In March I wrote an article on The Yellow Wallpaper. I had broken my usual rule and reverted to a class I'd taken in college, Psychopathology in Literature, and was all set to write on what I believed Charlotte Perkins Gilman was trying to say in her work. Then it happened. One Google search later, and I found Gilman's own words detailing the thoughts and motives behind her story, and boy did I feel dumb. Her analysis of her book was so much better than mine. And simpler, too. I had a nice, dark chuckle over my original work, then set out to clean it up according to the author's own words, all the while mentally glowering at my analysis-happy professors of yore.

How did I mess it up so badly? Well, I am expecting my first baby this fall. Like a squirrel storing up nuts for winter, I have been stocking my brain with as much information as I can find about all things labor, delivery and baby. Shoring up my mental straights this way, I have been doing a lot of reading about post-partum depression. With that in the back of my mind, I took up The Yellow Wallpaper and started to write.

Art is evocative. It draws thought and emotion out of us as we identify with characters, environments and themes. Gilman's story drew out of me all my fears of infant induced, sleep deprived madness. Because of how I related to the unnamed main character, through analysis I was able to piece together the story of her post-partum depression. I saw a woman exhausted by birth, isolated by depression and self-loathing because of her inability to be a certain type of mother. I was able to look at late 19th Century society and say, "A woman's place in society as wife and mother drove this character to X when recognition that Y was happening would have saved her mind." Then I found Gilman's article about the book, basically stating that, no, she wasn't making social commentary of any sort. She'd been nearly insane and treatment had made her worse, so she wrote a story about it. Who knew it was a roman a clef?

One of the beauties of art is that it gives us a place to sort out all manner of shapeless thought and emotion. Art helps us to line up our psyches with words and images, sounds and textures. Art gives us a forum for opinion, and the beauty of opinion is that yours is your own and need not conform to mine. When we shape those opinions into fact, we have analysis.

Hamlet is a perfect example of a work that evokes strong opinions which are often put forward as fact through analysis. Analysis of Hamlet as a character offers so many diversities that you'd think you were looking at more than one man. Is Hamlet sane pretending to be insane? Or is he insane, pretending to be sane, pretending to be insane? Hamlet's relationship with his mother is another hotbed of analytic confusion. One need only look at the differences between how Mel Gibson's Hamlet interacts with Glenn Close's Gertrude, and how Kenneth Branagh's interacts with Julie Christie's for example of that. It is an Oedipal Complex causing confusion and anger versus a pure, unadulterated, insane rage. Frankly, I prefer the latter because sometimes, it's just a cigar.

Your perception of Hamlet as a character alone or of Hamlet as he interacts with others is sure to be influenced by your experience and/or education. You may be neither right nor wrong. Shakespeare is dead. We'll never know whether he meant that the Danish prince had an unclean longing for his mother or if he meant that Hamlet's father's death and his mother's quick marriage to his uncle had so affected him that he could not separate his grief and anger from his relationship with her. I would be slow to put forth either idea, really. Shakespeare was a wry soul. He probably had a much cleverer back-story than I could imagine. Or maybe he was just writing what sounded good to him with no back-story at all.

Whatever your perception, if Hamlet has evoked a response in you, then the artist's work is done. You need not fully understand every jot and tittle to appreciate the experience. You need not know every thought behind every word in order to be moved by their meanings. Art frees us to soar. Analysis tethers us to the ground.

Art provokes though and emotion. We can accept that and be satisfied with what it does in us, or we can hold it under a magnifying glass, scrutinizing it to ash. To say, "Write about what this meant to you," is far different from, "Write about what this means," or even, "Write about what you think this meant to the author." One frees you to create your own art; the others bind you to a terminology. To paraphrase something Gore Vidal said in a lecture, with art, you can analyze it to death, but it is a lot more fun to just enjoy it.

I'm all about the fun, frankly. Then again, I still have many miles to go before I sleep, which means to me, time to learn, time to change and time to grow. Oh, but if you're writing a paper about that poem, make sure you say that Frost is talking about death. Otherwise, you're going to get a bad grade because everyone knows that's exactly what he meant. Well, at least that's what you're supposed to say. He's dead, too. Can't ask him.

Lane Morris Buckman studied English, Foreign Language and Classics at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she received her B.A. in 1995.
Read More