Updated for 2-16-16: "The Other Woman," PEEL Paragraphs, and Sentence Errors

English 1C Essay Options: The Best American Short Stories

You will have an in-class reading exam on the following material on March 8.

Your second typed essay is due on March 10.

Please write the Essay Option Number on top of your essay.

General Principle for Your Writing Assignment Options:

Being a critical thinker means to be able to read anything as a "text."

For example, those Real Housewives shows on Bravo are a text and the central theme is oneupmanship.

A critical thinker not only finds the text's central theme but converts the theme into a thesis. For example:

The Real Housewives television franchise chronicles the horrors of oneupmanship for the voyeuristic viewers' delectation. This oneupmanship results in the loss of empathy, the loss of friendships, the misguided quest for self-validation.

Another example if Facebook. The central theme of Facebook is not connection with others because the connections are compromised or outright false. The real theme of Facebook is Becoming Stupid. A critical thinker takes the theme of Becoming Stupid and converts it into a thesis:

Facebook makes us dumb because our most banal and half-baked thoughts are rewarded and this positive reinforcement results in more half-baked thoughts, addiction to attention, and the despair of making flimsy, false, unsatisfactory connections.

Using the principles of literary analysis for writing paragraphs and thesis statements, develop an argumentative, cause and effect analysis, or extended definition thesis that addresses one or more of the assigned short stories.

When we write literary analysis, we choose on a theme and then we take that theme and convert it into a specific thesis statement.

Option #1 for "The Other Woman": Developing a thesis for the theme of Modernism using cause and effect analysis

The Modernism evident in "The Other Woman" explains our unhinged condition resulting from _______________, __________________, __________________, and ____________________.

Two things you need to know to write the above thesis:

One. What does it mean to be unhinged? (compulsive, beholden to Dionysian forces with no Apollonian counterbalance, no self-knowledge, beholden to a fictitious grandiose self that makes one blind to one's real self, no metacognition; the self is divided so that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing and vice versa.)

Two. What are 4 major causes of the man's unhinged state in the story?

Essay Option #2 for "The Other Woman": The demands of marriage in the story using argumentation

Support or refute the notion that "The Other Woman" evidences that Universal Man's demands for a wife are impossible.

Thesis Template

In the powerful short story "The Other Woman," when we examine the man's needs for a woman, we see that those needs represent Universal Man, and that those needs are impossible, rendering most marriages doomed to misery, evidenced by __________________, __________________, ___________________, and ______________.

What You Need to Know

How are the man's needs in a woman both universal to most men, and how do those needs place impossible demands on women? Some of man's "needs" include trophy wife, Eros, Mom, upper class status and privilege, life coach, life manager, etc.

Essay Option #3 for "The Other Woman": How dualism makes us unhinged (dualism consists of the opposing forces that make the man a conflicted character) Using Extended Definition

In "The Other Woman," the dualism evident in the story reveals a man who has lost his sanity and is unhinged evidenced by ____________________, ____________________, _________________, and ___________________.

What You Need to Know

What is dualism? How does dualism manifest in the main character? In what 4 ways does the dualism show that the man is crazy?

Essay Option #4 for "You're Ugly ,Too" by Lorrie Moore using argumentation

In the context of the story, support, refute, or complicate the argument that for a single woman like Zoe there is a point in which the personality, adapting to being alone with its lack of demands for sacrifice, defies romance and intimacy. In other words, when it comes to relationships, a woman can adapt to her single state and this adaptation, or maladaptation, makes her reach The Point of No Return in which she becomes "undateable." Do you know any such women who compare to Zoe? What process have they gone through that makes it almost impossible for them to connect romantically?

Points to Consider

One. Zoe adapts to loneliness and the lifestyle of no compromise.

Two. Her standards for the type of man who can disrupt her lifestyle continue to elevate till she reaches The Point of No Return.

Three. Her adaptation to loneliness and male troglodytes hungry for the Heidi Myth causes her to develop a prickly facade of irony and cynicism that makes her off-putting and grotesque so that he repels not only the troglodytes but the qualified, good men as well.

Four. Educated men who would otherwise be part of her dating pool find themselves searching for the Heidi Archetype, the bovine, servile ignoramus, rather than an educated, autonomous woman.

Five. Lonely professional women such as Zoe find they are stagnant in a perpetual condition of intellectual pride alternated by bitter despair and this alternating cycle becomes a prison from which they can see no escape, thus defining their abject learned helplessness.

Essay Option #5 for Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf" using argumentation:

Support, refute, or complicate the argument that O'Connor's religious faith, which is so flagrant in the story, does not compromise but in fact strengthens her cautionary tale about the dangers of pride and how those of us mired in pride are a "damned lot" doomed to languish in our own private hell.

Essay Option #6 that compares "Where I'm Calling From" and "You're Ugly, Too" (using comparison and cause and effect analysis)

In a comparison-contrast essay, analyze the theme of maladaptive emotional wall-building, vulnerability, pride, and personal transformation in "Where I'm Calling From" and Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly Too."

Essay Option #7 for "A Country Husband" using cause and effect analysis

Develop a thesis that shows how Cheever's "A Country Husband" is a scathing critique of the American Dream.

Another Essay Option #8 for "A Country Husband" using extended definition

Using Francis Weed as a model, develop an extended definition of he Man-Child (or you can use the Turkish word Muganda).

Essay Option #9 for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" using cause and effect analysis

Develop a thesis that shows how the story is a critique of the Cult of Perpetual Adolescence. You can refer to Joseph Epstein’s “The Perpetual Adolescent” (available online) as a valuable resource to define your term.

Essay Option #10 for "Defender of the Faith" using cause and effect analysis

Develop a thesis that explains the following: Nathan Marx wants us to know that he is world-weary and life-hardened, a man who “has seen it all,” but in fact he has not: He is not prepared to face the insidious evil of the homunculus parasite, Sheldon Grossbart, that kills us gradually, slowly, incrementally, through a thousand cuts. How does this slow death occur?

