the small window and watched the dark snow clouds gather around the mountains; she was worrying about the unpaved road. She was frightened by what she saw inside too: the strips of venison drying on a rope across the ceiling and the children jabbering excitedly in a language she did not know. So they stayed for only a few hours. Ayah watched the government car disappear down the road and she knew they were already being weaned from these lava hills and from this sky.The last time they came was in early June, and Ella stared at her the way the men in the bar were now staring. Ayah did not try to pick her up; she smiled at her instead and spoke cheerfully to Danny.When he tried to answer her, he could not seem to remember and he spoke English words with the Navajo. But he gave her a scrap of paper that he had found somewhere and carried in his pocket; it was folded in half, and he shyly looked up at her and said it was a bird. She asked Chato if they were home for good this time. He spoke to the white woman and she shook her head. “How much longer?” he asked, and she said she didn’t know; but Chato saw how she stared at the boxcar shack. Ayah turned away then. She did not say good-bye. She felt satisfied that the men in the bar feared her. Maybe it was her face and the way she held her mouth with teeth clenched tight, like there was nothing anyone could do to her now. She walked north down the road, searching for the old man. She did this because she had the blanket, and there would be no place for him except with her and the blanket in the old abode barn near the arroyo. They always slept there when they came to Cebolleta. If the money and the wine were gone, she would be relieved because then they could go home again; back to the old hogan with a dirt roof and rock walls where she herself had been born. And the next day the old man could go back to the few sheep they still had, to follow along behind them, guiding them, into dry sandy arroyos where sparse grass grew. She knew he did not like walking behind old ewes when for so many years he rode big quarter horses and worked with cattle. But she wasn’t sorry for him; he should have known all along what would happen. There had not been enough rain for their garden in five years; and that was when Chato finally hitched a ride into the town and brought back brown boxes of rice and sugar and big tin cans of welfare peaches. After that, at the first of the month they went to Cebolleta to ask the postmaster for the check; and then Chato would go to the bar and cash it.They did this as they planted the garden every May, not because anything would survive the summer dust, but because it was time to do this.The journey passed the days that smelled silent and dry like the caves above the canyon with yellow painted buffaloes on their walls. 17 18 283 284 CHAPTER 8 19 20 21 22 ■Writing a Critical Essay He was walking along the pavement when she found him. He did not stop or turn around when he heard her behind him. She walked beside him and she noticed how slowly he moved now. He smelled strong of woodsmoke and urine. Lately he had been forgetting. Sometimes he called her by his sister’s name and she had been gone for a long time. Once she had found him wandering on the road to the white man’s ranch, and she asked him why he was going that way; he laughed at her and said, “You know they can’t run that ranch without me,” and he walked on determined, limping on the leg that had been crushed many years before. Now he looked at her curiously, as if for the first time, but he kept shuffling along, moving slowly along the side of the highway. His gray hair had grown long and spread out on the shoulders of the long overcoat. He wore the old felt hat pulled down over his ears. His boots were worn out at the toes and he had stuffed pieces of an old red shirt in the holes. The rags made his feet look like little animals up to their ears in snow. She laughed at his feet; the snow muffled the sound of her laugh. He stopped and looked at her again.The wind had quit blowing and the snow was falling straight down; the southeast sky was beginning to clear and Ayah could see a star. “Let’s rest awhile,” she said to him.They walked away from the road and up the slope to the giant boulders that had tumbled down from the red sand-rock mesa throughout the centuries of rainstorms and earth tremors. In a place where the boulders shut out the wind, they sat down with their backs against the rock. She offered half of the blanket to him and they sat wrapped together. The storm passed swiftly. The clouds moved east. They were massive and full, crowding together across the sky. She watched them with the feeling of horses—steely blue-gray horses startled across the sky.The powerful haunches pushed into the distances and the tail hairs streamed white mist behind them. The sky cleared. Ayah saw that there was nothing between her and the stars. The light was crystalline. There was no shimmer, no distortion through earth haze. She breathed the clarity of the night sky; she smelled the purity of the half moon and the stars. He was lying on his side with his knees pulled up near his belly for warmth. His eyes were closed now, and in the light from the stars and the moon, he looked young again. She could see it descend out of the night sky: an icy stillness from the edge of the thin moon. She recognized the freezing. It came gradually, sinking snowflake by snowflake until the crust was heavy and deep. It had the strength of the stars in Orion, and its journey was endless. Ayah knew that with the wine he would sleep. He would not feel it. She tucked the blanket around him, remembering how it was when Ella had been with her; and she felt the rush so big inside her heart for the babies.And she sang the only song she knew to sing for babies. She could not remember if she had ever sung it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her mother had sung it: Short Story The earth is your mother, she holds you. The sky is your father, he protects you. Sleep, sleep. Rainbow is your sister, she loves you. The winds are your brothers, they sing to you. Sleep, sleep. We are together always We are together always There never was a time when this was not so. INQUIRING INTO THE STORY Use the methods of inquiry—exploring, explaining, evaluating, and reflecting—to discover what you think about Silko’s short story, and move toward your own interpretations. The questions below might serve as journal prompts and triggers for class discussion. 1. On the left page of your notebook, jot down at least five lines or passages that you believe were key to your understanding of the story. These may include details that seem important, moments that signify turning points, or feelings or ideas suggested by the narrator or another character. On the opposing right page, openly fastwrite about the passages you collected. What do they seem to suggest about possible themes for the story? What do you notice about Ayah, the main character and narrator? What do you consider the significant events that affect all the characters and how do they change them? 2. Explain the significance of the poem that ends “Lullaby.” 3. A recurring detail in the story is the blanket that Ayah received from her son, Jimmie. Trace every mention of the blanket in the story. What accumulated meaning does this detail acquire in the story? 285 286 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay 4. Some critics have argued that “Lullaby” is a story of healing and recovery. Do you agree or disagree? What evidence in the story would you point to that either supports or contradicts that contention? 5. One of the most common responses we have to stories we enjoy is to say that we “could relate to it.” Did you feel that way about “Lullaby” even though you might not be Native American? Certainly the story helps those of us who are not Native American to understand an aspect of the Indian experience in America, but does it also help us understand ourselves? ONE STUDENT’S RESPONSE NOEL’S JOURNAL DOUBLE-ENTRY JOURNAL RESPONSE TO “LULLABY” “It was worse than if they had died; to lose the children and to know that somewhwere, in a place called Colorado, in a place full of sick and dying strangers, her children were without her.” “She stayed on the hill where they had fled the first time, and she slept rolled up in the blanket Jimmie had sent her.” I think this sets the tone of the whole story. She loses one son to the war and the other two were taken from her. Knowing that one son had died and wouldn’t ever come home again. The other two were alive and well but they would not grow up with their mother and were kept from their own culture by the government. After she lost all her children she finds comfort in the blanket her older son had sent her. She sleeps in the place where she spent the last moments with her other two children. She carries the blanket with her wherever she goes. This is how she spent her time mourning her loss and memories. . . SHORT STORY Alice Walker is most famous for her novel, The Color Purple, which was later turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey. But Walker is also a talented essayist and short story writer. “Everyday Use,” first published in 1973, is probably Walker’s best-known work of short fiction. One way to read literature is to consider its historical context, so keep in mind that this story was written at a time in Short Story which the black power and women’s movements were fundamentally challenging the ways Americans traditionally looked at African Americans and women. Another way to read a literary work is to explore the choices the writer made about how to tell the story and to think about how those choices influence your experience reading it. For instance, one of the most important considerations for fiction writers is point of view (see “Inquiring into the Details: Literary Devices” later in the chapter). There are a range of choices writers can make. For instance, they can tell the story as if the narrator is God, hovering over the narrative and describing everything that is happening. Sometimes such omniscient storytellers use their power to enter the thoughts of one or more characters. Other times, writers narrate a story from a single character’s point of view, as Walker does here. As you read “Everyday Use,” consider how this choice of point of view shapes your experience of the story. What if Walker had chosen to tell the story through another character or simply described what happened as an omniscient narrator? What might be Walker’s motive in choosing Mama as the voice that dominates this tale? Finally, short stories usually are built around a significant event that causes characters to change in some way. Imagine that a story is like a placid pond, with each character floating like a motionless twig on the surface. Then the writer heaves a stone into the water, and this creates ripples outward that eventually move the twigs—and the characters—this way and that. Some characters are more affected than others, and those that are most moved by the significant event in the story are often important. How did they change? Why? A significant event can be dramatic—someone dies—or more ordinary—a surprise birthday cake was delivered to a couple’s table—but it’s important enough to move the characters in some way. What is the significant event in “Everyday Use?” Who is changed by it? What is the significance of that change? EVERYDAY USE Alice Walker I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house. Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her. 1 2 287 288 CHAPTER 8 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ■Writing a Critical Essay You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course.What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs. Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have.Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers. In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing: I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue. But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature. “How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden by the door. “Come out into the yard,” I say. Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground. Short Story Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much. I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand. Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was. I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way. I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs any more.There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. 10 11 12 13 14 289 290 CHAPTER 8 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 ■Writing a Critical Essay But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?” She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on wash-day after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them. When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself. When she comes I will meet—but there they are! Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here,” I say.And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe. It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.” Dee next.A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather.A dress so loud it hurts my eyes.There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits.The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears. “Wa-su-zo-Tean-o;” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move.The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin. “Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push.You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. Short Story She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included.When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house.Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead. Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie. “Well,” I say. “Dee.” “No, Mama,” she says. “Not �Dee.’Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!” “What happened to �Dee’?” I wanted to know. “She’s dead,”Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.” “You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born. “But who was she named after?” asked Wangero. “I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said. “And who was she named after?” asked Wangero. “Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said.Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches. “Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.” “Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say. “There I was not,” I said, “before �Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?” He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head. “How do you pronounce this name?” I asked. “You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero. “Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you, we’ll call you.” “I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero. “I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.” Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard.After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I didn’t ask. 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 291 292 CHAPTER 8 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 ■Writing a Critical Essay “You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples down the road,” I said.They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay.When the white folks poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight. Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.” (They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero [Dee] had really gone and married him.) We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs. “Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely these benches are.You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it. “This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?” “Yes,” I said. “Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.” “Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber. Dee (Wangero) looked up at me. “Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.” “Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.” When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands.You didn’t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks: you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived. After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Short Story Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War. “Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?” I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed. “Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.” “No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those.They are stitched around the borders by machine.” “That’ll make them last better,” I said. “That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them. “Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts.They already belonged to her. “Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom. “The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas.” She gasped like a bee had stung her. “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.” “I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college.Then she had told me they were old-fashioned, out of style. “But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she had a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!” “She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.” Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!” 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 293 294 CHAPTER 8 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 ■Writing a Critical Essay “Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?” “Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts. Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other. “She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ’member Grandma Dee without the quilts.” I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work. When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open. “Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee. But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber. “You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car. “What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know. “Your heritage,” she said. And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.” She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and her chin. Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed. INQUIRING INTO THE STORY Explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect on Walker’s story “Everyday Use.” 1. A child returns home as an adult and everything is somehow changed. Things that didn’t have much meaning before suddenly seem meaningful. Most of us have had this experience. But “Everyday Use” forces us to see this from a mother’s point of view. Critical Essay Explore this in your own life. Think of a time when you returned home after leaving for awhile—perhaps returning after a year at school, serving in the military, or taking a job in another city. In your journal, begin with a moment during a return home in which you were in the presence of one or both of your parents. Now describe yourself through your mother’s or your father’s eyes. What do they notice about you? What do they think? What pleases and displeases them? How does this exercise affect your understanding of Walker’s story? 2. Identify the significant event in this story (see “Inquiring into the Details: Literary Devices”) and explain how it changes a character. What do you make of these changes? What do they suggest about some of the larger themes of “Everyday Use?” 3. Evaluate the following assertion about the narrator, Mama, in the story: While Dee seems to be the character who is least sympathetic in the story, Mama is blind to her own role in nurturing both daughters’ faults. If there is a villain in this story, it’s the narrator. Do you agree or disagree? What evidence would you point to in the story to support your thinking? 4. One of the most common reasons I hear for liking a story or an essay is that the reader “can relate to it.” Reflect for a moment on what this means to you. Does such a principle apply to your experience of reading Walker’s story? Does it apply to other stories that open doors to worlds you may not know because of your race and background? C R I T I C A L E S S AY Writing about literature is like rock climbing—you’re always looking for a handhold or the right place to sink your bolt. Fortunately, good stories offer writers plenty of places to grasp. You can focus on a particular character, the significance of a scene, a particular motif, or the overall themes of the story. The only essential is that your critical essay be firmly anchored to the story itself—what characters say or do, specific details, particular scenes or passages. In the essay that follows, critic John Gruesser seizes on the images of animals in Alice Walker’s “Everday Use.” This is a pretty narrowly focused essay but it works well because Gruesser finds plenty of evidence in the story to support his thesis that animal images “and references to animal husbandry pervade” the story. This brief piece, which recently appeared in the literary journal Explicator, nicely models important features of the critical essay you’re assigned to write: it’s well focused, it never strays far from specific evidence from the story, and is composed around the writer’s own idea about one way to understand the story. 