Page 23 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

22 How to write critical essays
created, at least in some periods, by those far removed from
society’s key-situations.
The notion of an isolated and relatively ignorant circle of
writers and readers would anyway need investigating. Jane
Austen was well enough informed about the origins of wealth in
her own circle to write Mansfield Park, in which Sir Thomas
Bertram has to be absent from his English estate so that he can
check up on his apparently more essential investments in the
sugar plantations of the West Indies. This does not, of course,
prevent his being respected by some modern interpretations as
the text’s moral touchstone. By contrast, another author of the
period, Thomas Love Peacock, used more than one of his novels
to attack the West Indies trade explicitly. His own commitment
had led him to join those who refused to eat sugar on the
grounds that its popularity made slaving profitable. One of his
novels devotes some of its liveliest prose to arguing that the
reader should do likewise.
How far a contemporary reader interpreted the relevant
passages in both novelists’ works as offering central, rather
than merely peripheral, meanings might depend in part on the
amount of space actually given to them. However, you know
from your own experience as a critical reader of novels that
merely counting the number of paragraphs or pages devoted to
a particular issue settles few questions about a text’s deeper
pattern of emphases and fluctuating intensities. So perhaps the
judgement of some readers at the time was influenced by
whether they themselves had investments in the West Indies; or
at least by how much the social circles in which they moved had
a taste for sugar and could afford to satisfy it.
You may concede that in the eighteenth century a peasant
and an aristocrat would have been right to decide that
admiration for a particular text would be unlikely to serve both
their interests. Nevertheless you may see this as a problem that
the modern critic is spared. You may believe that the gap
between rich and poor has now become so negligibly slight that
we can all afford to share a common code of values whose
acceptance is of no more advantage to one group than another.
You may feel that, as free citizens of an egalitarian society, we
can now all benefit equally from a text’s being interpreted in a
given way, or evaluated so highly that it exerts a powerful
influence. If your essay does imply this, it may be adopting an