11 Chapter 11 – Sample Student Analytic Essays
Sample Student Analytic Essays
The following two essays were written by sophomore students at St. Peter’s University for their common core Introduction to Fiction class. They represent excellent examples of undergraduate academic essays that advance an analysis of a work of fiction. Take note, in particular, of the clear, sophisticated interpretive arguments driving both, the seamless ways that they integrate their research to move forward their analysis, and the formal, objective academic tone that they maintain throughout. Each essay is formatted in accordance with current Modern Language Association (MLA) formatting standards (though the page breaks in the original essays have been lost due to the way Pressbooks is formatted). If you are to use this style for your own essays, you can also use these essays as models for how your headings, title, parenthetical citations, and works cited page should be set up.
Ace Bautista
Dr. Walonen
EL-208-HP
25 March 2022
How Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” Deals with Suffering as a Creative Force
There are few pieces of literature that capture one’s inner conflict with taboo subjects such as drug addiction while still reaffirming the person’s humanity. Be that as it may, James Baldwin navigated the subject in his short story “Sonny’s Blues” with grace, compounding the narrative with artistic expression. Even though decades later, the “War on Drugs” in America would demonize drug users, Baldwin’s efforts to retain the character’s dignity as a human being showed understanding of social problems as a universal human experience, transcending drug literature as only being a counterculture. Therefore, James Baldwin in “Sonny’s Blues” dramatizes empathy as the figurative bridge between not only two brothers, but also between a person’s suffering and their redemption, by emphasizing forgiveness and compassion as instrumental in the narrative’s resolution.
The most telling aspect of this exploration of redemptive suffering was Baldwin’s usage of motifs and symbols representing Sonny’s struggle. The juxtaposition of light and darkness shows up throughout the story and is demonstrated by the objects, people, and environments surrounding Sonny. When the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” recounted a flashback from childhood, the readers looked at a child “filled with darkness” after the elders had talked about “where they’ve come from, and what they’ve seen, and what’s happened to them and their kinfolk” (Baldwin 58). It was important to contextualize the “darkness” or the pain and trauma that the child–who could have been the narrator, Sonny, or any anonymous child at the time–was experiencing as one that his family has gone through before. Continuing with the scene, the next sentence states that “everytime this happens he is moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about” (Baldwin 58). This passage then is a commentary about the inevitability of suffering and the darkness stemming from generational trauma, especially for the narrator and Sonny who, throughout the story, could not seem to grow out of that deep, dark place that Harlem had thrown them and their family into. Sonny, the more musically-inclined and bohemian of the brothers, felt this just as strongly as the narrator had, and especially considering that, as Clark says, “Sonny is a person who finds his life a living hell, but he knows enough to strive for the ‘light.’ … his quest is for regaining something from the past – from his own childhood and from the pasts of all who have come before him” (203). Sonny’s attempts from trying to escape the neighborhood and his past have led to him confiding to the narrator: “I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside” (Baldwin 55). He is aware of the darkness chasing him; in fact, by sinking into addiction, getting arrested for drug use, and figuratively being dunked into an ice-cold bath of reality’s suffering, Sonny had festered in that darkness for a long while. Even then, he still wanted to try and overcome that darkness, that pain and suffering, by going “outside” towards the “sun.” Darkness was Baldwin’s manifestation of the suffering in the narrative, which the characters struggled against in order to find their inner peace.
Music, then, was the “light” to Sonny’s suffering as the one thing that made life all the more bearable for him and helped him be understood. Throughout the story, music has been described as having light imagery and was all the more important in the climax of the narrative: When the narrator watched Sonny and Creole start playing, the narrator “realizes that this music is important, [that] music is central to the experience of the black experience,” all while he was seated in his dark corner (Clark 204). Later in this scene, the playing of jazz at the club functioned as a “space in which to develop such a conversation, … the unspoken but manifest shared knowledge of the ‘deep water’ of life, of heroin, and of music,” and in this, “Sonny can venture into it and return… [reconciling] his need to be in the world and his tendency to, as he puts it ‘shake to pieces’” (Kowalska 3). Again, the music represents a turning point for the narrator and Sonny to understand each other. All this time, Sonny was looking for a way to cope with life’s troubles, whether it be heroin or music, which was the point that the narrator never quite comprehended before this point. However, the narrator, now that he was forced to process his suffering after his daughter’s death, could clearly see the way that Sonny expresses his grief and the grief of generations before him by leaning into the blues. It was then that the narrator understood why Sonny fought so hard to keep on practicing his craft, that it was Sonny’s way to “make sense of not just his own suffering and joy but of these emotional experiences on a universal human level” (Kowalska 3). Thus, music was the way that Sonny redeemed himself, and for the narrator and Sonny to finally see each other as the same person, fundamentally.
