APPENDIX
A
Writing Literary Arguments

When you write an essay about literature, you have a number of options. For example, you can write a response (expressing your reactions to a poem, play, or story), or you can write an explication (focusing on a work’s individual elements, such as a poem’s imagery, meter, figurative language, and diction). You can also write an analysis of a work’s theme, a character in a play or a story, or a work’s historical or cultural context. Another option, which is discussed in the pages that follow, is to write a literary argument.

What Is a Literary Argument?

When you write a literary argument, you do more than just respond to, explicate, or analyze a work of literature. When you develop a literary argument, you take a position about a literary work (or works), support that position with evidence, and refute possible opposing arguments. You might, for example, take the position that a familiar interpretation of a well-known work is limited in some way, that a work’s impact today is different from its impact when it was written, or that two apparently very different works have some significant similarities.

It is important to understand that not every essay about literature is a literary argument. For example, you might use a discussion of Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” with its sympathetic portrait of a young mother during the Great Depression, to support an argument in favor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansion of social welfare programs. Alternatively, you might use Martín Espada’s poem “Why I Went to College” to support your own decision to continue your education. However, writing a literary argument involves much more than discussing a literary work in order to support a particular position or referring to a character to shed light on your own intellectual development or to explain a choice you made. A literary argument takes a stand about a work (or works) of literature.

Stating an Argumentative Thesis

When you develop an argumentative thesis about literature, your goal is to state a thesis that has an edge—one that takes a stand on your topic. Like any effective thesis, the thesis of a literary argument should be clearly worded and specific; it should also be more than a statement of fact.

INEFFECTIVE THESIS (TOO GENERAL)	In “A&P,” Sammy faces a difficult decision.
EFFECTIVE THESIS (MORE SPECIFIC)	Sammy’s decision to quit his job reveals more about the conformist society in which “A&P” is set than about Sammy himself.
INEFFECTIVE THESIS (STATES A FACT)	The theme of Hamlet is often seen as an Oedipal conflict.
EFFECTIVE THESIS (TAKES A STAND)	Although many critics have identified an Oedipal conflict in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s play is also a story of a young man who is struggling with familiar problems—love, family, and his future.

Here are three possible thesis statements that you could support in a literary argument:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” usually seen as a feminist story, is actually a ghost story.
The two characters in August Strindberg’s play The Stronger seem to be rivals for the affection of a man, but they are really engaged in a professional rivalry to see who gives the better performance.
Although many readers might see Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” as the more powerful poem because of its graphic imagery of war, Carl Sandburg’s understated “Grass” is likely to have a greater impact on modern readers, who have been overexposed to violent images.

(For more on developing a thesis statement, see Chapter 7.)

Choosing Evidence

Like any argument, a literary argument relies on evidence. Some of this evidence can be found in the literary work itself. For example, to make a point about a character’s antisocial behavior, you would cite specific examples of such behavior from the work. To make a point about a poet’s use of biblical allusions, you would present examples of such allusions from the poem.

Evidence can also come from literary criticism—scholarly articles by experts in the field that analyze and evaluate works of literature. For example, to argue that a particular critical theory is inaccurate, outdated, or oversimplified, you would quote critics who support that theory before you explain why you disagree with their interpretation. (For more on evaluating potential sources for your essay, see Chapter 8.)

Writing a Literary Argument

The structure of a literary argument is similar to the structure of any other argument: it includes a thesis statement in the introduction, supporting evidence, refutation of opposing arguments, and a strong concluding statement. However, unlike other arguments, literary arguments follow specific conventions for writing about literature:

