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-From “Writing Short Stories”, Flannery O’Connor [1969]
Theme in fiction is discoverable to the extent that we are willing as critics to subject its various elements – its “every word” – to the process of analysis and interpretation.
Three more important points about themes in fiction need to be made. First of all, theme may be less prominent and less fully developed in some works of fiction than in others. This is especially true in the case of detective, gothic, and adventure fiction, where the author wants primarily to entertain by reducing mystification, inducing chills and nightmare, or engaging the reader in a series of exciting, fast-moving incidents.
Such works may not have a demonstrable theme at all, at least in the sense in which we have defined the term. To identify the theme of a detective story with the idea that “crime doesn’t pay” is not only to confuse theme with moral, but in all probability to misinterpret where the author has chosen to place the work’s emphasis. One must, however, be careful. Many works of humor and satire – for example, short stories like Samuel L. Clemens’ The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and novels like Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt – while they make us smile, and perhaps laugh, do have thematic content and offer the reader significant, and in Lewis’s case serious, insights into modern and contemporary life. Much the same thing is often true of gothic fiction, where, in the hands of genuine artists like Poe, Faulkner, and Carlos Fuentes, melodrama and terror are used not for their sake but to probe the recesses of the human soul.
Second, it is entirely possible that intelligent readers and critics will differ at times radically, on just what the theme of a given work is. It is on the basis of such disagreements that the reputations of literary critics are frequently made, or discredited. Critical disagreements often occur when the elements of the work are arranged in a way that yields two or more acceptable, yet mutually exclusive, statements. A case in point is Young Goodman Brown Hawthorne’s story of a young Puritan who leaves his wife of three months (appropriately named Eaith) and embarks on a nighttime journey into the forest to keep a prearranged appointment with the Devil. As he makes his way through the woods, first alone and then in the company of a stranger (presumably the Devil) who resembles his own father, Goodman Brown becomes increasingly convinced that his fellow townspeople, and finally even Faith, are members of the Devil’s unholy communion. The story climaxes in a lurid rite of initiation, in which Goodman Brown cries out: “My Faith is gone!... There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name. Come Devil! For to thee is the world given.”
In the aftermath, Brown’s faith is destroyed; he shrinks from the bosom of his wife and goes to his grave convinced that “Evil is the nature of mankind.” The final theme of the story, however, is anything but clear. Hawthorne’s tale is made deliberately ambiguous through the use of a limited omniscient point of view: the narrator refuses to commit himself as to whether what Goodman Brown thinks he sees is reality happening or whether it is merely the figment of Brown’s distorted imagination.
As a result, the story has been analyzed by its various critics to yield a multitude of possible themes, all of them plausibly rooted in the facts of the story as the critics have interpreted those facts. Some have accepted Goodman Brown’s own interpretation as the definitive statement of Hawthorne’s theme; others have argued that Hawthorne is attempting to illustrate the failure of belief and the effects of moral skepticism. The story has also been variously interpreted as an attack on the hypocrisy of Puritan society, as an attack on Calvinistic theology, and as a psychoanalytic study of arrested sexual development that has nothing at all to do with the question of religious faith. Nor does Hawthorne’s story stand alone as an extreme of protracted (and, one might add, finally inconclusive) literary debates.
Third, and last, the theme of a given work need not be in accord with the reader’s particular beliefs and values. On those grounds many of us would surely object to a reading of Hawthorne’s story that determines its theme to be the assertion that mankind is inherently evil and goodness is an illusion. To be sure, we are under no obligation as readers to accept a story’s theme as it is presented to us, especially if we believe that it violates the truth of our own experience and that of others. But we must remember that although literature is full of ideas that may strike us, at least initially, as unpleasant, controversial, or simply wrong-headed, literary sophistication and plain common sense should warn us against dismissing them out of hand. Stories such as Hawthorne’s survive, in part at least, because of the fresh and startling ideas and insights they offer. Such ideas and insights have the power to liberate our minds and our imaginations and to cause us to reflect critically about our own values, beliefs, and assumptions. At the very least, before rejecting an author’s ideas, we owe it to the author and to ourselves to make certain that we understand why we reject them.
An author’s ideas, as they are embodied in the theme, may be unconvincing on still other, more important, grounds. An author’s theme may be unconvincing because the work itself fails to substantiate that theme, that is the interplay of the elements of the story as we experience and analyze them may no support or justify the theme that the author apparently wanted us to draw from it. Thus, if the reader can sometimes fail to do full justice to an author, an author may, on occasion, fail equally to do full justice t his reader.
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