From a narrative standpoint, one can say that Sonny’s tale of struggle and redemption emulates a hero’s journey and, more importantly, the fight against his inner demons. That is to say, Sonny is “a young man who tries to escape from the terrors of his life by creating music. For Sonny, music becomes a haven from the world of violence and drugs that lies outside his Harlem apartment, and it is a passion he tries to share with those whom he loves” (Jones 469). Sonny is the prodigal son–designated not by himself but by the world–and is separated from his home because he cannot reconcile with the pain just yet. This was partly due to the narrator and his family lacking the empathy that Sonny sought, which, coupled with his addiction, impeded him from his revelation through music. However, Sonny comes home and invites the narrator to listen to him play at the club, serving as the culmination of Sonny’s journey and is “crucial to the construction of the artist as a hero, … Finding the courage to listen to his own pain, particularly after avoiding it, is the ultimate achievement of Baldwin’s artist-hero” (Jones 470). It is interesting to note that Baldwin used the character of an artist to show that artistic integrity was key to Sonny changing his destiny, as this artistic integrity allowed even the narrator to feel Sonny’s pain and to seek peace. The drink that the narrator orders Sonny is characteristic of this change of heart, in which “the drink, symbolizing love and understanding between the brothers, is a celebration of the older brother’s recognition of Sonny as an artist” (Jones 474). To see Sonny change to finally embrace his music as his own and to “come home” like Odysseus from his journey is pivotal from the narrator’s view, who was only privy to his narrow machinations of black and white. Therefore, by mutual understanding, Baldwin puts forward the idea that a hero can be one who emerges from the gray.
All in all, with “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin maintains the idea that the darkness associated with drugs and corruption can finally be shunned away by the light of a man who has rekindled his art and is understood fundamentally by those closest to him. The narrative, as a result, moves past being drug literature. “Sonny’s Blues” is also a story about the estrangement of a man from his home and family; in losing his identity, he has lost his home, drifting wherever he can go to escape the suffering. The suffering still lingered of course, but through careful writing, Baldwin eventually led Sonny to find that home was still achievable. How was this possible? Sonny saw that home was where comfort and peace were, where grief and suffering were, where compassion and love were. Hence, Sonny’s story demonstrates that home can be found once again by means of empathy and understanding – by finding where one belongs.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” An Introduction to Fiction, edited by Kennedy and Gioia, 11th edition, Longman, 2009, pp. 51-73.
Clark, Michael. “JAMES BALDWIN’S ‘SONNY’S BLUES’: CHILDHOOD, LIGHT AND ART.” CLA Journal, vol. 29, no. 2, College Language Association, 1985, pp. 197–205, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44322387.
Jones, Jacqueline C. “FINDING A WAY TO LISTEN: THE EMERGENCE OF THE HERO AS AN ARTIST IN JAMES BALDWIN’S ‘SONNY’S BLUES.’” CLA Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, College Language Association, 1999, pp. 462–82, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44323260.
Kowalska, Eva. “Troubled reading: ‘Sonny’s blues’ and empathy.” Literator, vol. 36, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-6. ProQuest, http://library.saintpeters.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/troubled-reading-sonnys- blues-empathy/docview/1707035853/se-2.
Andrade1
Ada I Andrade
Dr. Walonen
EL-208-HP
May 5, 2023
The Story of an Hour: Analysis of the Thematics of Gender
Kate Chopin’s 1894 short story, The Story of an Hour has become one of the most critically acclaimed short stories of her time and remains so to this day. The story follows Mrs. Louise Mallard, who suffers from a “weak heart,” as she is informed that her husband Mr. Brently Mallard has died in a train accident. Mrs. Mallard is overtaken by grief and retires upstairs to her room. Here her health takes a turn for the better as she encounters for the first time the possibility of living for herself. There is a sudden surge of energy within her as the result of this newfound freedom despite the unfortunate death of her husband, and later joins her sister and family friend Richards downstairs. At that moment, her husband walks in, alive and hale. Mrs. Mallard heart fails her, and she dies, of the “joy that kills”. This 19th century short story is among Chopin’s most notable work, where she emphasizes the female perspective and themes of freedom and confinement. Chopin, in The Story of an Hour utilized Mrs. Mallard’s awakening and repressed emotions to critique the encroachment of women’s freedom and identity that is perpetuated and justified by social conventions.
