Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [101]
But none of these personal influences ultimately matters. What matters is that you share your data, show your reasons for believing that it means what you say it means, and do this well enough for a reader to find your interpretation reasonable (whether he or she actually believes it or not).
Arriving At an Interpretive Conclusion: Making Choices
Let’s try on one final interpretive context, and then see which of the various contexts (lenses) through which we have viewed the cover produces the most credible interpretation, the one that seems to best account for the patterns of detail in the evidence. We will try to push our own interpretive process to a choice by selecting one interpretive context as the most revealing: the New Yorker magazine itself.
In this context, the dark-haired figure wearing the New York banner stands, in a sense, for the magazine or, at least, for a potential reader—a representative New Yorker. What, then, does the cover “say” to and about New Yorkers and to and about the magazine and its readers?
So what that the woman representing New York is dark when the other women are light, is closed (narrowed eyes, closed mouth, hair tightly pulled up and back) when the others are open (wide-open eyes and mouths, loosely flowing hair), is pointed and angular when the others are round, sports a bared midriff when the others are covered?
As with our earlier attempt to interpret the cover in the context of the 2000 presidential campaign, interpreting it in the context of other New Yorker covers would require a little research. How do New Yorker covers characteristically represent New Yorkers? What might you discover by looking for patterns of repetition and contrast in a set of New Yorker covers rather than just this one?
The covers are all online. A cursory review of them would make evident the magazine’s fondness for simultaneously sending up and embracing the stereotype of New Yorkers as sophisticated, cultured, and cosmopolitan. How does the cover read in the context, for example, of various jokes about how New Yorkers think of themselves relative to the rest of the country, such as the cover depicting the United States as two large coastlines, east and west, connected by an almost nonexistent middle?
Armed with the knowledge that the covers are not only characteristically laughing at the rest of the country but also at New Yorkers themselves, you might begin to make explicit what is implicit in the cover.
Here are some attempts at making the cover speak. Is the cover in some way a “dumb blonde” joke in which the dark woman with the pronounced beauty mark and calculating gaze participates in but also sets herself apart from some kind of national “beauty” contest? Are we being invited (intentionally or not) to invert the conventional value hierarchy of dark and light so that the dark woman—the sort that gets represented as the evil stepmother in fairy tales such as “Snow White”—becomes “the fairest of them all,” and nobody’s fool?
Let’s end this sample analysis and interpretation with two possibilities—somewhat opposed to each other, but both plausible, at least to certain audiences (East and West Coast Americans, and readers of the New Yorker). At its most serious, the New Yorker cover may speak to American history in which New York has been the point of entry for generations of immigrants, the “dark” (literally and figuratively) in the face of America’s blonde northern European legacy. Within the context of other New Yorker covers, however, we might find ourselves wishing to leaven this dark reading with comic overtones—that the magazine is also admitting, yes America, we do think that we’re cooler and more individual and less plastic than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it.
GUIDELINES FOR MAKING INTERPRETATIONS PLAUSIBLE
Laying out the data is key to any kind of analysis, not simply because it