Another Essay Option #11 for "Defender of the Faith" using cause and effect analysis

In the context of the story, develop a thesis that analyzes the connection between tribalism and entitlement and how this connection clashes with individual morality.

Review the Principle of Critical Thinking and Identifying a Theme

Being a critical thinker means to be able to read anything as a "text."

For example, those Real Housewives shows on Bravo are a text and the central theme is oneupmanship, trying to outdo everyone else in a form of ruthless Darwinian competition.

A critical thinker not only finds the text's central theme but converts the theme into a thesis. For example:

The Real Housewives television franchise chronicles the horrors of oneupmanship for the voyeuristic viewers' delectation. This oneupmanship results in the loss of empathy, the loss of friendships, the misguided quest for self-validation that leaves the housewives as hollow as corn husks and emotionally fragile as rotten eggs on the verge of a dumpster-fire meltdown.

Another example is the restaurant Islands. The theme of Islands is escaping to some faraway away place where you can throw all your cares to the wind.

Let's convert the Islands theme into a thesis:

Islands' theme of escape encourages us to throw care to the wind in terms of the money we spend, the alcoholic beverages we imbibe, and the general lowering of standards as we stuff our gullets with high-calorie dense, unremarkable food that bears a strong resemblance to frozen TV dinners.

A critical thinker also learns to make meaningful connections. For example, Facebook and Islands both encourage people to be dumb.

We can convert this idea into a thesis:

Both Facebook and Islands encourage us to relax our critical thinking skills and to undergo a dumbing-down process in which we feel the false euphoria of phony Facebook "friendships" and substandard TV-dinner food so that in the end we become like zombies with no powers of discrimination, a condition consumer society wants us to be in so it can manipulate and "punk" us into buying into its pablum. (Pablum is bland or insipid fare, flavorless baby food, worthless matter.)

"The Other Woman" (full text of the short story)

“The Other Woman” by Sherwood Anderson

One. What life changes are happening to the man that might explain his condition of demonic possession and general craziness?

The man has too much attention that he can’t deal with. He gets a job promotion, he wins a writing contest that becomes featured in the newspaper, and he’s about to marry a judge’s daughter. Everyone is congratulating him.

When he goes to the theater, everyone recognizes him and surrounds him. We read, “He had never received so much attention before, and now a fever of expectancy took possession of him.”

In the above quote, the key word is “possession.” This story is about a man who is in many ways demonically possessed or unhinged. He has never enjoyed attention before.

One of the story's themes is the danger of getting attention. People can't handle attention. Check out ****** ******, Lindsay Lohan, and Johnny Manziel. Some people can't handle attention, and they go down a rabbit hole. That's what happens in this story.

Throughout the story, we read about the man’s growing disconnection from reality. A lot of his disconnection results from the man living too much inside his head. Many of the story’s passages show the man’s imaginary or fantasy world that he escapes in.

In a key passage, we read:

As he explained when he told me of his experience, it was for him an altogether abnormal time. He felt like one floating in air. When he got into bed after seeing so many people and hearing so many words of praise his head whirled round and round. When he closed his eyes a crowd of people invaded his room. It seemed as though the minds of all the people of his city were centered on himself. The most absurd fancies took possession of him. He imagined himself riding in a carriage through the streets of a city. Windows were thrown open and people ran out at the doors of houses. "There he is. That's him," they shouted, and at the words a glad cry arose. The carriage drove into a street blocked with people. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes looked up at him. "There you are! What a fellow you have managed to make of yourself!" the eyes seemed to be saying.

Even though the man doesn’t realize it, the operating principle that animates his motivations is his desire for the Chanel No. 5 Moment, the attention bath of others that gives us false validation and makes us go crazy.

As an example, my friend has a precocious, talented, beautiful daughter who at a young age, around 5, showed amazing talent for doing skits, singing, and dancing. Many people encouraged the father and mother to get their daughter into “show business,” but the parents refused.

The father explained to me that a child isn’t fully formed psychologically and that all the attention a child star receives makes the child go crazy. The father explained that he had observed many cases of this happening. The children grew up “messed up,” prone to various addictions, and in general treated other people badly as they showed low levels of empathy and high levels of narcissism.

In other words, these children grew up to have a very high opinion of themselves but were disconnected from the human race.

Their disconnection made them anxious and their anxieties propelled them to find escape through various self-destructive behaviors, mostly addictions.

Very few of us can handle too much attention because the more attention we receive the less we control our ability to define ourselves on our own terms. We become beholden to the image that others impose on us even when this image is a fiction that is disconnected from our real selves.

Secondly, too much attention warps our self-image. We perceive ourselves as something totally different than who we really are. This creates confusion and cognitive dissonance. No one can live up to being a false god without falling hard.

Third, when we feel connected to “our fans,” the connection is not real; it’s in reality an obnoxious power play that leaves us disconnected and lonely.

Fourth, when we enjoy adulation, we feel that the world’s morality is not applicable to us. Because we’re special, we’re entitled to live outside the normal boundaries of morality. Having affairs, using other people, and manipulating others becomes “our right” in our state of obnoxious grandeur.

Fifth, when we enjoy the adulation of others, we are blind to the fact that even though we think we are rising in life, soaring the skies of success and looking down at the “little people who serve us,” in reality we are sinking. In fact, a wise man once said that when we think we are rising in life we are really falling, and when we think we are falling we are really rising.

Sixth, attention from others becomes a drug-like addiction, and like all addictions we adapt to a certain amount of the drug so that we have to keep upping the ante until we can’t get enough of our fix. In psychology, this is called the hedonic treadmill. We adapt to any type of pleasure until pleasure is impossible. As a result, we hit a wall and crash into despair.

