Page 125 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

124 How to write critical essays
work’s most telling magnification of Man to expose all that
makes him ugly.’
Here is a more seriously confused and confusing extract from
an essay on Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi:
The heroine is the one character who consistently shows the
most admirably human and humane characteristics. In spite
of all that her sadistic brothers and their henchmen have
done to those she loves and to herself, she tells the jeering
man whom they have sent to strangle her ‘I am Duchess of
Malfi still’. In this proudly defiant line she claims and proves
that Man, even at the moment of his own death, can and
should respect himself.
The heroine here could be said to assert the dignity of ‘people’,
of ‘humanity’, of ‘Homo sapiens’, even of ‘men and women’,
though ‘women and men’ might seem fairer. However, if those
‘sadistic brothers’ are any guide to a masculine ethic, she hardly
typifies ‘Man’.
Consider, too, the vexed issue of authors’ names. The
convention which your tutor may still expect you to follow
discriminates female authors by using forename as well as
surname throughout: ‘Woolf’ is preceded by ‘Virginia’, and
‘Plath’ by ‘Sylvia’. Male writers too may be given a forename or
initials at the beginning of an essay but are thenceforward more
economically described by their surnames only. ‘E.M. Forster’
after his first appearance thus becomes plain ‘Forster’ and ‘Ted
Hughes’ becomes just ‘Hughes’. So an essay on George Eliot
reminds us throughout that the pseudonym masks a woman
and she will still be, laboriously perhaps, called ‘George Eliot’
even in the essay’s last sentence. ‘T.S. Eliot’ by contrast, being
male, will be so fully titled only at the outset. From then on he
is, more economically, ‘Eliot’. Such is the old convention but it
is increasingly being challenged.
Does this formula imply that men can speak on behalf of all
humanity but women are confined to writing as women? Or
does the use of a woman’s full name positively suggest a more
humanly accessible, less loftily remote, voice? Or might the
convention be no more than a quaintly old-fashioned, and
harmless, gesture of courtesy? Could it, on the other hand, be
firmly placing women on a pedestal where their room for
independent manoeuvre will be severely limited? Does the