A knowledge of an author’s life can help readers understand his or her work more fully. Events in a work might follow actual events in a writer’s life just as characters might be based on people known by the author. Relevant facts about an author’s life can make clearer the source of his or her convictions and how his or her own experiences inform the major concerns showcased in a given work. Biographical details might also help to fill in some of the context for the author’s motivation for writing about a certain subject, or for writing about it a certain way. The aim of a biographical critic would not be to equate the author and a character in a story, or voice in a poem. The biographer might want to solidify such connections between author and creation, but the critic would use those connections to frame an interpretive response.
Some formalist critics — some New Critics, for example — argue that interpretation should be based exclusively on internal evidence rather than on any biographical information outside the work. They argue that it is not possible to determine an author’s intention and that the work must stand by itself. Although this is a useful caveat for keeping the work in focus, a reader who finds biography relevant would argue that biography can at the very least serve to narrow the scope of possible interpretations.
However, it is also worth noting that biographical information can complicate a work. Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” presents a repressed wife’s momentary discovery of what freedom from her husband might mean to her. She awakens to a new sense of herself when she learns of her husband’s death, only to collapse of a heart attack when she sees that he is alive. Readers might be tempted to interpret this story as Chopin’s fictionalized commentary about her own marriage because her husband died twelve years before she wrote the story and seven years before she began writing fiction seriously. Biographers seem to agree, however, that Chopin’s marriage was evidently satisfying to her and that she was not oppressed by her husband and did not feel oppressed.
Moreover, consider this diary entry from only one month after Chopin wrote the story (quoted by Per Seyersted in Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography):
If it were possible for my husband and my mother to come back to earth, I feel that I would unhesitatingly give up everything that has come into my life since they left it and join my existence again with theirs. To do that, I would have to forget the past ten years of my growth — my real growth. But I would take back a little wisdom with me; it would be the spirit of perfect acquiescence.
This passage raises provocative questions instead of resolving them. How does that “spirit of perfect acquiescence” relate to Mrs. Mallard’s insistence that she “would live for herself ”? Why would Chopin be willing to “forget the past ten years of … growth” given her protagonist’s desire for “self-assertion”? Although these and other questions raised by the diary entry cannot be answered here, this kind of biographical perspective certainly adds to the possibilities of interpretation. Critics should always be cautious about assuming that a character is automatically a stand-in for the author. The narrator of a short story, speaker of a poem, or protagonist of a play might in fact be a character far removed from the author’s sensibility, even a character that the author has created in order to critique that character’s thoughts, words, or behavior. There might be a literary reason for having created that character, such as to engage in a debate with another character in order to advance a work’s theme. Unless you are thoroughly familiar with an author’s biography, we would caution against taking the biographical details you know as the defining factors in an interpretation. These details are better thought of as signposts than treasure maps.
Given the enormous influence that Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have had on twentieth-century interpretations of human behavior, it is nearly inevitable that most people have some familiarity with his ideas concerning dreams, unconscious desires, and sexual repression, as well as his terms for different aspects of the psyche — the id, ego, and superego. Certainly an enormous number of twentieth-century European and American authors knew Freud’s theories, and that awareness is evident in many literary works, even if authors did not agree with Freud or with the other theorists he influenced. But a critic using Freud’s theories would not even necessarily need to know how much an author engaged with those theories: the works themselves can be used to illustrate or dispute the validity of Freud’s theories. Psychological approaches to literature often draw on Freud’s theories or other psychoanalytic theories to understand more fully the text, the writer, and the reader. Critics use such approaches to explore the motivations of characters and the symbolic meanings of events, while biographers speculate about a writer’s own motivations — conscious or unconscious — in a literary work. Psychological approaches can also be used to describe and analyze a reader’s responses to a text.
Although it is not feasible to explain psychoanalytic terms and concepts in so brief a space as this, it is possible to suggest the nature of a psychological approach. It is a strategy based heavily on the idea of the existence of a human unconscious — those impulses, desires, and feelings that a person is unaware of but that influence emotions and behavior.
Central to a number of psychoanalytic critical readings is Freud’s concept of what he called the Oedipus complex, a term derived from Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King (Chapter 36). This complex is predicated on a boy’s unconscious rivalry with his father for his mother’s love and his desire to eliminate his father in order to take his father’s place with his mother. The female version of the psychological conflict is known as the Electra complex, a term used to describe a daughter’s unconscious rivalry with her mother for her father’s affection. The name comes from a Greek legend about Electra, who avenged the death of her father, Agamemnon, by plotting the death of her mother. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explains why Oedipus the King “moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one.” What unites their powerful attraction to the play is an unconscious response:
There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus…. His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laios and married his mother Iokaste, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes … and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down within us.