Seven, we become a false god to others and ourselves. By its very nature, being a false god is a form of insanity.

This Craziness Is Not Limited to Full-Fledge Celebrities

We don’t have to be full-fledged celebrities to undergo this transformation into narcissistic, obnoxious craziness.

We can become mini celebrities on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other types of social media.

Once we become addicted to digital validation from “likes” and followers, we start the dark journey into the Broken Self, a needy pseudo-celebrity doomed to a life of anxiety, disconnection, and depression.

We can become Big Fish in a Little Pond, like a couple I used to know in Bakersfield.

The Danger of the Chanel No. 5 Moment

A term I use for the type of attention people crave is the “Chanel No. 5 Moment.”

A Chanel No. 5 Moment is an attention bath in which you are overcome with the ecstasy of being at the center of attention. This attention bath raises your adrenalin, your hormones, and your grandiosity resulting in an increased libido and increased virility. Perhaps most importantly, the Chanel No. 5 Moment magnifies pre-existing weaknesses—a tendency to be mean toward others, selfishness, greed, egotism, infidelity, insecurity, self-identity confusion.

In the case of the man in Sherwood Anderson’s short story “The Other Woman,” three things have happened that have given him more attention than he can handle, rendering him a crazed, demonic state.

One, he is getting married. People who are about to get married not only cannot handle the stress of the upcoming wedding and all that marriage entails, they cannot handle all the attention.

Two, the man is not only getting attention for marrying a judge’s daughter, he has just enjoyed a public job promotion that has earned the admiration of others.

If that’s not enough, he just won a writing contest that has elevated his stature even further.

The total sum of these three changes in the man’s life has made him unhinged: Intoxicated by all the attention he’s receiving, he does not know who he is. His passions are inflamed and he desires the craven affair with the book store owner’s wife, and he cannot reconcile this desire for his desire to be in a happy marriage with his innocent pure-hearted wife.

The above qualities could very well be in the man in our story; however, with his Chanel No. 5 Moment these qualities become more virulent, more intense, and he becomes his worst self in the most demonic sense. In fact, his behavior is that of a man possessed.

The Chanel No. 5 Moment Is Universal

Craving the Chanel No. 5 Moment--public approval at the expense of building true substance in one's inner self--is commonplace. As we read in a famous passage from French philosopher Blaise Pascal:

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.

Two. Explain the story’s opening, “I am in love with my wife.”

He blurts out this statement. It appears to have been produced from some kind of fear or guilt or both. He makes the announcement like a compulsion. He needs to convince himself that he loves his wife.

We can make a general principle that people who are desperate to convince themselves that they love something in fact do not have authentic love for the very thing they wish to love. They try to will this love, but their willfulness is in vain. "The heart wants what the heart wants," and there's nothing we can do to change this.

We see a man so terrified by his state of not knowing who he is and what his desires are that he must constantly remind himself that he loves his wife when the story’s evidence points to feelings toward his wife that are, at best, confused, ambiguous, and conflicted. He is Unhinged Man, terrified, conflicted, compulsive, and completely lacking in self-understanding. He needs to take a Critical Thinking class.

His conflicted feelings are further reinforced by the affair he has with the allegedly plain looking woman. However, we should be wary or skeptical of the man's description. He may be lying, either intentionally or unconsciously.

He is a man who tries to assert his will to be a good person and to live the romantic dream that society tells us to live, leading a moral married life, but he can't. We read in a key passage:

As would be natural under such circumstances, he tried to control his thoughts, but when he sat by the window and was wide awake a most unexpected and humiliating thing happened. The night was clear and fine. There was a moon. He wanted to dream of the woman who was to be his wife, to think out lines for noble poems or make plans that would affect his career. Much to his surprise his mind refused to do anything of the sort.

The man's mind does not obey his will. His real desires have a mind of their own that disregards the man's conscious desires and his attempt to conform to society's morality.

The inability to know oneself and the futility of one's free will in the face of unconscious desires and impulses characterize the dark philosophy of Modernism.

In fact, the story is a prime example of Modernism. In one opening sentence, Sherwood Anderson introduces us to the themes of Modernism:

We can’t know or understand ourselves or others. We are strangers to ourselves. We our impostors incapable of understanding our “real agenda.”
We suffer from dualism or Left Hand-Right Hand Syndrome (the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand does and vice versa).
There is no free will. Rather, we are ruled by unconscious psychological forces we cannot control. We are compulsive and as such we are slaves to our compulsions.
Every plot point is an ironic reversal so that we feel we live in an “upside down world.”
We suffer unresolved conflict between private desires and public duty.

“I am in love with my wife,” therefore, is a statement wrought with deception and desperation.

He WISHES he loved his wife, just like later in the story when we read, “He wanted to dream of the woman who was to be his wife . . .”

He wants to feel all the feelings he is SUPPOSED to feel for his wife, but he does not.

Perhaps he does not love his wife.

Or perhaps he loves her but not in a conventional way that would appease his conscience.

Or perhaps he feels repelled by her and everything she represents: domesticity, being a slave to conformity and image, sentimental notions of love are beyond his reach.

Or perhaps he loves her desperately as an antidote to the sin of adultery and chaos that stirs in his hedonistic self.

Or perhaps he obsesses over all the above possibilities but cannot pinpoint his emotions, as he remains a miserable slave to ambiguity and confusion.

Welcome to Modernism.

Three. What kinds of changes are taking place with the unnamed man?

He is overcome with a creative flurry of writing resulting in an award that results in minor celebrity. He enjoys the attention, like someone on Facebook enjoying a flurry of "likes" and other forms of self-validation to compensate for his unhinged self.

