Formalist critics focus on the formal elements of a work — its language, structure, tone, and the conventions of its genre. The word form at the root of formalism is key: each work of literature is a unique object, but one that helps us to understand the form it has taken, or the way it was formed. A formalist reads literature as an independent work of art rather than as a reflection of the author’s state of mind or as a representation of a moment in history. Historic influences on a work, an author’s intentions, or anything else outside the work are generally not treated by formalists. (This is particularly true of the most famous modern formalists, known as the New Critics, who dominated American criticism from the 1940s through the 1960s.) Instead, formalists offer intense examinations of the relationship between form and meaning within a work, emphasizing the subtle complexity of how a work is arranged. This kind of close reading pays special attention to what are often described as intrinsic matters in a literary work, such as diction, irony, paradox, metaphor, and symbol, as well as larger elements, such as plot, characterization, and narrative technique. Formalists examine how these elements work together to give a coherent shape (or “unity”) to a work while contributing to its meaning. The answers to the questions formalists raise about how the shape and effect of a work are related come from the work itself. Other kinds of information that go beyond the text — biography, history, politics, economics, and so on — are typically regarded by formalists as extrinsic matters, which are considerably less important than what goes on within the autonomous text.
For an example of a work in which the shape of the plot serves as the major organizing principle, let’s examine Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” a two-page short story that takes only a few minutes to read. A first reading probably results in surprise at the story’s ending: a grieving wife “afflicted with a heart trouble” suddenly dies of a heart attack, not because she’s learned that her kind and loving husband has been killed in a terrible train accident but because she discovers that he is alive, and thus still in her life. Clearly, we are witnessing an ironic situation since there is such a powerful incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. A likely formalist strategy for analyzing this story would be to raise questions about the ironic ending. Is this merely a trick ending, or is it a carefully wrought culmination of other elements in the story resulting in an interesting and challenging theme? Formalists value such complexities over simple surprise effects.
A second, closer reading indicates that Chopin’s third-person narrator presents the story in a manner similar to Josephine’s gentle attempts to break the news about Brently Mallard’s death. The story is told in “veiled hints that [reveal] in half concealing.” But unlike Josephine, who tries to protect her sister’s fragile heart from stress, the narrator seeks to reveal Mrs. Mallard’s complex heart. A formalist would look back over the story for signs of the ending in the imagery. Although Mrs. Mallard grieves immediately and unreservedly when she hears about the train disaster, she soon begins to feel a different emotion as she looks out the window at “the tops of trees … all aquiver with the new spring life.” This symbolic evocation of renewal and rebirth — along with “the delicious breath of rain,” the sounds of life in the street, and the birds singing — causes her to feel, in spite of her own efforts to repress her thoughts and emotions, “free, free, free!” She feels alive with a sense of possibility, with a “clear and exalted perception” that she “would live for herself” instead of for and through her husband.
It is ironic that this ecstatic “self-assertion” is interpreted by Josephine as grief, but the crowning irony for this “goddess of Victory” is the doctors’ assumption that she dies of joy rather than of the shock of having to abandon her newly discovered self once she realizes her husband is still alive. In the course of an hour, Mrs. Mallard’s life is irretrievably changed: her husband’s assumed accidental death frees her, but the fact that he lives combined with all the expectations imposed on her by his continued life kill her. She does, indeed, die of a broken heart, but only Chopin’s readers know the real ironic meaning of that explanation.
Although this brief discussion of some of the formal elements of Chopin’s story does not describe all there is to say about how they produce an effect and create meaning, it does suggest the kinds of questions, issues, and evidence that a formalist strategy might raise in providing a close reading of the text itself.