In this passage Freud interprets the unconscious motives of Sophocles in writing the play, Oedipus in acting within it, and the audience in responding to it. Although the Oedipus complex is, of course, not relevant to all psychological interpretations of literature, interpretations involving this complex do offer a useful example of how psychoanalytic critics might approach a text.
The situation in which Mrs. Mallard finds herself in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is not related to an Oedipus complex, but it is clear that news of her husband’s death has released powerful unconscious desires for freedom that she had previously suppressed. As she grieved, “something” was “coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully.” What comes to her is what she senses about the life outside her window; that’s the stimulus, but the true source of what was to “possess her,” which she strove to “beat … back with her [conscious] will,” is her desperate desire for the autonomy and fulfillment she had been unable to admit did not exist in her marriage. A psychological approach to her story amounts to a case study in the destructive nature of self-repression. Moreover, the story might reflect Chopin’s own views of her marriage despite her conscious statements about her loving husband, for to admit her true feelings to herself or to her public might not be possible.
One key motif to pay attention to if you are interested in psychological interpretations of literature is the presence of dreams or dream-imagery in literature. Although there has been a great deal of debate over the centuries about what dreams “mean” — ranging from prophecy, to random spasms of our brains, to the field of our unconscious desires — they are potent repositories of meaning in literary contexts. In Ralph Ellison’s story “King of the Bingo Game,” the protagonist initially dozes off during a movie, and much of the rest of the story depicts him in a kind of trance-like state in which the imagery doesn’t make perfect sense — just as one might experience life in a dream. The speaker of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” famously asks of his experience, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: do I wake or sleep?” At the end of another famous poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot’s speaker concludes with surreal, dream-like, underwater imagery which will last “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” The juxtaposition of irrational images, whether or not framed as an actual dream, will alert the psychoanalytic critic to the possibility that we are witnessing the border between rational and irrational urges, or between the conscious and unconscious mind. Humans can’t always articulate what they desire or fear; dreams can sometimes provide a key.
Historians sometimes use literature as a window onto the past because literature frequently provides the nuances of a historic period that cannot be readily perceived through other sources. Another way of approaching the relationship between literature and history, however, is to use history as a means of understanding a literary work more clearly. The approach assumes that the writing contemporary to an author is an important element of the history that helps to shape a work. There are many ways to talk about the historical and cultural dimensions of a work. Such readings treat a literary text as a document reflecting, producing, or being produced by the social conditions of its time, giving equal focus to the social milieu and the work itself. The general impulse to view literature through a historical lens provides context for meaning. There are more refined or more ideological versions of historical approaches, too: Marxist criticism, new historicist criticism, and cultural criticism.
A work of literature may transcend time to the extent that it addresses the concerns of readers over a span of decades or centuries, but it remains for the historical critic a part of the past in which it was composed, a past that can reveal more fully a work’s language, ideas, and purposes. When using a historical approach, critics move beyond both the facts of an author’s personal life and the text itself to the social and intellectual currents in which the author composed the work. They place the work in the context of its time, and sometimes they make connections with other literary or artistic works that may have influenced the author. The basic strategy of these critics is to illuminate the historical background in order to shed light on some aspect of the work itself.
To return to our recurrent example: the repression expressed in the lines on Mrs. Mallard’s face is more distinctly seen if Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is placed in the context of “the Woman Question” as it continued to develop in the 1890s. Mrs. Mallard’s impulse toward “self-assertion” runs parallel with a growing women’s movement away from the role of long-suffering and unfulfilled housewife. This desire was widely regarded by traditionalists as a form of dangerous selfishness that was considered as unnatural as it was immoral. It is no wonder that Chopin raises the question of whether Mrs. Mallard’s sense of freedom owing to her husband’s death isn’t a selfish, “monstrous joy.” Mrs. Mallard, however, dismisses this question as “trivial” in the face of her new perception of life, a dismissal that Chopin endorses by way of the story’s ironic ending. This is not to conclude simply that Mrs. Mallard was representative of all American women at the time of its publication, but rather that her internal struggle connected to a broader social context, one which would have been more immediately apparent to Chopin’s readers in 1894 than it is to readers in the twenty-first century. That is why a historical reconstruction of the limitations placed on married women helps to explain the pressures, tensions, and momentary release that Mrs. Mallard experiences.