In a key passage, we read:

At a corner of the street where he lived there was a small cigar store and newspaper stand run by a fat man of forty and his wife, a small active woman with bright grey eyes. In the morning he stopped there to buy a paper before going down to the city. Sometimes he saw only the fat man, but often the man had disappeared and the woman waited on him. She was, as he assured me at least twenty times in telling me his tale, a very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her, but for some reason he could not explain, being in her presence stirred him profoundly. During that week in the midst of his distraction she was the only person he knew who stood out clear and distinct in his mind. When he wanted so much to think noble thoughts he could think only of her. Before he knew what was happening his imagination had taken hold of the notion of having a love affair with the woman.

"I could not understand myself," he declared, in telling me the story. "At night, when the city was quiet and when I should have been asleep, I thought about her all the time. After two or three days of that sort of thing the consciousness of her got into my daytime thoughts. I was terribly muddled. When I went to see the woman who is now my wife I found that my love for her was in no way affected by my vagrant thoughts. There was but one woman in the world I wanted to live with and to be my comrade in undertaking to improve my own character and my position in the world, but for the moment, you see, I wanted this other woman to be in my arms. She had worked her way into my being. On all sides people were saying I was a big man who would do big things, and there I was. That evening when I went to the theatre I walked home because I knew I would be unable to sleep, and to satisfy the annoying impulse in myself I went and stood on the sidewalk before the tobacco shop. It was a two story building, and I knew the woman lived upstairs with her husband. For a long time I stood in the darkness with my body pressed against the wall of the building, and then I thought of the two of them up there and no doubt in bed together. That made me furious.

"Then I grew more furious with myself. I went home and got into bed, shaken with anger. There are certain books of verse and some prose writings that have always moved me deeply, and so I put several books on a table by my bed.

"The voices in the books were like the voices of the dead. I did not hear them. The printed words would not penetrate into my consciousness. I tried to think of the woman I loved, but her figure had also become something far away, something with which I for the moment seemed to have nothing to do. I rolled and tumbled about in the bed. It was a miserable experience.

But for all his validation and approval and in spite of his "Chanel No. 5" Moment, he is a tormented soul. He is having a "miserable experience." Worse, he is ignorant of who he is and what he really wants from life. He is lost in a murky swamp of moral ambiguity unlike his wife who has a singular vision of herself and she keeps her innocence and as such is blessed while he is a lost damned soul. He sees this and wants to cleave to his wife as if she were his savior, but he cannot rid himself of "the other woman," the other side of himself that rages on in spite of himself.

His elevated esteem in the eyes of others has a drug-like effect on him. Intoxicated, disoriented, he becomes unhinged. He reminds me of the character who becomes "drugged" after getting a new overcoat in the Gogol short story, "The Overcoat."

He is engaged to be married to a judge’s daughter. The the father is a judge points to a possible metaphor about the kind of world the man is entering: a world of judgment, right and wrong, black and white, moral and immoral. This crisply defined world appears to be incompatible with the gray, murky, morally ambiguous world of the storyteller.

He has also received a job promotion that affords him elevated status.

All three events point to a man who is in the public eye, a cause of much ego gratification, even intoxication, which he seems to enjoy.

But the downside of this public adulation is perhaps a sense of anxiety and pressure (added responsibilities) that causes him to have a sort of breakdown manifest in obsessive-compulsive behavior.

This period is described as an “abnormal time” in which he was “floating on air.” Could he perhaps be disoriented, even delirious?

For many, the spotlight feels claustrophobia and performance anxiety, causing those people to feel like caged animals who need an outlet.

His sense of anxiety is further reinforced by the knowledge that he begins to suffer insomnia. Sleep deprivation could push him toward insanity of some kind.

He appears to be a man unhinged, severed from any core self that would make him feel whole and calm. He is a contrast of his fiancé who evidences singularity of purpose and seems to know herself.

For many, the spotlight feels claustrophobia and performance anxiety, causing those people to feel like caged animals who need an outlet.

Perhaps the man seeks an outlet where he can “be himself,” whatever that may be.

Four. Speak to the man’s attraction to the shopkeeper’s wife.

We read about this compulsive obsession the storyteller has with an older woman with “bright gray eyes.”

The narrator tells us the storyteller assured him “at least twenty times” that she was a “very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her.” But her presence “stirred him profoundly.”

Again, we are faced with ambiguity. We don’t know if the woman is truly plain looking or a stunning beauty since the storyteller has proven that he appears to say one thing when in fact he means the opposite.

But another interpretation is that she is indeed plain looking; however, the storyteller’s desperate state inexplicably draws him to her. We don’t know.

What’s clear is that as the man’s marriage looms near, with its implications of a conventional life of conformity and slave morality to society’s script, the man hungers for Another World, Los Otros, so that the shopkeeper’s wife becomes his most compelling reality.

We read, “During that week in the midst of his distraction she was the only person he knew who stood out clear and distinct in his mind. When he wanted to think noble thoughts, he could think only of her. Before he knew what was happening his imagination had taken hold of the notion of having a love affair with the woman.”

By “noble thoughts,” we can assume living a life of convention and purity when in fact the man is having doubts about enlisting or conscribing himself into such an imprisoned state.

There is an adage that marriage for a woman is the beginning of her life, but that marriage for a man is the death of his.

Perhaps the man is feeling an impending death and panic has set in.

His obsession with the shopkeeper’s woman reinforces the Modernist theme that we cannot understand others or ourselves. We read, “I could not understand myself,” as the storyteller vents his vexation about obsession with a plain looking older woman as he is presumably about to marry a young beauty.

As the man’s obsession with the other woman grows so does his torment, and we see a man being pulled apart into two opposing worlds, one of illicit passion and the other of domestic convention.

We read, “There was but one woman in the world I wanted to live with me and to be my comrade in undertaking to improve my own character and my position in the world, but for the moment, you see, I wanted this other woman to be in my arms. She had worked her way into my being. On all sides people were saying I was a big man who would do big things, and there I was.”