295 296 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay ANIMAL IMAGERY IN “EVERYDAY USE” John Gruesser 1 2 3 Images of animals and references to animal husbandry pervade Alice Walker’s justly famous 1973 short story “Everyday Use.” Not only is each of the three characters, Mama, Maggie, and Dee, explicitly or implicitly associated with animals, but the story takes place in a “pasture,” down the road from which several “beef-cattle peoples” live and work. Some of the comparisons between the women and fauna are highly conventional or purely descriptive: Maggie’s memory is linked to that of an elephant; the voice of a pleading Dee sounds as “sweet as a bird”; Dee’s hair stands erect “like the wool on a sheep”; and her pigtails are compared to “small lizards disappearing behind her ears”. Image patterns involving cows and dogs, however, foreshadow the story’s climactic scene, in which Mama decides to give the quilts to Maggie rather than Dee, and they play an integral role in the scene itself and its aftermath. Mama frequently describes Maggie as a docile, somewhat frightened animal, one that accepts the hand that fate has dealt her and attempts to flee any situation posing a potential threat. When Dee arrives, Mama tells us that “Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand.�Come back here,’ I say.And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe”. Maggie’s characteristic stance in such situations is aptly summed up by Mama in the word “cowering”. Although the etymologies of the words “cow” and “cower” differ, it seems likely that Walker is hinting at the former by employing the latter. Yet Maggie is not the only person described in bovine terms. Mama refers to herself as “a large, big boned woman” and informs us that her own body language, at least in her encounters with white men, resembles Maggie’s: “It seems to me I have talked to them with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is furthest from them”. Mama and Maggie’s connection to cows is reinforced when Dee lines up a Polaroid shot of her mother, her sister, the house, and a real cow that has wandered into the yard. More important, in a key passage that adumbrates the ending of the story, Mama tells us that she used to enjoy milking cows until she was “hooked in the side” in 1949, adding, “Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way”.This is precisely the kind of mistake Dee will make later when she demands the quilts that Mama has already promised to Maggie. Mama’s comparisons between animals and Maggie, who bears the scars from a fire that destroyed the family’s previous home (and who was perhaps burned trying to save the very quilts Dee covets), often seem insensitive. Without a doubt, the most shocking example of this occurs early in Critical Essay “Everyday Use”: “Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone ignorant enough to be kind him? That is the way my Maggie walks”. Near the end of the story, after Maggie tells her mother that Dee can have the quilts because she can “’member Grandma Dee without” them, Mama describes Maggie in similar terms: “I looked at her hard. She had filled up her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look”. It is at this moment in the story that Mama has her epiphany, realizing that her thin, scarred, pathetic daughter, who knows how to quilt and serves as her family’s oral historian, deserves the quilts more than her shapely, favored, educated daughter Dee, who only wants the quilts because they are now fashionable. Acting on this flash of insight, Mama does two things that she has never, amazingly enough, done before: she hugs Maggie and she says “no” to Dee. Afterward, in the final paragraph, Maggie’s face lights up with a smile that is “real [. . . ] not scared”. Moreover, Mama asks her for “a dip of snuff ”, and together the enlightened mother and the faithful daughter sit, enjoying their snuff and each other’s company, oblivious to the “dopey, hangdog look” they presumably present to the world. Significantly, in seeing the value in Maggie, Mama has been able to look beneath the surface of things and see the value in herself as well. It is perfectly appropriate that animal imagery should figure in “Everyday Use,” a story with a rural setting, whose matriarch and narrator supports herself by raising livestock.Walker goes a step further, however, by using hooking cows and hangdog looks to reinforce the major themes of her story. Work Cited Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” Everyday Use. Ed. Barbara Christian. New Brunswick: Rutgers, UP, 1994. 23–35. INQUIRING INTO THE ESSAY Use the four ways of inquiring—exploring, explaining, evaluating, and reflecting—to think about your response to Gruesser’s essay. 1. Explore your reaction to the essay twice. After reading the piece all the way through the first time, open your journal and fastwrite for three minutes, beginning with the following phrase: The first thing that strikes me about this essay is . . . When the writing stalls, use the phrase again: Another thing that strikes me about this essay is . . . As you write, try to remember all that you can from the essay 4 297 298 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay without looking at it. After three minutes of writing, reread the essay. Repeat the fastwriting exercise in your journal, except begin with the following phrase: The second time I read the essay, I thought . . . And then I thought . . . And then . . . Stop and look at the essay again if you want to. Write for five minutes this time. 2. What was your most significant reaction to Gruesser’s essay that emerged from your two episodes of fastwriting in the previous question? 3. Using the list in the earlier “Features of the Form” section, explain how this essay exemplifies some of the features. 4. At the end of the essay, Gruesser argues that Walker uses animal imagery, including “hooking cows” and “handog looks” to reinforce “the major themes of the story.” How would you evaluate that claim? What is the strongest evidence he offers in its support? What is the weakest? 5. My students often complain that English teachers dig deeply for meaning in stories when it isn’t really there. What do you think of this? Do you agree? Would Gruesser’s story be an example of this? SEEING THE FORM CHRISTINA’S WORLD BY ANDREW WYETH If a photograph can be thought of as a form of nonfiction, then a painting compares well with fiction or poetry. The painting certainly has a strong relationship to the real; after all, the painter sees the world we all live in and expresses that vision in the work. That expression may be realistic, impressionistic, or abstract, but it is firmly rooted in things that can be seen, smelled, heard, and touched. Yet unlike photographers who work with the visual materials presented to them through the viewfinder, the painter can transform these materials through invention. If it works better that the woman’s dress is pink rather than blue, then pink it shall be. Similarly, fiction writers’ primary obligation is to the story, not reality, and they invent characters and make them do things that contribute tension and meaning to the narrative. Interpreting a painting, then, like Andrew Wyeth’s famous work Christina’s World, is much like interpreting fiction. The painting acts as a text that, like a short story, is a complete invention and whose meaning is implicit rather than explicit. Therefore “reading” Wyeth’s painting should involve the kind of interpretive moves you might employ in reading any literature. Critical Essay Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948. Tempera on gessoed panel, 32 1/4 X 47 3/4”. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. (16.1949), © Andrew Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth painted Christina’s World in 1948, and Christina Olson, who died in 1969, was a frequent subject for the painter. At the invitation of her family, Wyeth spent many years using an upstairs bedroom of the Olson house as a studio. The home and the setting haunted his work for many years that followed. You can still find the old house in this painting in Cushing, Maine. EXERCISE 8.1 Painting as Literature In this exercise you will attempt to interpret Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World in the same way you might interpret a piece of literature. STEP ONE: A first reading: Simply experience the power of Christina’s World. (It’s really a pretty powerful image.) Look closely. Pay attention to your own feelings about the painting and your tentative ideas about 299 300 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay its meaning. Your first instinct may be to tell a story about the woman in the painting, but for now focus on your ideas about what the painting says or the feelings it evokes. Make a four-minute fastwrite entry in your notebook. Begin this way: The main feeling or idea I get from this painting is . . . . When the writing stalls, use this prompt to get you going again for a few minutes: Among the things I notice in the painting are . . . STEP TWO: A second reading: In small groups, spend time focusing on how the Wyeth painting was made, or how it was composed. To do this, it might be helpful to understand a little bit about the composition of paintings. You don’t need to be an expert, but the following basic terms and concepts should give you a helpful analytical framework for looking at Wyeth’s painting. • Line. In artistic composition, the line is the direction the viewer’s gaze travels when looking at the painting, something that is managed by the placement of forms and their relative size. In a good painting, the viewer’s eye is directed to the main focal point of the picture, and away from unimportant elements. Some questions to ask about line include whether the painting succeeds in encouraging your gaze to move smoothly to the main objects of interest, or whether the line is confusing, making you feel as if you’re not quite sure where to look. Do things flow visually? • Hierarchy. Do you sense that some visual elements are more impor- tant than others? In a well-composed painting you should. Artists can manage this in a number of ways, including the size and location of various objects in the painting, and