The setting of the story is vague, with details such as the telegram and railroads being mentioned, cluing in that the story takes place in the latter half of the 19th century. The unclear setting of both time and place serves to establish the possibility that the circumstances of the story could happen anywhere to any wife. Which leads to the question, what could be so powerful or so prevalent that it can exist through any space, time or medium? The story hints that such powerful and prevalent force is societal conventions. Western society in the 19th century “mandated the complete dependence of wives on husbands”, which some could take to
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be a more socially accepted “form of slavery” (Basch 349,355). Societal conventions are taught and learnt and while they are not concrete law, they influence the governing institutions. These institutions were fueled by the male-centric idea that women were in fact the weaker sex, incapable of survival without a male figure. Therefore when Mrs. Mallard hears of the news of her husband’s death there is a realization that she has a newfound freedom that she never had before.
Women in this society tend to have limited roles, they are confined to the domestic roles of daughter, wife, and mother. The very fact that Louise Mallard had never even thought that such freedom was possible in her life is demonstrated when she “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” and when she expressed that now that her husband has died “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” (Chopin 583). This “powerful will” that others impose can be attributed to societal conventions which weaken the individual and in fact prevent any sort of genuine interaction. Societal conventions and expectations are akin to following a script for a play, every situation has a rule and expected outcome and any deviation from that is frowned upon. It could also be argued that if every situation and role in society is defined, especially for women, then no real individual exists if their will and freedom is being imposed on by empty conventions.
Yet it is not only in private that Mrs. Mallards free will and individuality is encroached by the reach of society: “so insistent is this artificial life of empty conventions for Mrs. Mallard that it tries to assert itself even after its barriers are broken, as she sits in her room and begins to comprehend the freedom that awaits her as a widow: ‘She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will’ ”(Jamil 216). Here it is posited that despite relishing her newfound
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freedom, her first instinct is to subdue it, due to the ingrained societal conventions that have been taught to her and are prevalent in her surrounding society and company. In her own home by herself she is not able to be free of these expectations, there is no relief or space for her individuality to express itself or bloom since it has been stifled for so long that it has impaired.
Societal conventions seemed to have the final say on all types of roles and institutions in western society, and the institution of marriage is no exception, and it is particularly highlighted in the short story. Mrs. Mallard, in speaking about her alleged late husband expressed that “she had loved him-sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! Why could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest pulse of her being” (Chopin 583). Here Mrs. Mallard, despite having some affection for her husband, cannot find that her grief or love for him in any way or form can match the new surge of free will and autonomy that his death has produced. It might seem puzzling at first as to why Mrs. Mallard feels what she feels at the end of her marriage and beginning of widowhood, but it is “because her husband, the source of her suppressed and repressed emotions, suddenly seems to have disappeared, her bottled emotions gush out to taste freedom just as the world of nature (“the sounds, the scents, the color that that fills the air”) breaks out spontaneously” (Jamil, 218). There is no indication given that Mr. Mallard was a despicable man or that their marriage was a disaster; in fact, he was described as quite pleasant. Yet it is not Mr. Mallard that is the issue here but rather what he represents. Mr. Mallard represents a male-centric society, where the man is the provider and a woman’s worth was almost exclusively tied to the central male figure in her life usually a father or husband.
In this point in time women; whether poor or wealthy, were still relegated to these domestic positions in society and so Mr. Mallard; despite being a loving husband, was
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complicit in the institution that suppresses the will and identity of women. At the time, women were under “coverture,” where both husband and wife were one person legally. “Thus, all women’s rights were essentially swallowed by their husbands” (Maddock). Society and the government had this idea that marriage and motherhood was the ultimate happiness and satisfaction a woman could achieve, that it was enough to cover all their needs and wants. Yet Mrs. Mallard herself feels hollow and unfulfilled, love was not enough to fill, marriage was seen as two halves’ becoming one, when it is two individuals choosing to walk side by side. And so, in an unfulfilled marriage, she is trapped in an unstimulating environment that deprives her of any individuality and growth.
With the death of Mr. Mallard, Mrs. Mallard has a spiritual awakening or rebirth, that for that moment in time frees her from the societal obligations that come with being a woman. Until now Mrs. Mallard, like many women of her seems to have only been defined by the status of daughter and wife and eventually mother. These are the only roles that society has deemed fit for women as caretakers and wards, not individuals. The status of daughter, wife and mother all have a connotation of dependency on others, particularly men. Leaving women with the impression that their life is only of value if they are attached to a male figure. As a daughter she is attached to her father, as a wife to her husband and a mother to her children, effectively being in a position of servitude from birth to death. It appears that
Mrs. Mallard seems to realize it’s impossible for her to keep both her spirit and body free in the traditional society. After the sudden death, Mrs. Mallard gains the eternal spiritual freedom, melting into the universe. To some extent, she is not tragic and has taken fate in her own hands, making the supreme mastery over her destiny. From this point of view, maybe the doctor’s diagnosis is right that Mrs. Mallard did die of joy, but the delight is not from the good news that her husband is still alive, but from the death in which she acquires an immortal freedom. (Wan 169)
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Chopin decides to end the story with Mrs. Mallard dying after seeing her husband alive. The ironic ending serves to demonstrate that in society, women’s individuality is treated as a cruel joke, with no way out save death. With Mrs. Mallard’s death, she becomes a tragic martyr representing all those women confined by the institution of the patriarchy.
