Hidden Meaning

Yes, I know I'm getting tiring. But I wanted to write down something that I thought of today in class—very much on the "hidden meaning" wavelength.

The other day I watched a movie adaptation of Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors. In this drama, Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective, sets out to find some missing jewels. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead) He finally does solve the mystery. To do so he must:

1. Figure out that a gibberish letter is really some form of code.
2. Figure out that the code is really a notation for bell patterns in British change ringing.
3. Figure out which of several possible methods might have been used for the change ringing notation
4. Figure out which bell to follow through the changes.
5. Figure out that the code really is writing out two quotations from the Bible.
6. Find the place in the church where those quotations are inscribed.
7. Learn that the church used to have a balcony.
8. Climb up to the place where the inscription indicated, and finally
9. Figure out what to open up once he got up there.

THAT'S a hidden meaning! To unlock it, one had to be a trained bell-ringer AND have lived in the parish when there was a balcony twenty years previously AND known that the bell to follow was named "Tailor Paul." (Not to mention having a certain familiarity with the Bible.)

Many of my students write as if poems and plays worked much the same way. No—it's not like Indiana Jones or National Treasure. It's more like a letter from your mother, mentioning things that make you both happy. Or maybe like someone visiting a zoo and seeing a lot of animals that remind him of frightening predators, then moving on to wonder whether a good God could create things that eat small animals.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could form thy fearful symmetry?

Well maybe that's more obscure than "I looked at the tiger and wondered if God could make something that scary." But Blake's poem isn't hidden. Just deep.

Hidden meaning

This is one of those phrases that makes most literature teachers cringe: the "hidden meaning" of the piece. It's as if we were in an episode of Indiana Jones. The straightforward meaning of the story or poem might be about romantic love, but there's a "hidden meaning" (only available to the high priests who have gone through certain rituals) that has to do with something totally different.

The whole idea makes me a bit ill, but when I think of it, I've got to admit that the "hidden meaning" idea makes a bit of sense.

We look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "I like to see it lap the miles," and ask, "What is IT?" Students say "racing car" or "river." I point out that racing cars hadn't been invented when Dickinson was alive. I guess that's hidden meaning because I looked up her dates on Wikipedia. I ask whether rivers are "punctual" or "peer in shanties" and the students think I'm making something up.

There is a kind of student paper that says, "What the author was trying to say is ..."

Take it as a fact: most of these authors were actually pretty good at saying stuff. That's how they made it into the textbooks. And the stuff they were saying isn't something that's only for the high priests. It's for everyone. Everyone who will read carefully and look at a dictionary, that is.

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.