Page 85 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

84 How to write critical essays
Obviously, she has not really thought what it would be like
to live as a shepherd at all.
Here the final comment only repeats what was asserted when
the quotation was being introduced. Any tutor who, even after
reading the quoted passage, still cannot agree, or even
understand, the student’s interpretation, may resent the lack of
any further advice.
The same quotation could have been followed by:
The Princess’s fantasy acknowledges no distinction between
known present and hypothesized future. The ornamental
gardening, which she already performs in her present role as
a lady of leisure, merges into the sheep-farming which she
cites as an example of her supposedly different existence in
‘the time’ which ‘She hoped would come’. Repetitive syntax
insists upon this confusion so that ‘flowers planted by her
own hand’ sound suspiciously like ‘lambs of her own ewe’.
The possessive pronouns assume that the new life will admit
as much egotism as the old. Other people will still be
conveniently arranged about her as her ‘companions’. They
will still conveniently reinforce her own system of values and
satisfy her desire for sophisticated entertainment since they
will be ‘virtuous and elegant’. Their industriousness or skills
as workmates are not mentioned so the labour of an
agricultural life is presumably unimagined. The animals will
demand no more than the amusing or sensual gestures of
affection with which she might already ‘fondle’ a cuddly toy.
The farmland does not demand her presence in some field
where work is most needed: the Princess can position herself
according to comfort—‘in the shade’.
The alliteration of ‘brooks and breezes’ sounds so suavely
literary that we already hear her enjoying the future as a
merely fictional text even before we are told explicitly that it
does involve ‘reading’.
The formal control of such a long sentence anyway
suggests carefully written rhetoric rather than spontaneously
uttered speech. It thus prevents the Princess’s vision of the
pastoral from sounding like some neutral and impulsive
response to natural landscape. It is just a ‘virtuous and
elegant’ reconstruction of that refined world which she