Question

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Answer 1

“Literary theory” is a phrase which can strike the fear of God into students of literature: more than phase diagrams in chemistry, more than quantum theory to freshman physicists. The scientific whiff of the word “theory” is partially responsible, but there’s also the vastness of theory. We can read the works of Shakespeare, for instance, or Whitman– that’s an achievable task. But theoretical writing spans across cultures, languages and academic specializations. Philosophical, sociological, and even biological critiques of literature abound. So where on earth (or beyond) to start?

The word “theory” is a difficult one to pin down, but everyday usage gives us an important way in to this almost intimidatingly loaded word. Say you’ve experienced some rejection, social media style. You ask your friends for advice: “But why did she defriend me on Facebook?” One of them steps up: “Well, I have a theory. It goes like this…” The theory is not just going to be “She hates you”. It requires a degree of articulation and explanation, and while grounded in logic, it’s also going to require some imaginative leaps.

A theory is not going to be obvious, and it’s also going to have a fair bit of complexity— our modern concept of “conspiracy theory” is also helpful in coming to an understanding of the word. Theories involve a range of factors which can’t be easily proved or rejected; not helpful in providing a simple definition, maybe, but an important point if we want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the body of work designated “theory”.

When did “theory” start? The philosopher Richard Rortyprovides a startlingly concise answer:

     Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle
     and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is
     neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary
     productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy,
     nor social prophecy, but all of these mingled together
     in a new genre.

This places the date around the nineteenth century— but it doesn't quite answer the question. Aristotle’s Poetics, written around 335 BCE, is often considered an important contribution to theory, as it seeks to classify and describe the essential features of Ancient Greek drama. At the time, though, it would have been considered strictly Philosophy. The works of Goethe et al were the first ones to blur the line between imaginative literature and philosophy: they were neither, but wove together elements from both. It was later, in the 1960s, when texts from outside the “literary” boundary, including moral philosophy, sociology, political theory, psychoanalysis, etc., would be used on a large scale to discuss literary texts. A simplistic but helpful definition is that works of “theory” question the prevalent way of thinking in the area in which they seem to belong.

It’s time to look at some examples of theory. I’ll venture that the best way to approach literary theory is not to start trying to learn as many of the different theoretical schools as possible, but to see how different types of theory can be used to illuminate a literary text. Let’s take a poem: Christina Rossetti’sGoblin Market, first published in 1862. Although Rossetti claimed it was intended for children as a cautionary tale, it’s charged with very adult symbolism and content.

     "We must not look at goblin men,
     We must not buy their fruits:
     Who knows upon what soil they fed
     Their hungry thirsty roots?"
     "Come buy," call the goblins
     Hobbling down the glen...

Over the course of its longish narrative, we are introduced to two sisters: Laura and Lizzie, who live alone together. They often hear the goblins hawking their fruits, and one day Laura, after her sister has gone home, trades a lock of her hair and a tear for some of the fruits, since she has no money. Lizzie reminds Laura of Jeannie, who suffered a horrible death after eating the fruits, and sure enough, Laura is truck with a terrible sickness. Lizzie goes to try to buy more fruits, but the goblins want to get her hooked instead: “Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,”, they shove the fruits in her face. She resists, though, and Laura recovers, and the poem closes by praising sisterly love.

So the poem does work as a cautionary tale for children: we can see that. But as we read it, a more powerful level of allegory becomes evident: Rossetti’s poetic craft suggests that there is something deeply, philosophically wrong with the goblins, and that redemptive love between Laura and Lizzie has meaning beyond the merely practical aspect of helping Lizzie to get better. How do we articulate and explain this?

An incisive resource for understanding the moment arrived a century later: the social and political movement we call feminism. It will be familiar to many readers; in simple terms it’s the belief that women should be equal to men. Historians point the the late nineteenth century as the “First Wave” offeminism, where women campaigned for the tangible things that men had: the vote, freedom of speech; the rights we usually hold to be fundamental. The 1960s, a time of general social upheaval, brought the second wave of feminism, which went much further, criticising the way society discriminated against females not just in obvious ways (e.g. suffrage), but also in more insidious ones: the way that anti-feminist ideas can be encoded into language and social mores. To give an obvious example, the way “obey” is used in a wife’s Christian wedding vows but not a husband's.

We can see, then, that it was a fairly natural step to apply these revolutionary ideas to literary texts. A brief skim through Renaissance-era texts reveals a glut of ingrained prejudice: (the obsession with female virginity, the depictions of prostitutes, the dearth of strong female characters, the fact that there is a play called ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore), but Goblin Market offers us something different: the sisterly love it portrays can be much better understood in light of the critique of male-dominated literature feminism offers.

The lines I quoted earlier, “We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits: / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?”, gain a new power in light of the feminist project. Rossetti uses a device called anaphora in the first two lines (i.e., she begins them both with the same word), which gives Laura’s argument a strong structure, but isn’t really notable until we understand, with the knowledge gleaned from theory, that “We” is actually a tremendously powerful word in the context of the poem, as it separates Laura and Lizzie off from the evil of the goblins: their world is based on love, and sacrifice for one another, while the goblins’ world seems to be based on hatred.

We can bring a different school of theory to bear on the poem:Marxism. Karl Marx famously saw free market capitalism, where the means of production are owned by individuals with capital, and the workers, having nothing to invest, were exploited by selling their labor, as a fundamental problem of human civilization. He advocated a shared ownership of factories, etc., instead, leading Russia and her surrounding states to adopt what they called “Communism”. Marxist literary theory analyses literature from, broadly speaking, the point of view of wealth disparity.

Again, parts of Goblin Market are brightly illuminated from this standpoint. It’s Lizzie who has no money to invest: she has “no copper in my purse”, and to get some of the fruit she must spend the “gold” which is on her head, i.e., symbolically give up her body. The words “gold” and “golden” appear fifteen times throughout the poem, with the goblins having lots of golden items, and Laura only having her golden locks, which she trades for a moment of pleasure and severe health problems. The temptation to say that the goblins are evil exploitative capitalists is high. The less valuable “silver penny” Laura uses to try to buy more fruit for Laura is pathetic in comparison: she has no gold, but does the very best she can. We can understand the deep sisterly love a little better, though not comprehensively, with some Marxist theory.

I’ve chosen two examples of theory which are necessarily simplistic, and deal fairly obviously with systems of control. This is because this seems to me to be where the central power of literary theory lies. Theory challenges all of our assumptions, including the ones we make by common sense, examining with great rigor how meaning is created and how human identities are created: these are some of the advantages of theory.

Of course, theoretical readings are not without their disadvantages. Goblin Market offers a lot to the Marxist reader, as I’ve shown, but to look at the poem from an overbearingly Marxist perspective will obscure rather than illuminate it. The famous anti-theoretical critic Harold Bloom has asserted that theoretical readings of texts tell us a bit about the theoretical schools, but little about the texts themselves. A good critic will use theory in tandem with more traditional close reading skills, staying alert to the many different ways of interpreting a text.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of theory with a fingernail here, but my main focus was to debunk some of the things that shroud theory in mystery, and to introduce it generally: hopefully it helps the reader beef up their annotations with some theoretical meat.