In your essay’s first paragraph, include the author’s full name and the title of each work you are discussing.
Use present tense when discussing events in works of literature. For example, if you are discussing “I Stand Here Ironing,” you would say, “The mother worries [not worried] about her ability to provide for her child.” There are two exceptions to this rule. Use past tense when referring to historical events: “The Great Depression made things difficult for mothers like the narrator.” Also use past tense to refer to events that came before the action described in the work: “The mother is particularly vulnerable because her husband left her alone to support her children.”
Italicize titles of plays and novels. Put titles of poems and short stories in quotation marks.
If you quote more than four lines of prose (or more than three lines of poetry), indent the entire quotation one inch from the left-hand margin. Do not include quotation marks, and add the parenthetical documentation after the end punctuation. Introduce the quotation with a colon, and do not add extra line spaces above or below it.
When mentioning writers and literary critics in the body of your essay, use their full names (“Emily Dickinson”) the first time you mention them and their last names only (“Dickinson,” not “Miss Dickinson” or “Emily”) after that.
Use MLA documentation style in your paper, and include a works-cited list. (See Chapter 10 for information on MLA documentation.)
In your in-text citations (set in parentheses), cite page numbers for stories, act and scene numbers for plays, and line numbers for poems. Use the word line or lines for the first in-text citation of lines from each poem. After the first citation, you may omit the word line or lines.

The following literary argument, “Confessions of a Misunderstood Poem: An Analysis of ‘The Road Not Taken,’” takes a stand in favor of a particular way of interpreting poetry.

MEGAN MCGOVERN
CONFESSIONS OF A MISUNDERSTOOD POEM: AN ANALYSIS OF “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN”

In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins suggests that rather than dissecting a poem to find its meaning, students should use their imaginations to experience poetry. According to Collins, they should “drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out” (lines 5–6). However, Collins overstates his case when he implies that analyzing a poem to find out what it might mean is a brutal or deadly process, comparable to tying the poem to a chair and “beating it with a hose” (15). Rather than killing a poem’s spirit, a careful and methodical dissection can often help the reader better appreciate its subtler meanings. In fact, with patient coaxing, a poem often has much to “confess.” One such poem is Robert Frost’s familiar but frequently misunderstood “The Road Not Taken.” An examination of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” reveals a complex and somewhat troubling message about the arbitrariness of our life choices and our need to idealize those choices.1

On the surface, Frost’s poem seems to have a fairly simple meaning. The poem’s speaker talks about coming to a fork in the road and choosing the “less-traveled” path. Most readers see the fork in the road as a metaphor: the road represents life, and the fork represents an individual’s choices in life. By following the less-traveled road, the speaker is choosing the less conventional—and supposedly more emotionally rewarding route. At the end of the poem, the speaker indicates his satisfaction when he says his choice “made all the difference” (line 20). However, Frost himself, referring to “The Road Not Taken,” advised readers “‘to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem very tricky,’” encouraging readers not to accept the most appealing or obvious interpretation (qtd. in Savoie 7–8). Literary critic Bojana Vujin urges readers to look for “poetic booby traps such as irony or deceit” in this poem and to enjoy the pleasures and rewards of discovering instances of “deliberate deceit on the poet’s part” (195). In fact, after the speaker’s tone and word choice are carefully examined, the poem’s message seems darker and more complicated than it did initially.2

The speaker’s tone in the first three stanzas suggests indecision, regret, and, ultimately, lack of power. Rather than bravely facing the choice between one common path and one uncommon path, the speaker spends most of the poem considering two seemingly equal roads, “sorry” not to be able to “travel both” (2). Even after choosing “the other” road in line 6, the speaker continues for two more stanzas to weigh his options. The problem is that the two roads are, in fact, indistinguishable. As several critics have observed, “the difference between the two roads, at least when it comes to the amount of treading they have been exposed to, is but an illusion: “‘they both that morning equally lay’ and neither is particularly travelled by” (Vujin 197). The roads are worn “really about the same” (10). If there is virtually no difference between the two, then why does Frost draw our attention to this fork in the road this seemingly critical moment of choice? If Frost had wanted to dramatize a meaningful decision, the roads would be different in some significant way.3

One critic, Frank Lentricchia, argues that Frost is demonstrating “‘that our life-shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control’” (qtd. in Savoie 13). Similarly, another critic contends that Frost wants his readers “to feel his characters’ inner conflicts and to feel as conflicted as his characters, who are all too often lost in themselves” (Plunkett). These two critical views help to explain the speaker’s indecision in the first three stanzas. The speaker impulsively chooses “the other” road but cannot accept the arbitrariness of his choice; therefore, he cannot stop considering the first road. He exclaims in the third stanza, “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” (13). In the next two lines, when he finally gives up the possibility of following that first road, he predicts, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back” (14–15). Here, the speaker further demonstrates a lack of control over his own decisions. He describes a future guided not by his own active, meaningful choices but rather by some arbitrary force. In a world where “way leads on to way,” he is a passive traveler, not a decisive individualist.4

