Questions for further practice: deconstructive approaches to other literary works

The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!” We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: “Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him, But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather He said it for himself. I see him there, Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

A New Critical reading of the text—What is the central tension at work in this poem, and how is it resolved in the poem’s unified advancement of its main theme?—is often a useful first step in deconstructing a literary work because such readings can almost always be found to rest on a binary opposition in which one member of the pair is privileged over the other. This binary opposition is usually the key to the text’s ideological framework (or at least one of the text’s ideological frameworks). Once a New Critical reading is formulated, the binary opposition on which it rests can be deconstructed: that is, it can be examined to find the ways in which the opposing elements in the text overlap or aren’t really opposed. And this is how we can learn something about the limitations of the ideology the text (consciously or unconsciously) promotes. In the case of “Mending Wall,” it seems rather clear that the binary opposition structuring the text can be found in the disagreement between the speaker and his neighbor. The speaker advocates nonconformity when the tradition one has followed no longer fits the circumstances in which one finds oneself. The neigh‑ bor, without even thinking about what he is doing, advocates conformity to the way things have always been done in the past. Thus the binary opposition structuring the poem is that between nonconformity and conformity. Because we see the situation from the speaker’s point of view and our sympathies there‑ fore lie with him, it is safe to say that nonconformity is the privileged term. The main theme, from a New Critical perspective—or, in deconstructive terms, the poem’s overt ideological project—might be stated as follows: the poem criticizes mindless conformity to obsolete traditions for which the wall is a metaphor. To be sure that we have identified the poem’s ideological project and not just set up an easy target that we can then proceed to shoot down, we must find, in New Critical fashion, all the evidence the poem offers in support of the theme we’ve identified. For example, we accept the speaker’s negative views of his neighbor and of obsolete traditions because he clearly shows that the wall has outlived its purpose—“My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines” (11. 25–26)—and because the speaker associates himself with nature (“Spring [a natural event] is the mischief in me”: 1. 28), which is generally pre‑ sumed good. Indeed, our faith in nature’s wisdom promotes our initial accep‑ tance of the speaker’s viewpoint in the poem’s opening four lines, which put nature in opposition to the wall: it is nature that “sends the frozen‑ground‑swell” to spill “the upper boulders in the sun” (11. 2–3). This theme is reinforced when the men “have to use a spell” to make the unwill‑ ing boulders, natural objects, stay in place (11. 18–19) and when it is implied that the boulders will fall as soon as the men turn their backs (1. 19). Nature’s “children”—the hunters in lines 5–7 and the elves in line 36—also support the speaker’s attitude toward the wall. In addition, we often associate the word wall