No Straw Men

Shakespeare refuses reduction to any single explanation. If, for instance, one believes that Oedipal jealousy motivates Hamlet, then one presupposes that the playwright endowed this character with unqualified motivations. But, as Hamilton College English professor Nathaniel Strout has observed, with Shakespeare, there are always “on the other hands”; that is, the extraordinarily well-roundedness of the […]

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Of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates writes that what “releases his . . . self is simply distance from home, the freedom of a white man’s power over those whom he considers his racial ‘inferiors,’ whose influence over him is subliminal (2). Yet while distance, “freedom,” and […]

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Should Joe average people our highest works of art, or should art be an Olympus in which we probe the souls of heroes? Aristotle argued for the latter: art should reflect life, not necessarily as it is, but as it might be and ought be. On this view, a novel’s characters—namely, its heroes—determine its aesthetic […]

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The themes of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire follow Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind: the emotional struggle for supremacy between two characters who symbolize historical forces, between fantasy and reality, between the Old South and a New South, between civilized restraint and primitive desire, between traditionalism and defiance. If Blanche DuBois represents defunct Southern […]

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