Given the indecision that characterizes the previous stanzas, the poem’s last two lines are surprisingly decisive: “I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference” (19–20). Is the speaker contradicting himself? How has he suddenly become clear about the rightness of his decision? In fact, the last stanza does not make sense unless the reader perceives the irony in the speaker’s tone. The speaker is imagining himself in the future, “ages and ages hence,” telling the story of his moment at the crossroads (17). He imagines how he will, in hindsight, give his choice meaning and clarity that it did not have at the time. As Vujin argues, the poem’s speaker is already “mythologizing his self and his life” (198). The narrator, rather than anticipating the satisfaction that will come from having made the right and braver choice, is anticipating rewriting his own life story to make sense of an ultimately arbitrary chain of events. Vujin explains, “This is not a poem about individuality; this is a poem about self-deceit and the rewriting of one’s own history” (198). Reading the last stanza ironically allows readers to make sense of the poem as a whole.5

There are many possible interpretations of “The Road Not Taken,” most of which can be supported with evidence from the poem itself. However, to understand these interpretations, readers need to take the poem apart, look at how its parts fit together, and reach a thoughtful and logical conclusion. To do so, readers must go against some of Billy Collins’s well-meaning advice and be willing to tie the poem—and themselves—to a chair: to read it carefully, ask questions, and stay with it until it confesses.6

Work Cited

Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry.” Sailing Alone around the Room. Random House, 1998, p. 16.

Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” Mountain Interval. Henry Holt, 1920, Bartleby.com, www.bartleby.com/119/1.html.

Plunkett, Adam. “Robert Frost Was Neither Light Nor Dark.” New Republic, 13 Jun. 2014, newrepublic.com/article/118046/art-robert-frost-tim-kendall-reviewed-adam-plunkett.

Savoie, John. “A Poet’s Quarrel: Jamesian Pragmatism and Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’” New England Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5–24. Academic Search Premier, www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-premier.

Vujin, Bojana. “‘I Took the Road Less Traveled By’: Self-Deception in Frost’s and Eliot’s Early Poetry.” Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 195–203.

The following literary argument, “Not Just a ‘Girl,’” argues against the commonly held position that a key character in the 1925 Ernest Hemingway short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is a stereotype.

LOREN MARTINEZ
NOT JUST A “GIRL”

In Ernest Hemingway’s famous story “Hills Like White Elephants,” a couple, “the American and the girl with him,” talk and drink while waiting for a train to Madrid (Hemingway 69). Most readers agree that the subject of their discussion is whether “the girl,” called Jig, should have an abortion. Most of the story is told through dialogue, and although the word abortion is never mentioned, most readers agree that the pregnancy is the source of the tension between them. However, there are other aspects of the story about which readers do not agree. For example, some critics believe that Hemingway’s portrayal of “the girl” is unfair or sexist. More specifically, some see in her the qualities of “the typically submissive Hemingway woman” (Nolan 19). However, a close reading of the story reveals the opposite to be true: “the girl” is not a one-dimensional stereotype but a complex, sympathetically drawn character.1

Most critics who see Hemingway’s portrayal of Jig as sexist base their interpretation on Hemingway’s reputation and not on the story itself. For example, feminist critic Katherine M. Rogers points out that because Hemingway himself “openly expressed fear of and hostility to women” (263), it “seems fair” to see his male characters “as representative of Hemingway himself” (248). However, although “the American” in this story may see Jig as just “a pleasant pastime,” it would be an oversimplification to confuse the character’s opinion of her with the writer’s as Rogers would encourage us to do (251). For example, one could argue (as many critics have done) that because the name “Jig” has sexual connotations, it reveals the author’s sexism (Renner 38). However, as critic Howard Hannum points out, she is referred to by this name only twice in the story, both times by the male character himself, not by the narrator (qtd. in Renner 38). Critic Stanley Renner agrees with Hannum, rejecting the idea that Hemingway’s choice to refer to the character as “the girl” is equally “belittling” (38). Renner argues that this use of the word girl is necessary to show how the character changes and matures in this story. In fact, he sees “her achievement of mature self-knowledge and assertion [as] the main line of development in the story” (39). All in all, the evidence suggests that “the girl,” not “the American,” is actually the story’s protagonist. Given this central focus on “the girl” and the complexity of her character, the accusations that Hemingway’s sexism has led him to create a stereotype do not seem justified.2

