Deconstructionist critics insist that literary works do not yield fixed, single meanings. They argue that there can be no absolute knowledge about anything because language is unstable across different contexts and time periods, and thus can never say what we intend it to mean. Anything we write conveys meanings we did not intend, so the deconstructionist argument goes. Language is not a precise instrument but a power domain whose meanings are caught in an endless web of possibilities that cannot be untangled. Accordingly, any idea or statement that insists on being understood separately can ultimately be “deconstructed” to reveal its relations and connections to contradictory and opposite meanings.
Unlike other forms of criticism, deconstructionism seeks to destabilize meanings instead of establishing them. In contrast to formalists such as the New Critics, who closely examine a work in order to call attention to how its various components interact to establish a unified whole, deconstructionists try to show how a close examination of the language in a text inevitably reveals conflicting, contradictory impulses that “deconstruct” or break down its apparent unity.
Although deconstructionists and New Critics both examine the language of a text closely, deconstructionists focus on the gaps and ambiguities that reveal a text’s instability and indeterminacy, whereas New Critics look for patterns that explain how the text’s fixed meaning is structured. Deconstructionists painstakingly examine the competing meanings within the text rather than attempting to resolve them into a unified whole.
The questions deconstructionists ask are aimed at discovering and describing how a variety of possible readings are generated by the elements of a text. In contrast to a New Critic’s concerns about the ultimate meaning of a work, a deconstructionist is primarily interested in how the use of language — diction, tone, metaphor, symbol, and so on — yields only provisional, not definitive, meanings.
Deconstructionists look for ways to question and extend the meanings of a text. A deconstructionist might find, for example, the ironic ending of Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” less tidy and conclusive than would a New Critic, who might attribute Mrs. Mallard’s death to her sense of lost personal freedom. A deconstructionist might use the story’s ending to suggest that the narrative shares the doctors’ inability to imagine a life for Mrs. Mallard apart from her husband. As difficult as it is controversial, deconstructionism is not easily summarized or paraphrased. The final sentence contains a number of phrases that are ambiguous: to whom are the doctors speaking? What does joy kill? Since language itself is unstable, its contradictions are of great interest to deconstructionists who like to examine its slippages and who like to show how the texts it produces are also unstable. Here’s a thought that might delight a deconstructionist: how do we know that Mrs. Mallard is dead? Who says so? The story has already proven that Brentley Mallard was presumed dead because of a story told by Josephine and Richards; who’s to say that Mrs. Mallard is not also alive but only presumed dead because the doctors said so? Why trust them? The story does not end with a dead body, but with another story.
The following lists of questions for the critical approaches covered in this chapter should be useful for discovering arguments you might make about a short story, poem, or play. As we stress above, we are only introducing these fields, and the questions that follow are designed to sharpen your sense of what these critical strategies entail, and also invite you to consider how the “meaning” of a text might look different based on the way you approach it, or the lens through which you view it.
These questions will not apply to all texts; and they are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined to explore a text from several critical perspectives or contexts simultaneously. A feminist approach to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” could also use Marxist concerns about class to make observations about the oppression of women’s lives in the historical context of the nineteenth century. Your use of these questions should allow you to discover significant issues from which you can develop an argumentative essay that is organized around clearly defined terms, relevant evidence, and a persuasive analysis in response to your instructor’s directions.