Some notes on themes

Friday's quizzes were still a bit weak, mainly in part c: identify the thematic significance of this passage...

A theme, remember, is a recurring question or problem in a text. You could say that a theme is what a text is about. Themes shouldn't be vague: for example, "marriage" is not a theme but a concept. If you ask questions about that concept, you might come closer to a thematic preoccupation of Middlemarch; for example, you might say that one theme of the novel is the role played by marriage in connecting the individual to his or her social obligations. This could be phrased as a question: when Dorothea and Rosamond get married, how do their relationships to their premarital social networks change? This could be phrased as a problem: what role does marriage play in reinforcing artificial social structures that are more in need of reform than of reaffirmation?

No text is about only one thing, so there is lots of flexibility here: thinking just about the concept of marriage in Middlemarch we can see that it touches on dozens of thematic questions and problems:

1. What role does marriage play in undermining or reinforcing individual agency?
2. How does marriage reveal the power differential between men and women in Middlemarch?
3. How does marriage shape our understanding of personal history? (For example, how do we see Lydgate's failed pursuit of Laure once he is married to Rosamond?)
4. How is marriage produced? (This was the subject of Prof. Ortiz-Robles's lecture last Tuesday.)
5. What role does marriage play in the social network?
6. How does marriage undermine -- or how is it undermined by -- the web of affinities that span across or between marriages? (E.g. Dorothea and Will, or Lydgate and Farebrother.)
7. How does marriage change our understanding of class dynamics? (Consider the number of cross-class marriages that pre-exist in the text: the Vincys, the Cadwalladers, the Garths.)

Last semester, my students pointed me toward a fairly straightforward trick for transforming a wide concept ("marriage" or "class") into a narrow theme: connect one concept to another ("How does marriage explain class change or class reform?").

Every paper, hebdomadal, quiz and exam essay you write must demonstrate your familiarity with thematic analysis: you should be able to connect nearly any sentence from Middlemarch or nearly any line from "In Memoriam" to a theme from that text. Your paper due this Friday is, in essence, an exploration of a single textual theme or -- in some cases -- an exploration of themes from two texts that connect together. To be able to write articulately about a text, you should be able to say what that text is about -- or, at least, one problem that text is trying to solve.