in doing so they are communicating something important about the overall theme of the work. What, for example, might the emphasis on certain objects in the painting imply about its meaning? What is the relationship among these things, and what does that imply? • Color. The arrangement of color in a painting will influence its mood. Certain colors are cool—blues, greens, purples and their many combinations—and these tend to recede in a painting. Other colors— yellows, oranges and reds—are warm and can be perceived as coming forward. Color is obviously enormously expressive when handled well. How do the colors the artist chose affect the mood of the work? How might that mood contribute to its overall theme or idea? • Value. To create the sense of dimension, artists use light and dark tones. In a black and white drawing, these tones are white to black, and all the shades of gray in between. In a color painting, value is often managed by using various shades of a color. Without value, a painting looks flat, one-dimensional. With it, the subjects look more realistic. How much emphasis is there on value in the painting? How realistic is the image? Critical Essay • Composition. All of these qualities—line, color, value, hierarchy—and more contribute to a painting’s composition. One of the key qualities of composition is balance, and this can be achieved in a number of ways, including arranging visual elements symmetrically, asymmetrically, or using something called the “golden mean,” an ancient mathematical concept that has historically influenced art and architecture, and which represents proportions often seen in nature, including the spiral of a sea shell, and the proportions of the human body (see Figure 8.1). What do you notice about the composition of the painting? How is it arranged to influence your feelings, and how does it seem to contribute to the overall theme or idea? FIGURE 8.1 The golden mean is a mathematical formula that when applied to a rectangle creates spatial relationships that are particularly pleasing to the eye. This is the so-called golden rectangle. For centuries, artists have exploited this principle, creating proportions in paintings and buildings based on these calculations. Can you see how Wyeth’s painting is visually organized to adhere to the golden rectangle? Using these concepts about visual texts, discuss in your small group possible interpretations of Wyeth’s painting. What would you say about how he uses line, color, value, hierarchy and composition to create certain feelings or effects in the painting? Do any of these elements account for your own feelings about what the painting expresses? S T E P T H R E E : As a group, complete the following sentence about the painting: We believe that the main idea or feeling in the painting �Christina’s World’ is . . . Put this at the top of a piece of newsprint and post in on the wall next to your group. Then make a list of evidence from the painting itself that supports the idea or feeling your group proposed. Put this on the newsprint as well. Share your work with the rest of the class. 301 302 CHAPTER 8 Writing a Critical Essay ■Questions for Discussion 1. Which group’s interpretation of the painting seems most convincing? Which seemed most original or surprising? 2. Which terms from Step Two of the exercise seemed most helpful in explaining each interpretation? 3. How is this process like interpreting a short story or a poem? How is it different? ■THE WRITING PROCESS ■INQUIRY PROJECT: Writing a Critical Essay Look at a story, essay, or poem, possibly one of the works in this chapter. Interpret it as you did Wyeth’s painting, looking closely at what the literary work says and how it says it, and, using some of the elements of literary analysis, offer readers a way of understanding the work that they would find convincing. The full draft should be about 1,000 to 1,500 words. You should do the following: ■Organize the essay around a question you’re trying to answer about the text and its possible meanings. (For example: Is Silko’s “Lullaby” a story that highlights the power of women in Navajo culture?) ■Use your question as a guide for reading the story selectively. ■As you shape your answer to the question, rely mostly on passages and other information from the primary work—the story or essay—as a source of evidence. ■If possible, use research with secondary sources (articles about the author, published criticism about the work, and so on) to help you revise your paper. Thinking About Subjects It’s likely that your instructor will ask you to write a critical essay on one or more of the readings in this chapter, or perhaps an assigned reading from another book. If you can choose among the three readings here, consider The Writing Process 303 which work you found most moving. Although analysis often demands a level of detachment and cool logic, literary works are usually intended to make us feel. This is a wonderful starting place for a closer look at the story because it’s sensible to wonder what it was that made you feel something. The answer will be found in the text, of course, by looking at how the author tells the story and what he says. But it will also be found in what you bring to the text—your own experiences, associations, and values. The writer Joan Didion once wrote that writing is an “act of aggression,” an implicit demand that readers see things the way the writer sees them. We react to stories sometimes because they are asking us to believe something we don’t believe, or don’t want to believe, or they are imagining us as readers we don’t want to be. A good starting point, then, for choosing to write about a work is to choose it because you find yourself resisting it in some way, rather than “relating to it.” On the other hand, it is also true that we are drawn to stories It is in the coversation that seem to confirm our sense of how the world works. Choosing between what a text says a literary text because you can relate to it is fine. But the chaland what it might be lenge is to do more than simply express agreement. Write about saying that you discover such a story because you want to more fully understand what it is you’re agreeing to. fresh understandings of what you read. Generating Ideas Spend some time in your notebook generating material for possible essays. The following prompts will invite you to first play around, and even write “badly.” Approach this material initially in an open-ended way. When you can, let the writing lead thought. The prompts below will be general enough to apply to any text, even if it isn’t one of the three in this chapter. Listing Prompts. Lists can be rich sources of triggering topics. Let them grow freely, and when you’re ready, use an item as the focus of another list or an episode of fastwriting. The following prompts should get you started: 1. Brainstorm a list of questions about the work that you find puzzling. 2. List the names of every important character or person in the story or essay. Choose one or two that seem most important. Under each name, make two new headings: Dreams and Problems. Under Dreams make a list of the thing that character seems to desire most, even if he or she isn’t fully aware of it. Under Problems make a list of everything that seems to be an obstacle to that character achieving those desires. 304 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay 3. Make a list of details or particulars from the story that seem to say more than they say. In other words, do any details recur? Do any objects have particular significance to one or more characters? Do any descriptions suggest the feelings, dispositions, or values of a particular character? Fastwriting Prompts. Remember, fastwriting is a great way stimulate creative thinking. Turn off your critical side and let yourself write “badly.” 1. Write a narrative of thought. Begin with When I first read this story or essay I thought . . . And then I thought . . . And then . . . And then . . . . 2. Choose three lines or passages that are key to your current understanding of the themes or ideas behind the story or essay. Write these down on the left page of your notebook. On the opposing right page, fastwrite about each, beginning with The first thing I notice about this passage is . . . And then . . . And then . . . And then . . . . When the writing stalls, write about the next line or passage until you’ve written about all three. Visual Prompts. Sometimes the best way to generate material is to see what we think represented in something other than sentences. Boxes, lines, webs, clusters, arrows, charts, or even sketches can help us to see more of the landscape of a subject, especially connections between fragments of information that aren’t as obvious in prose. 1. Create a cluster using the name of the main character as the core word. Reread the story and then build as many associations as you can from that character. Think about feelings and ideas you associate with that person as well as any particulars you remember from the story. 2. Make a visual map of the story. Begin by placing a brief description of what you believe is the most significant moment in the story at the center of a blank page. This might be a turning point, or the point of highest tension, or perhaps that moment when the main character achieves his desires and dreams. Consider that moment the destination of the story. Now map out events or details in the narrative that threaten to lead the protagonist away from that destination, and those that appear to lead the protagonist toward it. The Writing Process Research Prompts. When writing a critical essay, the most important research you do is carefully reading and rereading the primary text, or the poem, story or essay you’re writing about. But secondary sources can be a great help, too. A background article on the writer might help you understand her motives in writing the piece. A little historical research can give you a deeper understanding of the setting. 1. Put the story or essay in a biographical context. First, search the Web for anything you can find about the author. Begin by using the search term “authors” with Google. You’ll find a listing of a range of Web pages with biographical information about authors; one or more might feature yours. Several library databases are also useful, including The Literary Index. 