To be a “big man” and enjoy the high esteem and veneration of others, he feels compelled to live a life of marital convention in accordance with society’s script of what it means to be a big man.

The above speaks to man’s conflict with public duty, and his craving for public approval, and his private desires, which run contrary to society’s blueprint for success.

This conflict and the man’s attempt to suppress his private urges result in self-hatred. He grows more “furious” at himself. He tries to read pious literature to cleanse his naughty soul.

But attempts at finding morality through reading fail him. We read, “The voices in the books were like the voices of the dead. I did not hear them. The words printed on the lines would not penetrate into my consciousness. I tried to think of the woman I loved, but her figure had also become something far away, something with which I for the moment seemed to have nothing to do.”

Five. Is there evidence that the shopkeeper’s wife is a maternal figure?

We read that “She must have been ten years older than myself.” And that when he tried to put pennies on the glass counter, “the pennies made a rattling noise.”

Juxtaposing an older woman with a “rattling noise” could suggest a baby rattler in the presence of an All Comforting Mommy.

The anxiety and panic preceding a marriage, which to the man may feel like a prison sentence, may cause him to regress and seek a Mother Figure.

These feelings would be unconscious and would speak to Modernism’s worldview that we are creatures not of free agency or free will but creatures beholden to unconscious impulses.

Six. Describe the secret meeting with the shopkeeper’s wife.

He experiences Dionysian ecstasy and rapture, holding her, and connecting with her on this higher level than anything he has experienced before. We read, “I had forgotten everything in the world but just her.”

We are now introduced to a powerful conflict in the story, the struggle between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.

Dionysian refers to the overpowering force of ecstasy that, short lived, destroys everything in its wake. It is the Angelina Jolie of the Life Force.

Apollonian refers to nest building, domesticity, and monogamy. It is the Jennifer Aniston of the Life Force.

Our storyteller is caught between Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston.

Seven. What does the fiancé’s letter reveal about her?

She is pure of heart. She has a singularity of purpose, to marry, unlike her fiancé who is torn between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.

In a key passage, we read:

"It was on that morning, just the day before my marriage, that I got a long and very beautiful letter from my fiancee. During the night before she also had been unable to sleep and had got out of bed to write the letter. Everything she said in it was very sharp and real, but she herself, as a living thing, seemed to have receded into the distance. It seemed to me that she was like a bird, flying far away in distant skies, and that I was like a perplexed bare-footed boy standing in the dusty road before a farm house and looking at her receding figure. I wonder if you will understand what I mean?

"In regard to the letter. In it she, the awakening woman, poured out her heart. She of course knew nothing of life, but she was a woman. She lay, I suppose, in her bed feeling nervous and wrought up as I had been doing. She realized that a great change was about to take place in her life and was glad and afraid too. There she lay thinking of it all. Then she got out of bed and began talking to me on the bit of paper. She told me how afraid she was and how glad too. Like most young women she had heard things whispered. In the letter she was very sweet and fine. 'For a long time, after we are married, we will forget we are a man and woman,' she wrote. 'We will be human beings. You must remember that I am ignorant and often I will be very stupid. You must love me and be very patient and kind. When I know more, when after a long time you have taught me the way of life, I will try to repay you. I will love you tenderly and passionately. The possibility of that is in me or I would not want to marry at all. I am afraid but I am also happy. O, I am so glad our marriage time is near at hand!'

This is very disturbing, that this innocent woman is looking to her future husband as a mentor figure. He is in fact more lost than she is.

In addition, her purity of heart makes her fiancé feel guilty, but he want to feed off his future wife’s purity in the hopes that she will in turn purify him and cure him of his madness. But is he ever cured?

Remember, the story begins with him talking about her after their marriage and he compulsively blurts, “I am in love with my wife,” like a mantra that only a man who doesn’t love his wife would repeat in a vain attempt to cure his heart of his madness.

He reads the letter to gain strength from it, to find “resolve” to resist temptation, and his resolve fails him completely. We read, “The woman came at seven o’clock, and, as you may have guessed, I let her in and forgot the resolution I had made.”

Like a drug, the woman feeds his Dionysian appetites: “I felt very happy and strong.”

Eight. What does the man say about his feelings for the shopkeeper’s wife after she leaves his apartment?

He claims she left his mind, but we see evidence to the contrary.

In a series of bizarre statements full of contradictions, he says, “I am trying very hard to tell what happened to me. I am saying that I have not since that evening thought of the woman who came to my apartment. Now, to tell the facts of the case, that is not true.”

He then claims that his ecstatic experience with the shopkeeper’s wife gave him the strength to go through with his marriage. Further, his illicit affair gave him a “new faith in the outcome of our life together.”

Clearly, he is an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is another striking feature of the Modernist Literature Movement.

Perhaps the most disturbing and fascinating passage from the story can be read here:

"Now you see clearly enough what a mess I was in. In my office, after I had read my fiancee's letter, I became at once very resolute and strong. I remember that I got out of my chair and walked about, proud of the fact that I was to be the husband of so noble a woman. Right away I felt concerning her as I had been feeling about myself before I found out what a weak thing I was. To be sure I took a strong resolution that I would not be weak. At nine that evening I had planned to run in to see my fiancee. 'I'm all right now,' I said to myself. 'The beauty of her character has saved me from myself. I will go home now and send the other woman away.' In the morning I had telephoned to my servant and told him that I did not want him to be at the apartment that evening and I now picked up the telephone to tell him to stay at home.

"Then a thought came to me. 'I will not want him there in any event,' I told myself. 'What will he think when he sees a woman coming in my place on the evening before the day I am to be married?' I put the telephone down and prepared to go home. 'If I want my servant out of the apartment it is because I do not want him to hear me talk with the woman. I cannot be rude to her. I will have to make some kind of an explanation,' I said to myself.

