Critical Theory and Writing
I think of my ENG III class as a writing-intensive, college preparatory course, so, ultimately, if my class's work with critical theory is, as outlined in my question, "equitably building interpretive agency and relevant meaning-making skills," I want my students to be expressing that high-level analysis in an analytical essay. The essays they produced at the conclusion of our work with "The Yellow Wall-Paper" served as the final measure of the success of the lessons outlined in the previous sections (pts. 1 & 2).
Overall, the quality of the essays written about "The Yellow Wall-Paper" was much higher than past formal writing assignments. The most popular selected prompt was the following:
Overall, the quality of the essays written about "The Yellow Wall-Paper" was much higher than past formal writing assignments. The most popular selected prompt was the following:
- Analyze “The Yellow Wall-Paper” through a feminist lens. Consider some of the following questions to address:
- a. What statement is Charlotte Perkins Gilman making about gender roles or relationships between men and women?
- b. Who (or what) is to blame for the narrator’s madness?
- c. How does the use of first-person perspective give the narrator agency and ownership over her own story?
- d. How could the story be read as a criticism of patriarchal society?
Of the available prompts, this was by far the most challenging, as it does not offer students a position to defend, but rather forces them to determine their own, unique position and argue it. As outlined in the opening section, "The Problem," one of the main objectives of my paired text curricula is to build "interpretive agency--" to help students use their analysis to assert their own unique interpretation of a text. Helping students articulate their interpretation as an arguable claim required workshopping, but I was already pleased with students' increased willingness to develop their own claims, as it showed that students were developing the agency which I was striving to nurture.
So many of these claims proved rigorous because of students' new fluency with the theoretical concepts explored in our discussions of Virginia Woolf. These threads from our discussions showed up again and again in the strongest and most unique essays produced in the class. Below, find two detailed analyses of strong essays. At the bottom of this page, find a slideshow of a few additional excellent essays produced as the summative assessment of this unit.
So many of these claims proved rigorous because of students' new fluency with the theoretical concepts explored in our discussions of Virginia Woolf. These threads from our discussions showed up again and again in the strongest and most unique essays produced in the class. Below, find two detailed analyses of strong essays. At the bottom of this page, find a slideshow of a few additional excellent essays produced as the summative assessment of this unit.
Student Essay Excerpt 1
This student was actually writing to a prompt examining "The Yellow Wall-Paper" as a piece of realist fiction. Even though she did not select the prompt explicitly concerned with a feminist reading of the text, threads of feminist criticism ran throughout her argument. Her argument focuses on the story's depiction of psychological trauma, which the author uses to register a social critique of gender roles. The ability to interpret the domineering relationship between the narrator and her husband and the vocabulary to articulate this interpretation deepened her analysis and sharpened her argumentation:
The story as a whole can be seen as a critique of the role that women and men played during this time. The relationship between the Narrator and her husband is more of a paternalistic relationship than that of husband and wife. They are conveniently placed into a situation that would allow for the paternal instincts; her being mentally ill and him being a physician. This relationship is meant to illustrate the roles of women seen as the “weaker” figure and having to be dependent on the man.
This depth was especially apparent on the following page, where she developed a nuanced interpretation of the character of the narrator's husband. The student constructed a complex feminist interpretation of Perkins-Gilman's decision to not make John a monster, extrapolating his depiction into a broad societal critique:
Though this can be seen as John being the cause of her decline, if we maintain the realist point of view, Gilman is pointing out that men being told they’re supposed to be the breadwinner is to blame; not necessarily men themselves, but the mentality of gender stereotypes. So looking at their relationship as a whole, we can see the realist perspective Gilman was taking on societal gender roles and how these roles cause problems.
This student's essay, thus, employs feminist criticism throughout, adding depth and nuance to her argument. The theoretical framework we constructed as a class provided this student with powerful ideas and systems of meaning, which she used as tools to construct her argument.
Student Essay Excerpt 2
This student did select the feminist interpretation prompt, and built upon our collaboratively developed interpretive schema to develop a unique and theoretically complex thesis, arguing that "Gilman wrote this story to criticize the gender roles between men and women by challenging the way men control women in order to feel superior." The final element of her interpretation, that gender roles cause men to oppress women in order to protect a perceived superiority is a subtle but complex extension of the theoretical concepts discussed in our initial conversations about the feminist lens. This student's use of our shared schema to create more complex, unique ideas is apparent in the page pictured to the left:
The man tends to be paternalistic. The way he takes care of the narrator is like he is limiting her from certain things, like taking care of herself. This shows how John controls the narrator so he can feel superior to her. The student builds on the discussed theme of paternalistic relationships to explore the psychology behind the performance of traditional gender roles, and extrapolates from this analysis a broader social criticism within the text.
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Conclusions and Connections
As mentioned throughout the analysis above, the success and findings of this unit largely informed the development of my proposed solution and theoretical framework. Throughout the arc of this unit, then, we hit all three of my goals for paired text curricula, all of which contributed to the ultimate success of these end-of-unit essays.
- The intentional pairing of theoretical texts and literary texts naturally adds depth to student analysis, as critical theory explicitly concerns and adds meaning to thematic concepts.
- The deliberate building (as in our debrief of "Shakespeare's Sister,") of an interpretive schema creates a shared experience and structures the act of interpretation by isolating themes of focus and articulating assumptions regarding those themes.
- Since they are abstract and make meaning by interpreting themes, these schemata are ultimately more transferable to other media (a goal not explicitly examined in this series, but explored in depth in this artifact analysis from the second half of this unit).