Everything ranging from art to literature to perhaps the most trivial of things are capable of being interpreted to mean anything, depending on what the reader wants to see. A particularly relevant example are the books that we just got through reading these past few months. Huckleberry Finn and Song of Solomon both have many strong societal focuses, whether it regard race, gender, class, and so on. It is just a matter of which focus one chooses to prioritize in the reading that could completely change the messages of the book.
While I read these books, I focused on the two authors’ attitudes towards gender roles in their contextual societies, which gave me a pretty good look at how the issue might have been represented during that time period in reality. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s message was more along the lines of the fact that gender roles are not inherent; rather they are learned, and the women in society who are constantly penalized for their femininity are really the only ones who pick up on this fact. In contrast, Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon focuses more on the aspect of how men specifically are entitled to their superior positions entirely on the sole basis that they are men.
By focusing on this lens, I was able to really open my mind to how gender issues are represented and pull out the author’s opinions on them, without getting distracted by other ideas, which at many times appear far more distinct than the one that I am looking for. The downside to a single focus is I end up only hearing about one thing and ignoring all of the other viewpoints and issues that the author is trying to make a statement about. I think that in order to really get the most out of a text, a reader would have to read it multiple times with different singular focuses each time. That way they can analyze the text without distractions, and still not miss any other important statements that the text may contain.
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