"The woman came at seven o'clock, and, as you may have guessed, I let her in and forgot the resolution I had made. It is likely I never had any intention of doing anything else. There was a bell on my door, but she did not ring, but knocked very softly. It seems to me that everything she did that evening was soft and quiet, but very determined and quick. Do I make myself clear? When she came I was standing just within the door where I had been standing and waiting for a half hour. My hands were trembling as they had trembled in the morning when her eyes looked at me and when I tried to put the pennies on the counter in the store. When I opened the door she stepped quickly in and I took her into my arms. We stood together in the darkness. My hands no longer trembled. I felt very happy and strong.

"Although I have tried to make everything clear I have not told you what the woman I married is like. I have emphasized, you see, the other woman. I make the blind statement that I love my wife, and to a man of your shrewdness that means nothing at all. To tell the truth, had I not started to speak of this matter I would feel more comfortable. It is inevitable that I give you the impression that I am in love with the tobacconist's wife. That's not true. To be sure I was very conscious of her all during the week before my marriage, but after she had come to me at my apartment she went entirely out of my mind.

"Am I telling the truth? I am trying very hard to tell what happened to me. I am saying that I have not since that evening thought of the woman who came to my apartment. Now, to tell the facts of the case, that is not true. On that evening I went to my fiancee at nine, as she had asked me to do in her letter. In a kind of way I cannot explain the other woman went with me. This is what I mean--you see I had been thinking that if anything happened between me and the tobacconist's wife I would not be able to go through with my marriage. 'It is one thing or the other with me,' I had said to myself.

"As a matter of fact I went to see my beloved on that evening filled with a new faith in the outcome of our life together. I am afraid I muddle this matter in trying to tell it. A moment ago I said the other woman, the tobacconist's wife, went with me. I do not mean she went in fact. What I am trying to say is that something of her faith in her own desires and her courage in seeing things through went with me. Is that clear to you? When I got to my fiancee's house there was a crowd of people standing about. Some were relatives from distant places I had not seen before. She looked up quickly when I came into the room. My face must have been radiant. I never saw her so moved. She thought her letter had affected me deeply, and of course it had. Up she jumped and ran to meet me. She was like a glad child. Right before the people who turned and looked inquiringly at us, she said the thing that was in her mind. 'O, I am so happy,' she cried. 'You have understood. We will be two human beings. We will not have to be husband and wife.'

Nine. How does the man fit in the people at his fiancé’s party?

He feels disconnected, guilty, and alienated from their laughter. He is not a real member of their tribe. He’s just faking it.

He has a secret life. He reminds me of Dexter from the Showtime series, a man who can’t live in conventional society but who must exercise an alter ego to preserve his sanity, which at the same time threatens his sanity.

This double life creates a tension. We read, “What they would have thought had they known the truth (about the illicit affair) about me God only knows!”

Ten. What mantra of lies and self-deceit do we see in the aftermath of the marriage?

The man claims, “If you were to say that my marriage is not a happy one I could call you a liar and be speaking the absolute truth.”

In Modernism there is no absolute truth, only gray and moral ambiguity.

We read other mantras of self-delusion: “And now you see I am married and everything is all right. My marriage is to me a very beautiful fact.”

We see here that self-delusion has no limits. We should be afraid of ourselves, very, very afraid.

This pessimistic view of humans incapable of knowing the truth and being full of self-deception is part of Modernism, which rejected the idea that religion could bring us to the light and truth. That, too, is a form of self-deceit in the Modernistic worldview.

Option #1 for "The Other Woman": Developing a thesis for the theme of Modernism using cause and effect analysis

Show how Modernism is evident in the story.

Thesis Template:

The Modernism evident in "The Other Woman" explains our unhinged condition resulting from _______________, __________________, __________________, and ____________________.

Two things you need to know to write the above thesis:

Two. What are 4 major causes of the man's unhinged state in the story?

Essay Option #2 for "The Other Woman": The demands of marriage in the story using argumentation

Support or refute the notion that "The Other Woman" evidences that Universal Man's demands for a wife are impossible.

Thesis Template

What You Need to Know

How do false notions of success, adulation, and the Chanel No. 5 Moment contribute to this man's emotional retardation, which renders his ability to have meaningful connection with a woman impossible?

Essay Option #3 for "The Other Woman": How dualism makes us unhinged (dualism consists of the opposing forces that make the man a conflicted character) Using Extended Definition

What You Need to Know

What is dualism? How does dualism manifest in the main character? In what 4 ways does the dualism show that the man is crazy?

How does the Dionysian Force (the destructive river of passion) collide with the Apollonia Force (the nest-making force of domesticity)?

Recommended Resource for Options 2 and 3: "Adultery" by Tim Parks

Bonus Thesis Template

One of the most salient and frightening themes in "The Other Woman" is that we can only process so much public adulation before we reach a breaking point in which we become unhinged evidenced by ________________, _______________, ___________________, and ______________________.

Literary Analysis

When we write literary analysis, we choose on a theme and then we take that theme and convert it into a specific thesis statement.

Developing PEEL Paragraphs (PEEL equals Point, Evidence or Example, Elaboration or Explanation, and Links)

When writing a research paper, it’s very important in the evidence or example section to use a quote from the text.

Paragraph Example (I've underlined the links or transitions)

The essay "Green Guilt" makes a powerful argument that we must accept the afflictions of guilt and sin, whether that guilt be caused by religious or secular forces, in order that we survive and thrive in a cooperative society. As we read in Asma’s essay, “All this internalized self-loathing is the cost we pay for being civilized. In a very well organized society that protects the interests of many, we have to refrain from our natural instincts.” Indeed, our natural instincts, if left unchecked, would create a barbaric world where no kind of viable or even pleasing society could flourish. A second curse of selfish desires unbridled by a sense of guilt and sin would be the moral dissolution that would ensue as hordes of people would become numb to pleasures resulting in frustration and increased violence. We see evidence of such mayhem and grand displays of nihilism in hedonistic societies right before they crumble such as the Fall of Rome. Finally, let us not neglect to point out that a sense of sin can prompt us to be more disciplined so that we maximize the success of our personal goals rather than squandering our life on the foolish errands prompted by our unharnessed desires. To conclude, Asma convincingly shows us that it is in our best interests to repress our base passions by swallowing the Sin Pill in order to fulfill our potential as individuals and as a society.