2. Put the story or essay in a historical context. Search the Web for background information about the period, place, or events relevant to the story. For example, if you were writing about “Lullaby,” search for information about life among the Navajo in the late 1940s. INQUIRING INTO THE DETAILS COMMON LITERARY DEVICES There are many key concepts that provide useful frameworks for analyzing literature. The key is to see the following ideas as an angle for seeing an essay, story, or poem, much like you might move around a subject with a camera. Each provides a different way of seeing the same thing. In addition, each becomes a platform from which to pose a question about a text. • Plot and significant event. This is what happens in a story that moves it forward. One way of thinking about plot is to consider this: What are the key moments that propel the story forward? Why do you consider them key? How do they add tension to the story? In an essay, these moments often give rise to the question the writer is exploring. In short stories, there is often a significant event that may happen in or outside of the story, but the entire narrative and its characters act or think in response to that event. This significant event may be dramatic—a baby has died, perhaps—or not seem so at all—a surprise birthday cake is brought to a quiet couple’s table in a crowded restaurant. Naming that significant event becomes a way of seeing how everything in the story revolves around it, exposing the logic (and sometimes lack of logic) in why characters behave the way they do. • Characters. Imagine a still pond upon which small paper boats float. Someone throws a rock in the pond—big or small—and the 305 306 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay ripples extend outward, moving the boats this way and that. Depending on the size of the ripples, some of the boats may list or capsize, sinking slowly. Characters in a short story are like those boats, responding in some way to something that happened, some significant event that is revealed or implied. They move almost imperceptibly, or quite noticeably, or even violently. Is there logic to their response? How exactly are they changed? How do they relate to each other? In essays, characters live both inside and outside the text. In nonfiction, they are (or were) real people, which imposes an additional burden on them: Are nonfiction characters believable? Are they accurate? • Setting. Where a story takes place can matter a lot or a little, but it always matters. Why? Because where a story takes place signals things about characters and who they are. A story set in rural Wyoming suggests a certain austere, ranching culture in which the characters operate. Even if they’re not ranchers, they must somehow deal with that culture. Similarly, a story set in Chicago’s predominantly black south side will introduce another set of constraints within which characters must operate. In some cases, setting even might become a kind of character. • Point of view. In nonfiction essays, point of view is usually straightforward—we assume the narrator is the author. But in fiction, it’s much more complicated; in fact, how a story is told—from what perspective—is a crucial aesthetic decision. For instance, stories told from the first-person point of view in the present tense give the story a sense of immediacy—this feels like it’s happening now—but at the same time limit our understanding of other characters because we can’t get into their heads. We can only know what the first person narrator knows. So-called omniscient narrators can introduce a feeling of distance from the action, but they are also gratifyingly Godlike because they can see everything, hovering above all the action and even entering characters’ minds at will. Omniscient narrators can also choose to limit their access to characters and events as well. Why might an author have chosen a particular point of view? Is the narrator trustworthy? What might be his biases and how might they affect the telling? • Theme. One way of understanding a story or essay is to consider that everything—character, point of view, and setting—all contribute to a central meaning. In a good story, everything is there for a purpose—to say something to the reader about what it means to be human. In essays, this theme may be explicit since essays both show and tell. Short stories and especially poems are often short on explanation of theme, operating with more ambiguity. The Writing Process The writer hopes the reader can infer certain ideas or feelings by paying close attention to what he shows the reader. To get at the theme, begin with the simple question: So what? Why is the author telling this story or sharing this experience? What significance are we supposed to attach to it? • Image. Stories and poems ask us to see. When I read them, I imagine that writers take my face in their hands and gently—or sometimes brutally—direct my gaze. What are they insisting that I look at and how do they want me to see it? The critic John Gruesser suggests that in “Everday Use” Alice Walker wants us to see Maggie as a kind of helpless animal. Images that recur may also be significant. Judging What You Have Now it’s time to look more critically at what you’ve generated. Do you see some possible directions you could follow in a sketch? Are there tentative ideas and interpretations you might develop? Are there potential beginnings you could follow? The following suggestions use material generated by the prompts in the preceding section. What’s Promising Material and What Isn’t? If your assignment is to write about one of the stories in this chapter, by now you should have a sense of which one interests you most. That initial sense usually starts with a gut reaction—the story makes you feel something. That’s a good starting point, but the generating prompts should give you a fuller sense of why you feel something. As you examine the material you generated, consider the following: • What’s your question? Remember that your aim in the assignment is to build your essay around a question you want to answer about the story or essay. You may have found one already. A good opening question is specific enough to guide your rereading of the work, encouraging you to look at certain parts rather than the whole thing. • What surprised you? In your fastwrites, do you find that the writing led you from an initial impression or interpretation of the story but then took you toward ideas you didn’t expect? For example, perhaps you began fastwriting that “Inheritance of Tools” seemed to be about a sentimental affection for an inherited hammer but then you realized that the hammer stands in for what the author calls a “cloud of knowing.” Did you find a lot to say about the significance of certain passages? • Does a character in the story seem to emerge as a focus? A helpful way to write about a story is to focus on the actions and motivations of a 307 308 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay particular character. This might have become obvious when you generated lists or clusters about characters, and especially when you generated ideas about a character’s dreams and problems. How the character attempts to overcome obstacles in the way of his desires can say a lot about the meaning of the story. • Is there a recognizable significant event in the story and how do the important characters respond to it? When you mapped out the story, did you find a scene or moment that seemed to alter the course of the narrative or its characters? How did this change the characters and how did it change their relationships with others in the story? What does this say about what the author seems to be saying about the human condition? • Does the story’s context help explain the author’s purpose? Literature isn’t created in a vacuum. Like all art, it is often a response to things that are going on with and around the artist. It makes an enormous difference that Leslie Marmon Silko is a member of the Laguna Pueblo and has a keen interest in tribal culture and survival. It also helps to know what concerns her and any related historical events to which the writer may be responding. Do these contexts help you to read the story differently? What questions do they raise about its meanings? • Do you feel ready to answer the So what? question. Stories aren’t merely entertainment. Authors always have certain purposes—ideas they’re exploring, comments they want to make, or questions they’re trying to answer. In fiction and poems, these intentions are often implicit; that is, stories and poems are often ambiguous and leave us wondering what they’re really about. Essays are often much more explicit because authors frequently say what they mean. Answering the So what? question—speculating on what authors seem to be saying or implying about being human—is a key move in interpretation. After generating material, you may be ready to finish this sentence, What I think this story or essay is really saying is . . . If you like what you come up with, turn it into a question that will help organize your rereading of the story. Questions About Audience and Purpose. Why analyze a work of literature? For the same reason that some of us want to talk about anything complicated, whether it’s a relationship gone south or a wrenching movie about war: We simply want to understand. It’s fundamentally human to try to make sense of things, and reassuring when we can. Of course, we are drawn to some literature for sheer enjoyment and pleasure, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the best literary works offer readers so much more than that if they’re willing to look closely. The best stories offer a glimpse at the human spirit—at what makes people tick, at their longings and fears and possibilities. Ultimately, we learn about ourselves and our own humanity. The Writing Process Critical analysis of literature is simply a method of discovering these things. In the same way you used some tools of art criticism to interpret Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, using literary elements of stories such as character, significant event, setting, and especially theme help you to think about what a story is trying to do. You can use these tools for several purposes. The most basic is to simply write a summary of what happens to whom in a story. Often called a plot summary, this is useful as a way of initially understanding the work, but it isn’t often a college assignment. In general, however, critical essays work to offer some interpretation of what the story or essay seems to be saying, a move that often begins with a question. In the broadest sense the opening question is simple: What might this story mean? But to be really useful, the question needs to be more specific. For example, a slightly more specific question might be, What are the racial themes in Silko’s story “Lullaby?” Will such a question allow you to read Silko’s story selectively? Probably not. What about this: What is the significance of the recurring image of the blanket in “Lullaby?” Is this too specific? Possibly. But it’s not a bad starting point for your inquiry into the story because the question gives you direction about where to look to find the answers. Critical essays don’t simply ask questions; they attempt to answer them. There are a range of methods for doing that, including: 1. You can focus on a particular element such as character, setting, or plot development, analyzing how it contributes to one or more of the story’s themes. 