Page 45 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

44 How to write critical essays
a law of nature what is only one transient and tendentious way
of speaking. Texts perhaps tell us not what human nature or the
natural world are really like but how one group in a society at
just one point in its developing history has constructed these
ideas.
In saying that it is ‘My love’ that is ‘like a red, red rose’, the
poem is ambiguous: ‘love’ may mean either the abstract feeling
of desire and affection or the concrete person who is beloved.
Yet ‘My’ ensures that either of these loves must be seen as the
personal property of a voice which is firmly singular, possessive
and—because we know our way around our own culture—
presumably male. What it owns and apprehends is a visible
beauty that exists only when ‘newly sprung in June’ and will, by
implication, soon fade.
Male readers may feel moved here by a poignant suggestion
that female beauty—which they seek to possess and retain—all
too quickly disappears. A feminist reader, if she, too, takes ‘My
love’ to mean the poet’s girl-friend, is not likely to admire the
text’s implication that adolescent girls do briefly fascinate but
all too soon mature into irrelevance. She may feel able to
evaluate the poem more highly if she interprets ‘My Love’ as
referring to the poet’s own emotion: like all constructions of
feeling—including all those ways in which women have been
read—it will eventually be dismantled.
The traditional critic might protest that the pun on red/read
is impertinently creative; that the reader’s task is to receive in
humble passivity the meaning which the text imposes: the poem
tells us clearly enough how it wishes to be interpreted here. Yet,
to produce even the conventional reading, we need to know far
more than the poem’s own words. It is our experience of
countless other texts which prevents us assuming that Burns
must fancy women with scarlet skin or enjoy cutting off their
legs and sticking them in vases.
Some student essays—and not necessarily the worst—still
concentrate exclusively on internal evidence from the
primary text and resolutely ignore the existence of any
secondary sources which may have determined its origins, its
initial reception and its current reputation. In so doing,
whether they recognize what they are up to or not, they
imply their support for one theory of how literature should
be read, and their rejection of many others. If, on the other