There are three deaths within the story. First the alleged death of Mr. Mallard, followed quickly by the death of Mrs. Mallards’ passiveness, and then finally the death of Mrs. Mallard. Her death was the most impactful of all, as it sends a clear message that patriarchy will prevail if they continue suppress the free will and identity of women, because despite the end of Mrs. Mallard’s passiveness, it was not enough to heal years of smothering that rendered her heart weak. Yet despite how short-lived Mrs. Mallard’s true self and autonomous life was, it is still valid and beautiful, as the saying goes “nothing gold can stay,” but for that moment she rebelled against her patriarchal society. In two ways the irony in her death proves to be symbolic. She in the public sphere among her family and friends dies as devoted wife of the “joy that kills” seeing her husband alive and well, which immortalizes her in the patriarchy like a saint. But in private, she is more of an unexpected martyr for a freedom that she; for a few moments, could feel. Mrs. Mallard represents the common woman who is confined in every which way by a society that has rendered her inferior to men.
It is not until the death of her husband that Mrs. Mallard can comprehend that there is a future that belong to her, prior to this she was in a passive state, aimlessly living with no real sense of autonomy or self. The death of Mr. Mallard forces Mrs. Mallard to awaken her as an individual at first unconsciously and then with comprehension. Mrs. Mallard is “roused from her passivity by an uncontrollable flood of emotion. This “storm” that “haunt[s] her body and seem[s] to reach into her soul” (193) ultimately purges her of the sufferance of a meaningless life, as it becomes the impetus for the revelation that leads to her new freedom”
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(Jamil, 216). This awakening was unconscious at first, as if her own body and soul realized her freedom before she did. If this is so, then it must have also been aware that her free will and identity was being suppressed before Mrs. Mallard was consciously aware of the fact and in “purging her repressed emotions, she awakens to all the individual elements of her natural environment…Because her emotions are no longer bottled… they teach her of the particular combination of attributes within her soul that make her a unique individual. Clearly, her new emotional freedom leads to the awakening of her mind” (Jamil, 217). This awakening of her mind serves to awaken the real Mrs. Mallard, the one that does not have to answer to anyone but herself, who is autonomous and independent.
If the previous repression of emotions and free will was not conscious, then what can it be attributed to? Mrs. Mallard had lived in the same house and must have been in the same room countless times before and heard all the sounds outside her window repeatedly, yet why until now did she not have such an emotive response? At some point, the oppression from society longer needs to have a heavy hand and the individual submits to the exhaustion. And so, it is societal conventions and norms that suppress and subdue the individual, particularly women but it is the emotions and sentiments that reawaken the individual with clarity.
Considering all of this, Chopin used Mrs. Mallard’s moment of anguish and liberation to critique society’s oppression of women’s free will and identity. Mrs. Mallard’s passive nature is overtaken by her emotional and mental awakening at the death of her husband who symbolizes the patriarchy and societal conventions that do not allow women to be individuals. Effectively utilizing Mrs. Mallard as a martyr to emphasize the oppressed nature of the 19th-century woman. Ultimately leaving a testament that society and its institutions act against the interest of women.
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Works Cited
Basch, Norma. ‘Invisible Women: The Legal Fiction of Marital Unity in Nineteenth Century America.’ Domestic Relations and Law, DE GRUYTER SAUR, 1992, pp. 132–152, https://doi.org10.1515/978
Chopin, Kate. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Edited by Kelly J. Mays and W. W. Norton, 2022, pp. c582–584.
Jamil, S. Selina. “Emotions in the Story of an Hour.” The Explicator 67.3 (2009): 215-220.
Maddock, Nicole. “Feminism in the 19th Century.” Study.com , https://study.com/learn/lesson/feminism 19th-century- womens-rights-roles-limitations.html.
Wan, Xuemei. “Kate Chopin’s View on Death and Freedom in” The Story of an Hour”.” English Language Teaching 2.4 (2009): 167-170.3110968941.132.