2. You can put the story in relevant contexts—perhaps the biography of the author, background about the story’s time and place, or certain kinds of theories or ideas about literature—and exploit these as a way of unraveling the story’s themes and ambiguities. 3. You can argue for an interpretation of a story’s meaning, and use both particular elements such as character and setting, as well as relevant contexts to help you make your interpretation convincing to others. Each approach implies a different emphasis on certain kinds of information in the essay. But no matter what angle you use, the text of the story—the words, phrases, passages, and ideas that make up the story— will always be the most important source of evidence. I want to emphasize this because one of the most common weaknesses of writing about a reading is that it fails to mine material from the text itself. The audience for a critical essay, as for any form of writing, will make a big difference in what you say and how you say it. Scholarly criticism, which is not what you’re attempting here, is written for an audience of fellow critics, most of whom are familiar with the work as well as some of its contexts. For the assignment that follows, assume you’re writing for an 309 310 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay audience of peers. Ask your instructor whether you should assume that your audience is familiar with the work you’re writing about (which might be the case if you’re all writing about the same story or essay), or assume that your readers are unfamiliar with the work. If the latter is the case, then you’ll obviously have to do some summarizing about the plot and characters that wouldn’t be necessary if your readers knew your story or essay. Writing a Sketch We’ll begin again with an early draft, a sketch that represents an initial attempt to discover what you want to focus on and what you might have to say about the literary work you’ve chosen. Develop your sketch with the following things in mind: • It should have a tentative title. This time, the title should be the question about the work you’re trying to answer. (For example, What is the significance of Ayah’s relationship to nature in Silko’s “Lullaby?”) • It should be at least 500 to 600 words. • Write it with the appropriate audience in mind. Are you writing for readers who are familiar with the text? • Explore your question by paying close attention to what the story you’re writing about says. STUDENT SKETCH When Julie Bird read Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story “Lullaby” for the first time, she found it deeply moving. “It almost made me cry,” she said. In class, we talked a little about some of the traditions in Native American literature, and you can see in her sketch how she tries out several of the ideas we talked about: the importance of the storytelling tradition, the ways in which identity is tied to going home, and the healing power of the natural world. There are all kinds of literary traditions that are lenses through which you can read a story. Some, like this one, have to do with the race, ethnicity, or culture of the writer. Others have more to do with larger literary movements tied to historical events and histories of thought—for example, realism, modernism, or postmodernism. But the most important thing is to pay close attention to the text itself. What exactly does the story say, and what might it mean? Julie Bird doesn’t incorporate many passages from “Lullaby” in her sketch; she’s thinking through some ideas about key themes in the story. She underlines several ideas that emerged in this first look. Now she has to return to the story and test the ideas against what the text actually says. Student Sketch WHAT IS THE ROLE OF NATURE IN �LULLABY’? Julie Bird “Lullaby” written by Leslie Marmon Silko is an intriguing story about the life of a Navajo woman by the name of Ayah and her life . Ayah bared her soul to tell this story, an act of special meaning in a culture that passes on history by oral means.The Navajo’s often connect their identity to family, home, and nature.When the white man came to take away her children, Ayah, not fully understanding why, grabbed them and ran up the long slope of the mesa, to wait for her husband to come home.While she was waiting, she allowed the sun to relax her and felt as if “she could walk into the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly.” The connection of peace to the natural world is key to the essay’s theme. Ayah, using the wool blanket as an instrument, created strong parallels between her mother (the past) and her son Jimmie (her present). This generational timeline establishes her identity by correlating the comfort of the past with the warmth of the present.The wool blanket is the object of that unbroken line. At the end of the story, Ayah is searching for her husband and she is thinking, “she did this because she had the blanket, and there would be no place for him except with her and the blanket in the old abode barn near the arroyo.” The blanket is significant to the characters in revealing the importance of family ties to the Navajos. The overall theme of the essay relates to the sorrow and loss Ayah feels at the hands of the white man, and her inability to do anything about it. First, a government man comes to tell her that her son Jimmie was killed at war. Next, more government officials dupe her into signing her name in order to take away her children. To this she states “Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language, or any of their ways: it endangered you.” When Chato was too old to work the rancher made them move out of their home, and they had to go to the barn. Through all of the sorrow put upon her,Ayah was able to turn to her identity and connection with her heritage, nature, and roots to find peace and strength to continue on. Moving from Sketch to Draft Prepare for revision of your sketch by first evaluating it yourself and then sharing it in a small group workshop. Evaluating Your Own Sketch. Among the key concerns in evaluating this early draft of your critical essay is whether you’ve discovered a workable 1 2 3 4 311 312 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay focus and if you’re beginning to get some clear idea of what it is you’re trying to say. In your journal or on a separate sheet you can provide to your instructor when you hand in the sketch, try to answer the following questions: 1. Did the question you were asking about the text help you focus on certain parts of the story? What were they? Was the question too broad or too specific? What might be a more refined question as a focus for the next draft, or are you happy with the original question you posed? 2. Can you summarize in a sentence or two how you might now answer the question you pose in your sketch? Can you summarize an answer to another question that emerged that interests you more? 3. Based on what you tentatively seem to be saying in the sketch about the text you’re writing about, what do you think you might do in the rewrite? Questions for Peer Review. Workshop groups that are discussing the sketches should consider the following questions: • If you’re unfamiliar with the text the writer is analyzing, do you have enough information about the story or essay to understand what the writer is saying about it? What else would you like to know? • Does the sketch seem to answer the question it’s asking? In your own words, what do you think the writer seems to be saying? • Where is the sketch most convincing? Where is it least convincing? • Are there any questions or approaches that seem like good alterna- tives to the one the writer chose? Reflecting on What You’ve Learned. To make the best use of the workshop, try to listen without commenting to the discussion of your sketch. Use the double-entry journal approach of taking notes during the discussion. On the left page of your notebook, record all the comments and suggestions you hear, whether you agree with them or not. Later, on the right page, fastwrite your reactions and thoughts about the comments you recorded on the opposing page. Research and Other Strategies: Gathering More Information Before you wrote your sketch, you did some initial research that may have helped provide a context for the work you’re writing about. You may have learned a little biographical information about the author, or perhaps some things about the period, time, or place she was writing about. Now it’s time to dig a little deeper. How deep you dig depends on the scope of your project and the details of the assignment. Student Sketch This time, your campus library, rather than the Web, will be the focus of your investigations, although many of the following sources and databases are probably accessible through your library’s Web pages. • Researching the author. Check the online book index to find biogra- phies of your author. You can also gather biographical information on the author you’re writing about by consulting the following references at your university library: – Author’s Biographies Index. A key source to 300,000 writers of every period. – Biography Index: A Cumulative Index to Biographical Material in Books and Magazines. Remarkably extensive coverage, which includes biographies, as well as autobiographies, articles, letters, and obituaries. – Contemporary Authors. Up-to-date information on authors from around the world. • Researching the critics. What do other people say about your author or the work you’re writing about? Check these references or databases: – MLA International Bibliography. This is the most important database to find articles by others on the work or author you’re writing about. – Literary Index. A database of author biographies. – Contemporary Literary Criticism. Excerpts of criticism and reviews published in the last twenty-five years. – Magill’s Bibliography of Literary Criticism. Citations, not excerpts, of criticism on more than 2,500 works. – Book Review Index. Citations for tens of thousands of book reviews on even fairly obscure works. • Researching the genre or tradition. The type of writing—short story, novel, personal essay—that you’re analyzing is another useful context for thinking about the work. For example, Leslie Marmon Silko is among the most famous of contemporary Native American writers. Native American writing is an identifiable “tradition” of literary works, and much has been written about certain patterns in these stories and certain ways of understanding them. There are reference resources in your library that will help you research these traditions. For example, American Indian: Language and Literature is a reference that lists books and articles on the topic. Similarly, AfroAmerican Literature is a reference exploring the place of black writers and works in American literature. These references can be enormously helpful. Ask your reference librarian about useful books or electronic databases on the tradition you’re writing about. 