Sentence Fragments

No subject

Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.

No complete verb

The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.

Beginning with a subordinating word

We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.

A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.

Sentence Fragment Exercises

After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.

One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.

Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.

Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.

Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.

Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.

Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.

Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.

Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.

Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.

Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.

Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.

Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.

Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.

Avoiding Comma Splices and Run-Ons

Fused (run-on) sentence

Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.

She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.

A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.

Comma Splice

I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.

We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.

A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.

After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.

One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.

Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.

Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.

Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can often correct the problem.

Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.

Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.

Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.

Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.

Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.

Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.

Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.

Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.

Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.

Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.

Study Questions for “You’re Ugly, Too” by Lorrie Moore

One. What is Zoe’s crisis of connection?

Zoe is an urbane, well educated woman living in a bovine, somewhat backwards Midwestern town where the men are looking for the Heidi Archetype, a simple woman who smiles and serves and allows herself to be her husband’s accessory.

Zoe’s sarcastic defenses protect her from Heidi-seeking male troglodytes to a point, but over time these troglodytes become corrosive so that the very thing (caustic sarcasm) that protects and medicates her from her alienation and isolation becomes worse than the original poison. In other words, she has maladapted to her own defense mechanism becoming a prisoner of it in ways she cannot totally see.

Our defenses, whether they be sarcasm, deadpan irony, pessimism, cynicism, or lowered expectations in the age of Facebook, often reach the law of diminishing returns in which they create more problems than they solve.

Two. We read that Zoe Hendricks is “almost pretty.” How does this pertain to one of the story’s themes?

We find that most of us are at a point in our lives where we are ALMOST SOMETHING: almost pretty, almost handsome, almost buffed, almost skinny, almost appealing, almost successful, almost rich, almost secure, almost popular, almost famous, almost happy, etc.

What happens, though, is in our quest to get beat the sense of ALMOST we commit self-destruct through OVERKILL, relying on extreme measures to up the ante.

We’ve seen people who keep getting plastic surgery, one after an another, because they feel they’re ALMOST good looking and they end up looking like, to use an image from Tina Fey, a hand puppet with smudged lipstick or a clown fish or some other grotesquerie.

As humans, we tend to feel like we’ve constantly fallen short of whatever popular culture expects from us. Combine this with the glorification of perfect bodies, beauty, wealth, power, and celebrity in the media and we are vulnerable, fragile, and broken creatures susceptible to feeling like we’re ALMOST GOOD ENOUGH and thus have fallen short.

We read of Zoe: “She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn, no doubt, for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out the sides of her head like antennae.”

When we compensate for our perceived shortcomings, we often become frightening and grotesque with our oversized earrings, wristwatches, car rims, steroid-infused muscles, etc. Or we overdo our bachelor pad with the snap-command fireplace and clap-command descending king-size waterbed.

Or we do dumb stuff like the guy who on a first date takes off his shirt to play the piano while standing up. You should sit down and keep your shirt on when you play the piano, but standing up and playing while revealing your torso is overkill.

Three. How does Zoe’s life contrast with her younger sister Evan?

Evan and her live-in boyfriend suffer first-world problems like sharing a luxury pool in a Manhattan sky-rise condo instead of owning their own pool. They feel like they're "roughing it" by lowering themselves into the communal pool.

They are a settled couple. The boyfriend watches football. They don’t cook. They seem to have invested little in the relationship and put a minimum effort in their lives. They are both maladapted to complacent mediocrity.

As a couple that settles for a sort of mediocre, mindless existence, they live in contented self-complacency with low expectations, just like Facebook "friends" have low expectations from one another. The bonds in such relationships are flimsy and superficial.

In contrast, Zoe, who languishes in the Midwest and thinks she’s superior to the bovine peasants that surround her, lives in a state of intellectual pride alternated by the despair of her loneliness and learned helplessness.

The contrast of Zoe’s Midwestern home and her sister’s Manhattan one further underscores another story contrast, the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian forces.

Apollo represents order reason and control. Dionysus represents frenzy and excess.

I’ve read that any short story can be reduced to the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. That’s probably true.

In the story, we see Zoe goes through Apollonian cycles, living a life of dry routine and control, punctuated by Dionysian ones, characterized by reckless self-abandon, when she visits her sister in Manhattan.

The climactic Halloween party is the Dionysian meltdown where her mask comes off, she sees her chin whisker as a sign of being a witch and a Misfit, and she can’t even pull out the whisker, a symbol of her futility and ineptitude.

Four. What 3 Life Traps do we see in the story?

Trap of Intellectual Pride:

Zoe’s belief that she is better than others, that she is a genius surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces, reinforces her isolation and bitterness.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was better than most others. I thought I was smarter, funnier, hipper and these grandiose thoughts served to obscure my essential fear of my own humanity, which didn't become more evident until I became older.

Zoe is similar. Her pride is an escape from her fear of her own human foibles.

Trap of Complacency and Self-Satisfied Mediocrity:

We see Evan, Zoe’s sister, content to settle in a mediocre relationship. As we read, “He and Evan lived in it like two kids in a dorm, beer cans and clothes strewn around.” Their romance is gone. They’re nesting like two sloths in front of the TV.

At one point Evan says, “He’s wearing psychic cold cream and curlers, if you know what I mean.” Their settling together is a form of stagnation and death.

We also see Zoe’s students who are privileged and well-fed “large quantities of meat and eggs” whose brains are empty of knowledge, ideas, and critical thinking skills. They, too, represent self-satisfied mediocrity.

