Page 114 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

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grotesque deformity marring the elegant face of the created
earth. By the end of that century the literary convention was to
assume with equal certainty that anyone who fails to respond to
the grandeur of the Alps or the Lake District is behaving so
‘unnaturally’ as to be hardly ‘human’.
Writers often use the word ‘natural’ to describe qualities
which they regard as peculiar to people. Yet calling behaviour
‘natural’ may also invoke qualities which we have in common
with those other species who must survive in the same world as
we do—the survival instinct itself for instance. Consider the
elusive mobility of the term’s implications in the following
extracts from students’ essays:
Samuel Johnson’s ‘The vanity of human wishes’ suggests that
not only greed and ambition but also piety and pity are
natural.
Donne’s verse centres on natural emotions and ‘The Exstacy’
argues that copulation, even for the most intellectual men
and women, is still a necessity.
It was quite natural for Jane Austen as a privileged woman
of the time to be uninterested in either the Napoleonic Wars
abroad or social unrest at home.
T.S.Eliot in ‘The Four Quartets’ favours the natural existence
of medieval peasants over the artificial life led by twentieth-
century London’s lower middle classes.
In spite of his being a professional soldier, Macbeth’s killing
of his King is so unnatural that the whole order of Nature is
disrupted.

Shakespeare shows that Lear’s unnatural egotism drives
him mad and the hero’s insanity then deranges his entire
society.

The last example suggests another set of terms which must be
used guardedly: ‘madness’, ‘sanity’, ‘rational’, ‘deranged’ and
similar words. If an ‘entire society’ behaves in a certain way
can that behaviour seem ‘deranged’? Does ‘madness’ by
definition mean little more than what the prevailing standards
of a particular society regard as extremely abnormal
behaviour?