Through the Looking Glass

As I mentioned in my previous post, Showtime!, we are currently reading Hamlet in my senior English class. In order to enhance our study of the play, we have been learning about different critical approaches that one can utilize while reading a work of literature. Several of these approaches include feminist, formalist, psychoanalytical, mythological, Marxist, and new historic. We have learned that reading a text from a certain approach can greatly affect the way you perceive the characters and events within a story.

For example, when reading from the mythological approach, King Hamlet’s ghost fulfills the archetype of the “wise old man.” By identifying the ghost as the “wise old man” of the play, the ghost takes on the role of the savior or guru who represents knowledge, reflection, insight, wisdom, and cleverness. If the reader had been looking at the ghost from a different approach, that meaning would be lost and the ghost would just be the spirit of the dead king.

Taking the Critical Approach to Life
Similarly to studying texts using one of these critical approaches, people often view life though a lens, skewing the way that they perceive themselves and others. I’m not saying that everybody looks at life through one lens and can’t ever see things a different way, but people often have certain biases that unconsciously affect the way they think and act, like a reader who has chosen an approach to read through. These lenses can come in different forms, just like critical approaches do, and are shaped by a number of things such as a person’s religion, ethnicity, upbringing, socioeconomic status, and education.

Sharing Lenses
Your identity is largely dependent on the lens that you view life through because as you saw with the ghost in Hamlet, you may perceive a person or event in a way that is completely different than the way somebody else does. There is no “good” or “bad” lens to view life from, it is just important to recognize that not everybody perceives life in the same way. Often times arguments arise because of these differences in perception. One of the best ways to solve these conflicts is to attempt to understand what lens the other person is looking through and try to see things their way, or “take a walk in somebody else’s shoes.” Similarly, it is important to look at a text through a number of different approaches because you never know what you may be missing by looking at it in just one way.