Marxist readings developed from the heightened interest in radical reform during the 1930s, when many critics sought to understand literature in terms of proletarian social and economic goals, based largely on the writings of Karl Marx. Marxist critics focus on the ideological content of a work — its explicit and implicit assumptions and values about matters such as culture, race, class, and power. Marxist studies typically aim at revealing and clarifying ideological issues and also correcting social injustices. Some Marxist critics have used literature to describe the competing socioeconomic interests that too often pit wealth and capitalist power against socialist morality and justice. They argue that criticism, like literature, is essentially political because it either challenges or supports economic inequality or oppression. Even if criticism attempts to ignore class conflicts, it is politicized, according to Marxists, because it accepts the status quo.
It is not surprising that Marxist critics pay more attention to the content and themes of literature than to its form. A Marxist reading of Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” might draw on the evidence made available in a book published only a few years after the story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman titled Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898). An examination of this study could help explain how some of the “repression” Mrs. Mallard experiences was generated by the socioeconomic structure contemporary to her and how Chopin challenges the validity of that structure by having Mrs. Mallard resist it with her very life. A Marxist reading would see the protagonist’s conflict as not only an individual issue but part of a larger class struggle.
Since the 1960s a development in historical approaches to literature known as new historicism has emphasized the interaction between the historic context of a work and a modern reader’s understanding and interpretation of the work. In contrast to many traditional historical frameworks for reading literature, however, new historicists attempt to describe the culture of a period by reading many different kinds of texts that earlier critics might have previously left for economists, sociologists, and anthropologists. New historicists attempt to read a period in all its dimensions, including political, economic, social, and aesthetic concerns. These considerations could be used to explain the pressures that destroy Mrs. Mallard. A new historicist might examine the story and the public attitudes toward women contemporary to “The Story of an Hour” as well as documents such as suffragist tracts and medical diagnoses to explore how the same forces — expectations about how women are supposed to feel, think, and behave — shape different kinds of texts and how these texts influence each other. A new historicist might, for example, scrutinize medical records for evidence of “nervousness” and “hysteria” as common diagnoses for women who led lives regarded as too independent by their contemporaries.
Without an awareness of just how selfish and self-destructive Mrs. Mallard’s impulses would have been in the eyes of some of her contemporaries, readers in the twenty-first century might miss the pervasive pressures embedded not only in her marriage but in the social fabric surrounding her. Her death is made more understandable by such an awareness. The doctors who diagnose her as suffering from “the joy that kills” are not merely insensitive or stupid; they represent a contrasting set of assumptions and values that are as historic and real as Mrs. Mallard’s yearnings.
New historicist criticism acknowledges more fully than traditional historical approaches the competing nature of readings of the past and thereby tends to offer new emphases and perspectives. New historicism reminds us that there is not only one historic context for “The Story of an Hour.” Those doctors reveal additional dimensions of late-nineteenth-century social attitudes that warrant our attention, whether we agree with them or not. By emphasizing that historical perceptions are governed, at least in part, by our own concerns and preoccupations, new historicists sensitize us to the fact that the history on which we choose to focus is reconstructed by concerns that have come to the foreground in our own present moment. This reconstructed history affects our reading of texts.
Cultural critics, like new historicists, focus on the historical contexts of a literary work, but they pay particular attention to popular manifestations of social, political, and economic contexts. Popular culture — mass-produced and consumed cultural artifacts, today ranging from advertising to popular fiction to television to rock music — and “high” culture are given equal emphasis. A cultural critic attempting to interpret Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game” might be less interested in the Great Depression as a global phenomenon than in the type of movie the protagonist watches before playing bingo. The critic might note that in 1934 Hollywood adopted a widespread set of guidelines that essentially amounted to censorship known as the “Hays Code.” This code turned movies into escapist fantasies that upheld moral behavior: sex and violence were largely removed from the silver screen. The sexual desire the protagonist feels and the violence he experiences are thus in sharp contrast to the type of movie he is watching that day. Adding the “low” art of everyday life to “high” art opens up previously unexpected and unexplored areas of criticism. Cultural critics use widely eclectic strategies drawn from new historicism, psychology, gender studies, and deconstructionism (to name only a handful of approaches) to analyze not only literary texts but radio talk shows, comic strips, calendar art, commercials, travel guides, and baseball cards. Because all human activity falls within the ken of cultural criticism, nothing is too minor or major, obscure or pervasive, to escape the range of its analytic vision.
A cultural critic’s approach to Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” might emphasize how the story reflects the potential dangers and horrors of train travel in the 1890s or it might examine how heart disease was often misdiagnosed by physicians or used as a metaphor in Mrs. Mallard’s culture for a variety of emotional conditions. Each of these perspectives can serve to create a wider and more informed understanding of the story.