313 314 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay Composing the Draft Before you begin writing the draft, make sure that you have a workable focusing question that will drive the draft. A workable question needs to be specific enough to allow you to reread the story or essay you’re writing about selectively, focusing on certain parts rather than the whole thing. But it also needs to be general enough to allow you to develop the answer in 1,000 to 1,500 words. For example, here’s a question that is too general: What are the main themes in Walker’s story “Everyday Use?” You can certainly answer that question in four or five pages, but the essay will be so general, leaping from one part of the story to the next, that it will be vague and uninteresting. Consider this question: What’s the significance of Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, the new name Dee adopted in “Everyday Use?” This type of question—one that focuses on a particular detail or aspect of plot development—can work extremely well as a focus for a short critical essay. But unless that detail or development seems attached to other details, developments, and themes in the story, it probably won’t do. Here’s a good focusing question for a literary analysis, one that strikes a nice balance between specificity and generality: Why does Silko end with the poem at the end of “Lullaby,” and how does it figure in Ayah’s efforts to confront her losses? It seems as if there might be a lot to say about this without resorting to generalities. The question focuses on a particular part of the Silko story, yet also expands outward into other aspects of the work, particularly those relevant to the theme of recovery. Methods of Development. What are some of the ways you might organize your critical essay? Narrative. An entirely different approach is to use your question as the starting point for a story you tell about how you arrived at an answer. This approach is more essayistic in the sense that it provides the story of how you came to know rather than reporting what you think. A narrative essay might also involve relevant autobiographical details that influenced your reading of the literary work, explaining your interest in certain aspects of the story or the question you’re asking about it. As always, however, it’s critical to read the work closely and discuss your evolving understandings of certain details, passages, or ideas from it. Question to Answer. Because the assignment is designed around a question you’re trying to answer about a literary work, the question-toanswer design is an obvious choice. Consider spending the first part of your essay highlighting the question you’re interested in. You can do this in several ways. You can put it in context by demonstrating how your question is relevant to the on-going conversation that other critics have posed about the story, author, or tradition you’re writing about. You can also put it in the context of the research you’ve done about that tradition, or perhaps what you know about the life and interests of the author. Alternatively, establish the importance of the question by highlighting your understanding Student Sketch of the story’s meaning or the author’s intentions, or perhaps even how the question arises out of your own personal experiences with the events or subjects in the work. The key is to convince readers that yours is a question worth asking, and that the answer might be interesting to discover. Compare and Contrast. Critical essays often benefit from this method of development. The approach might be to compare and contrast certain elements within the story or essay—perhaps several characters, symbols or metaphors, plot developments, and so on—or you might compare the work to others by the same or even different authors. For example, it might be interesting to explore the significance of the nature imagery in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Lullaby” by examining other essays by the author. Do similar references appear in some of her other stories? These comparisons have to be relevant to the question you’re asking. Combining Approaches. Frequently, a critical essay will use several or even all of the methods of development mentioned here—question to answer, comparison and contrast, and narrative. Consider how you might put them all to work, especially in certain sections of your draft. Using Evidence. There are two main kinds of evidence that you need to consider in a critical essay: evidence that comes from so-called primary sources, especially the work itself, but also letters or memoirs by the author; and evidence that comes from secondary sources, or books, articles, and essays by critics who are also writing about the work or author. Primary sources are generally most important. In more personal literary responses, however, your personal associations, anecdotes, stories, or feelings may be used as evidence, if they’re relevant to the question you’re posing. Workshopping the Draft When you finish revising your sketch you should have a more developed draft with a clearer purpose and focus. After all this work, you may feel pretty good about it. But don’t worry if you’re not satisfied yet; you still have the opportunity to make further changes to your draft. Before you submit your draft for further peer review, explore your own feelings and tentative ideas about what you need to do in the next, and probably final revision. Reflecting on the Draft. Take a look at the draft before you and circle the passage you think is the best in the essay so far. Now circle the passage that you think is weakest. In your notebook, fastwrite for five minutes about both passages. What seems to be working in the better passage? What problems to do you notice about the weaker one? Does either one address the question you’re writing about? If so, how? If not, how might it? When you compare the two passages, what do you notice about the differences? How might you make the weaker passage more like the stronger one? How might you make the rest of the essay stronger? 315 316 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay Questions for Readers. Share your essay in small groups before you begin the final revision. Group members might consider the following questions about each draft they discuss: 1. If you’re unfamiliar with the story or essay the writer is writing about, do you have enough background information about it to understand the draft? 2. Does the draft stay focused, from beginning to end, on the focusing question? If not, where exactly does it seem to stray? 3. Do you find the interpretation of the literary work convincing? Where is the draft most convincing? Where is it least convincing? 4. Where exactly could the writer use more evidence? 5. What part of the draft was most interesting? What part was least interesting? Revising the Draft “Rewriting is the essence of writing,” the old saying goes. But too often rewriting is limited to changing a word here and there, maybe adding or cutting a sentence or two, or checking for run-on sentences. These activities are certainly an element of revision—and an important one—but as the word implies, it’s important to “re-see” both what you are trying to say as well as how you try to say it. Chapter 11, “Revision Strategies” is a useful introduction to the revision process for any essay, including the critical essay. It emphasizes ways writers can break the bonds that limit their ability to find new ways of seeing the draft. Critical essays typically have some of the following problems to solve. Do any of these apply to your draft? • When you make an assertion about the significance or importance of something in the work is it supported by specific evidence from the work itself? • Are you clear about your audience? Do you assume that readers are familiar or unfamiliar with the story, and have you written the draft with that assumption in mind? • Is your thesis clear? By the end of your essay, could a reader state without much confusion the main thing you’re trying to say about the poem, story, or essay? For help addressing some of these questions and others refer to Chapter 11, “Revision Strategies.” Use the following table as a guide to the appropriate revision strategies. Remember that a draft may present problems in more than one category. Student Sketch GUIDE TO REVISION STRATEGIES PART PROBLEMS PAGE NUMBER 1 450 Unclear thesis, theme, or main idea ■Not sure what you’re trying to say? 2 456 Lack of information or development ■Need more convincing evidence? 3 463 Disorganized ■Doesn’t move logically or smoothly from paragraph to paragraph? 4 467 Unclear or awkward at the level of sentences and paragraphs ■Does draft seem choppy or hard to follow at the level of sentences or paragraphs? 5 473 IN THE DRAFT (CHAPTER 11) Unclear purpose ■Not sure what the paper is about? ■Not focused enough? Polishing the Draft After you’ve dealt with the big issues in your draft—is it sufficiently focused, does it answer the So what? question, is it well organized, and so on—you must deal with the smaller problems. You’ve carved the stone into an appealing figure, but now you need to polish it. Are your paragraphs coherent? How do you manage transitions? Are your sentences fluent and concise? Are there any errors in spelling or syntax? Section 5, “Problems in Clarity and Style” in Chapter 11 can help you focus on these issues. Before you finish your draft, make certain that you’ve worked through the following checklist: ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ Every paragraph is about one thing. The transitions between paragraphs aren’t abrupt or awkward. The length of sentences varies in each paragraph. Each sentence is concise. There are no unnecessary words or phrases. You’ve checked grammar, particularly verb agreement, run-on sentences, unclear pronouns, and misused words (there/their, where/ were, and so on). ❑ You’ve run your spell checker and proofed your paper for misspelled words. 