When students who are not familiar with Hemingway’s reputation as a misogynist read “Hills Like White Elephants,” they tend to sympathize more often with “the girl” than with “the American” (Bauer 126) and to see the female character’s thoughtfulness and depth. Although “the American” refers to the abortion as “‘really an awfully simple operation’” (Hemingway 72), downplaying its seriousness, “the girl” has a “more mature understanding” of what her decision might mean (Bauer 130). She recognizes that it is not so “simple,” and she is not naive enough to think that having the baby will save the relationship. In fact, she responds to his own naive comments with sarcasm. He claims that they will be “‘all right and happy’” if she goes through with the operation; he says he’s “‘known lots of people who have done it.’ ‘So have I,’ said the girl. ‘And afterward they were all so happy’” (Hemingway 73). Despite her sarcasm and her resistance to his suggestions, the man continues to insist that this problem will be easy to fix. Finally, the girl becomes irritated with him and, as readers can see by the dashes that end his lines midsentence, cuts him off, finishing his lines for him as he tries to tell her again how “perfectly simple” the operation is (Hemingway 76). Readers understand her pain and frustration when she finally says, “‘Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?’” (Hemingway 76).3

The argument that “the girl” is a flat, stereotypical character portrayed in sexist terms is hard to support. In fact, a stronger argument could be made that it is the man, “the American,” who is the stereotype. As critic Charles J. Nolan Jr. points out, “Hemingway highlights Jig’s maturity and superiority as he excoriates the selfishness and insensitivity of her companion” (19). Moreover, “the girl” is certainly the central character in this story—the one in conflict, the one who must make the final decision, and the one who grows over the course of the story. At times, she seems willing to listen to the man, even going so far as to say, “‘Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me’” (Hemingway 74). However, soon after, she responds defiantly to his comment, “‘You mustn’t feel that way’” with “‘I don’t feel any way’” (Hemingway 75). Thus, as Renner notes, Hemingway’s dialogue reveals “the self-centered motives of his male character” while at the same time dramatizing the female character’s complex inner struggle (38). By the end of the story, the shallow “American” still expects things to be all right between them. But when the man asks, “‘Do you feel better?’” Hemingway shows the girl’s quiet power—and her transformation—by giving her the final understated words of the story: “‘I feel fine…. There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine’” (Hemingway 77). Although we do not learn what her decision is, we can see that she is now in control: she has decided to shut down the conversation, and what the man has to say no longer matters.4

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” “the girl” proves herself to be neither “‘weak in character’” nor “‘weak as character’” as some have described Hemingway’s female characters (Bauer 126). Far from being weak in character, she constantly questions and pushes against the male character’s suggestions. And far from being weak as a character, she acts as the protagonist in this story, winning the reader’s sympathies. A stereotypically drawn female character would not be able to carry off either of these feats. Although Hemingway may demonstrate sexism in his other stories—and demonstrate it in his own life—readers who evaluate this story will discover a complex, conflicted, sympathetic female character.5

Work Cited

Bauer, Margaret D. “Forget the Legend and Read the Work: Teaching Two Stories by Ernest Hemingway.” College Literature, vol. 30, no. 3, 2003, pp. 124–37. Academic Search Premier, www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-premier.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Men without Women. Charles Scribner’s, 1927, pp. 69–77.

Nolan, Charles J., Jr. “Hemingway’s Women’s Movement.” Hemingway Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1984, pp. 14–22. Academic Search Premier, www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-premier.

Renner, Stanley. “Moving to the Girl’s Side of ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’” Hemingway Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 1995, pp. 27–41. Academic Search Premier, www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-premier.

Rogers, Katherine M. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. U of Washington P, 1996.