Conflicting Lenses

In basic physics classes, high school students spend a unit learning about how light is reflected or absorbed by objects.  Students learn that the appearance of those objects can be altered by examining them through different lenses and filters.  For example, an object that normally is cyan will appear to be blue when seen through a green filter.  Using a green and blue filter to view the same object will make it appear black.

The lenses of literary criticism function in a similar way:  they alter the perspective of the reader by allowing him or her to see the text in a new light.  A commonly used example when introducing the concept of lenses is The Lion King.  To the layman The Lion King is a sweet movie about a lion cub and his friends overcoming obstacles together, but flip on a couple of lenses and the same story could be making bold statements about societal economic class structure or gender roles.

As with physical lenses and filters, multiple literary lenses can be used simultaneously to examine a text without coming into conflict with one another.  For example, in Ray Bradbury's  The Veldt, which tells the story of two children who take control of a futuristic "smart house" to murder their parents, utilizing both the feminist and Marxist lenses together yields an interesting result.  Through the feminist lens, the story seems to be a warning against the arrogance and destructive force that is created by male power structures, with the father as the patriarch and the mother and children as his subjects.  The Marxist lens suggests that the children, representing the Proletariat, are destined to overthrow the parents, as the Bourgeois, who attempt to use a coercive system of technologies and arbitrary rules to suppress them.  Put together, the two competing power structures blend, with the father becoming the active suppressor in the Bourgeois and the mother serving as his passive follower who is devoid of power.

The Veldt also shows that a lens can be used independently in stories where other non-mutually exclusive interpretations exist.  The psychoanalytic lens is very applicable to the story; there are many instances where the children are seen exhibiting primitive behavior (id), the parents are the idealists (superego), and the psychologist attempts to mediate between the two (ego).  This interpretation is able to stand on its own and retain full credibility, proving that interaction between lenses is not necessary in literary criticism, even when such interaction is possible.

Finally, The Veldt gives an example of a competing interpretations, as one possible method of interpretation partially rejects the others.  The protagonists repeatedly cite a disconnect from true nature in The Veldt as a significant problem, creating a window to use an ecocritical lens.  However, ecocriticism rejects a cornerstone of many other literary lenses in its focus on real world practicality.  In her book What is Nature?, Kate Soper writes, "It isn't language which has a hole in its ozone layer."  By rejecting constructionist ideology, ecocriticism enters into conflict with the other potential interpretations of the story.

Just by examining one short story, we are able to identify three possibilities of how lenses may interact.  The lenses may build off of each other and be constructive to examine together, a lens may function independently, or lenses may present competing and non compatible interpretations.  In physics, this would mean two lenses revealing a color that wasn't identifiable before, a single lens separating one color from the spectrum, or multiple lenses filtering out all color when used together (respectively).  In literary criticism, replace each "color" in the previous sentence with "interpretation," and you'll have the idea.