Her students’ sense of privilege and entitlement makes them empty-headed, bovine narcissists who are barely tolerable. They suffer from a “healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographical,” Zoe thinks sarcastically. Her loathing of her students reinforces her isolation in her community, and this isolation must make her anxious and depressed. Her disconnection compels her to create a proud persona, which only reinforces her disconnection from others.

To add to her contempt for the students, they feel their opinions are equal to hers or anyone else’s when in fact they don’t understand that informed opinions, which they don’t have, are superior. For her students, all opinions are “just opinions” and therefore are all alike.

Trap of Despair:

Zoe’s pride, which makes her think she’s too smart for other people, also feeds her despair and helplessness. Despair is the just the flip coin of narcissistic pride. To coddle one's despair is to affirm that one's despair is noteworthy and special, so that this wallowing in despair becomes a narcissistic exercise. "No one feels pain like I do."

Zoe’s failures with men prove lugubrious (beyond pathetic) and reinforce her cynicism and despair about connecting with a man. She can’t settle like her sister does, so she feels doomed to the private hell of her loneliness. She feels trapped, alone, anxious, and helpless.

Five. What is the Heidi Archetype?

Zoe believes that all men deep down want a Heidi, a subservient hourglass shaped simpleton who obsequiously serves her husband with a perky, ingratiating smile.

Zoe’s caustic, corrosive humor makes her the antithesis of the Heidi. She seems to relish in cruel humor and in fact the story title, “You’re Ugly, Too,” points to a cruel joke that defines the default humor setting inside Zoe’s psyche.

Six. What do Zoe’s mirror images say about the loss of herself?

Images in the mirror are a story motif or pattern. They serve as an opportunity for Zoe to see her personality’s dissolution and disintegration.

As her pride, sarcasm, and cynicism grow, a valuable part of her vanishes and she becomes a grotesque version of her real self. She can barely recognize herself. In one scene she has a chin hair that she can’t remove without drawing blood.

In another moment of despair she sees herself as “a woman alone at the movies with everything in a Baggie” evidencing how close she feels to becoming a bag lady. These morbid thoughts underscore her identity as an outcast and a pariah.

She misplaces her concern for self through hypochondria, the worry that she has cancer. Most likely, her stomach problems or dyspepsia are psychosomatic, the result of her anxiety, isolation, and worry.

In yet another grotesque image, Earl is dressed up as a naked woman and his disgusting image is a metaphor for Zoe’s feelings of unattractiveness and having replaced her original self with some fiendish looking Frankenstein.

Perhaps, then, Earl is Zoe’s doppelganger (double).

A Good Thesis

A good thesis is a complete sentence that defines your argument.

A good thesis addresses your opponents’ views in a concession clause.

A good thesis often has mapping components or mapping statements that outline your body paragraphs.

A good thesis avoids the obvious and instead struggles to grapple with difficult and complex ideas.

A good thesis embraces complexity and sophistication but is expressed with clarity.

For literary analysis, a thesis could be the following:

argumentative

cause and effect analysis

extended definition

Sample Argumentative Thesis

While Zoe has allowed her cynicism to get the best of her, her loneliness and failure to connect meaningfully with a man is largely the fault of modern American society evidenced by male sexism against professional women, perpetual male adolescence, and the undying Heidi Archetype.

Refutation of the Above Thesis

Blaming Zoe’s woes on sexist men is a pathetic argument that diverts attention from the severity of Zoe’s diseased mind, that attempts to abnegate Zoe’s responsibility for improving her life, and that relies on crude male stereotypes to make its claim.

Variation of the First Thesis

Educated, professional women like Zoe are better served suffering loneliness than settling with the modern American man when we consider the modern male’s sexism against independent women, his perpetual adolescence, and his deep love of the Heidi Archetype.

Sample Cause and Effect Analysis Thesis

Professional women who remain unwed through their thirties are close to reaching the Point of No Return in which they will most likely remain single for the rest of their lives. The cause of their perennial single status is the inevitable bitterness and caustic irony that changes their core personality, the dependence on their uncompromised routine, and the cultivation of highly idiosyncratic behavior that defies any kind of harmonious living arrangement with another human.

Sample Extended Definition Thesis

The Heidi Archetype, referred to in Lorrie Moore’s masterful short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” is a male fantasy characterized by a women who engages in self-abnegation or self-erasure, who slavishly accommodates her spouse, and whose life work is to allay any matrimonial conflicts as the Heidi sees this latter task as her Life Mission.

Essay Option for "You're Ugly ,Too" by Lorrie Moore

Points to Consider

One. She adapts to loneliness and the lifestyle of no compromise.

Two. Her standards for the type of man who can disrupt her lifestyle continue to elevate till she reaches The Point of No Return.

Four. Educated men who would otherwise be part of her dating pool find themselves searching for the Heidi Archetype, the bovine, servile ignoramus, rather than an educated, autonomous woman. '

Five. Lonely professional women find they are stagnant in a perpetual condition of intellectual pride alternated by bitter despair and this alternating cycle becomes a prison from which they can see no escape, thus defining their abject learned helplessness.

With literary analysis, we use the present verb tense.

Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays

Weak Introductions to Avoid

One. Don’t use overused quotes:

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:

Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .

In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .

Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.

We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.

In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.

Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.

Three. Never apologize to the reader:

Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.

I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.

Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.

Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.

In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.

It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.

Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”

General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph

It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).

It is compelling.

It is timely.

It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.

It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.

The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions

One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:

It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.

Men who are jealous are cheaters.

We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.

John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.

Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:

Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.

According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.

Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:

George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.

Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:

There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.

Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:

One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.” 

That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.  

This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”

As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:

“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”

Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:

My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.

In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.

But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.

Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.

The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.

Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.

American is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.

Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.

Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.

Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.

From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:

The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.

Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:

Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?

Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?

Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?

Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?

What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?