Writing about Literature

Supporting your interpretation with evidence from the work

Your thesis and tentative outline will point you toward details in the work relevant to your interpretation. As you begin filling out the body of your paper, make good use of those details.

As a rule, the topic sentence of each paragraph in the body of your paper should focus on some aspect of your overall interpretation. The rest of the paragraph should present details and perhaps quotations from the work that back up your interpretation.

In the following paragraph, from an interpretive essay on George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, the topic sentence comes first. It sums up the religious views represented by the character Lady Britomart.

Lady Britomart, a member of the Established Church of England, reveals her superficial attitude toward religion in a scene that takes place in her fashionable London townhouse. Religion, according to Lady Britomart, is a morbid topic of conversation. She admonishes her daughter Barbara: “Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant subject. Do have some sense of propriety” (1.686-87). Religion is an unpleasant subject to Lady Britomart because, unlike Barbara, she finds no joy or humor within her religion. It is not simply that she is a humorless person, for she frequently displays a sharp wit. But in Lady Britomart’s upper-class world, religion has its proper place—a serious place bound by convention and cut off from the real world. When Undershaft suggests, for example, that religion can be a pleasant and profoundly important subject, Lady Britomart replies, “Well if you are determined to have it [religion], then I insist on having it in a proper and respectable way. Charles: ring for prayers” (1.690-93).

Notice that the writer has quoted dialogue from the play to lend both flavor and substance to her interpretation (quotations are cited with act and line numbers). Notice too that the writer is indeed interpreting the work: She is not merely summarizing the plot.