317 318 CHAPTER 8 ■Writing a Critical Essay S T U D E N T E S S AY Julie Bird’s sketch earlier in this chapter about Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story “Lullaby” showed traces of the ideas behind this draft. Bird touches on the question behind her inquiry into the story—how does the character Ayah recover from her many losses?—and finds a tentative answer: Ayah finds peace in nature. Sketches are just that—roughly drawn glimpses into our own thinking about something. When they’re most helpful, this “bad” writing can help us discover what we want to say, as it did here for Bird. But notice how Julie takes the idea that nature is a powerful force in the story and extends and deepens it in the draft. The result is that her thesis is richer and more interesting. How did she do this? By returning to the dialectical process—that motion between creative thinking and critical thinking—and immersing herself in the story itself. Bird also did some research on Silko and Native American literature, testing her assertions. She not only found evidence to support them, but new ways of thinking about what she wants to say. NATURE AS BEING: LANDSCAPE IN S ILKO ’ S “L ULLABY ” Julie Bird 1 2 3 Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of “Lullaby,” is a Native American writer from the Laguna Pueblo culture in New Mexico. Silko’s story is about a Navajo woman, Ayah, and how she copes with the loss of her children—one dies in war, several others die in infancy, and two more are taken by the “white doctors” who suspect the children may have been exposed to tuberculosis. How is Ayah, condemned to poverty and surrounded by white indifference or hatred, able to recover from these losses? Reflecting the “interrelatedness of man and nature that permeates Native American literature” (Schweniger 49), it is in the landscape that Ayah finds peace in old age. Arizona’s natural environment, such as snow and the slope of the mesa, is an integral character in “Lullaby” that shows the intricate relationship between humans and the natural world. Even the structure of the story echoes these themes. Silko writes her story from the end, to the beginning, to the end in the same cyclical fashion as life in the natural world and on the reservation. The writer portrays this cyclical structure of storytelling beautifully when describing Ayah as an old woman, as she reflects on the birth of her children through to the death of her husband. Student Essay Trying to find peace in the harmony of the natural world, Ayah turned herself to the memories of a happier past, and the rituals and rhythms of the earth’s cycle. When saddened by thoughts of her dead son Jimmie, lost in some faraway war,Ayah wraps herself in a wool blanket that he had sent to her. This unconscious gesture invariably brings the memory of sitting with her they weaved it into blankets. Ayah fondly remembers that “the blankets were so soft and woven so tight that rain rolled off them like birds’ feathers” (Silko 44). Through Ayah’s reference to the feathers, Silko is making the connection to her own beliefs in the natural world. In a sense, Ayah becomes a bird. When Ayah runs into the foothills of the “juniper trees and black lava” (45) in order to get her children away from the white doctors, she is seeking the place of refuge that is a constant source of comfort. It is her ritual to return to this spot. Ayah comes to the mesa when her son Jimmie dies, when she buries her children who died too soon, when the doctors take her children; in other words, when she is looking for balance.To Ayah, “the sun’s warmth relaxed her and took the fear and anger away. It seemed to her that she could walk into the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly” (46). This harmony that Ayah shares with the natural world is what makes her who she is; it is her identity as a Navajo woman. This is especially obvious at the end of the story when she is sitting with her dying husband, a man crushed by hopelessness and alcoholism. Silko writes that “The light was crystalline. She breathed the clarity of the night sky; she smelled the purity of the half moon and the stars” (51). Silko was making a point that upon the death of her husband,Ayah at last felt a clear (“crystalline”) understanding.With the passing of the storm, “steely blue-gray horses startled across the sky” (51), and with the passing away of the last of her family, Ayah was finally free to find her own peace. In old age,Ayah finally achieved her balance with the harmony of nature and was ready for it. Just hearing the word snow evokes images of “freezing” and “icy”, but Silko uses snow to project Ayah’s feelings of warmth and comfort. Music, like nature, is a very integral part of some Native American cultures, and Silko expresses the correlation between music and the natural world throughout the story. For example, when Ayah is waiting for her husband to return home from a bar, she “sat down with her back against the wide cottonwood tree . . . and listened to the wind and snow sing a high-pitched Yeibechei song” (43). We learn from Silko that the Yeibechei song is the Navajo Night Chant and is a ceremony of healing.The fact that the snow sings such a song further reinforces the idea that nature is a healing force in the story.When Ayah is watching as the “snow drifted . . . with the northwest wind hurling it in gusts,” and “she smiled at the snow which was trying to cover her little by little” (44), 4 5 6 7 8 319 320 CHAPTER 8 9 10 11 ■Writing a Critical Essay Silko suggests that the snow, like the blanket, is a source of comfort to Ayah. And when Ayah is sitting next to her dying husband, the snow storm clears up and the night is still and clear.This is significant in that it parallels the clearing of Ayah’s troubles, the passing of the figurative storm within herself. At the end, Ayah sings her lullaby: “The earth is your mother, the sky your father, rainbow is your sister, the winds are your brothers” (51). It is hard to miss the balance of nature with humanity that is a part of the Navajo heritage. But Ayah’s lullaby also points to Silko’s particular vision of the role of nature. Landscapes aren’t something to be looked at as separate from people. As the critic Karen E.Waldron notes, “Silko’s poems, essays, and novels manifest the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings as one of being rather than viewing” (178) [emphasis added]. The most interesting, but subtle way in which the story is written deals with Silko’s use of color, scent, and smell to make the story come alive and to further reinforce the images of nature as a benign and loving force.When describing the birth of one of Ayah’s children, Silko writes “The morning was already warm even before dawn and Ayah smelled the bee flowers blooming and the young willow growing at the springs” (44). This passage correlates birth with the smell of spring flowers, very much in tradition of human harmony with the natural world. Silko, in trying to show Ayah’s relationship to the natural world uses every sense at her disposal to paint a vivid picture to the reader. When reading “Lullaby” you can feel the snow landing gently about you, hear the screech of the hawk as it patiently circles above, and smell the pungent odor of the juniper trees. Silko is also able to make the reader feel the intense pain of loneliness associated with the loss of Ayah’s family and culture at the hands of the white man. In the story, Silko weaves the natural world into every nook and cranny of the narrative so the reader is unaware of its existence but can feel its essence as its own entity; in this case it’s an entity that is not separate from Ayah but merges with her. Both are “beings”; both share consciousness. And in the end, she finds comfort in that. Works Cited Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Lullaby.” Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publshing, 1981. 43–51. Schweninger, Lee. “Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers.” Mellis 18 (1993): 47–60. Waldron, Karen E. “The Land as Consciousness.” Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers. Ed. Thomas S. Edwards and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe. Hanover, NH: U P of New England, 2001: 179–190. Using What You Have Learned EVALUATING THE ESSAY 1. Compare Bird’s earlier sketch and her draft. What do you notice about her revisions? In particular, do you think the draft is more insightful than the sketch? Why? 2. One of the temptations in writing about Native American literature (or any literature by someone from another or unfamiliar culture) is to make assumptions about what “they” believe or how “they” think. Many of these are based on certain cultural commonplaces that we pick up without thinking much about them. One of these is that Indians have strong ties to nature. Does Bird find support for her assumptions about that? How do you avoid simply accepting such assumptions? 3. When you write about literature, the most important source of information is the text you’re writing about—the story, poem, essay, or novel. How well does Bird use evidence from “Lullaby” to convince you that what she says about the story is a reasonable interpretation? U S I N G W H AT Y O U H AV E L E A R N E D Although literary texts are quite different from the kinds of texts you usually read in school for other classes, practice with writing the critical essay can be useful even if you’re not an English major. But how? 1. Think about your experience with this assignment. Can you point to something about the process that you could apply to another writing situation? What did you do here that you’ve done for other assignments in The Curious Writer? 2. Compare one of the short stories in this chapter with a research essay. What are the differences between these two kinds of texts— literary fiction and expository writing, a short story and a research essay? What are the similarities? Do you read them differently? Do you read them in similar ways? 3. In sixty seconds, generate a focused list that describes the most important things you’ve learned about writing a critical essay. How many of these things apply to writing other kinds of papers? 321
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