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When you focus on a theme within a text, expand your exploration beyond simply identifying main themes, like hate, family, relationships, power. Instead look at how themes relate to each other, by exploring conflicting ideas and the clash of opposites at the heart of them. For example:

• conflict - us versus them, friends versus foes, the state versus the citizen
• family - feelings of safety versus desire for independence
• love - desire for something forbidden versus attainable love
• power - the individual versus the state, man versus nature
• place - an idea of paradise versus reality, the idea of home versus exile
• nature - the separation of man from nature, natural beauty versus violence

An interesting theme involves a clash of opposites. Love as a theme is more interesting when there is conflict. If two people meet, fall in love and there are no problems, then it is not a very interesting story. Without something trying to stop love, the story has nowhere to go.

You can give structure and energy to an analysis essay by discussing the opposite sides of a theme.

The following extract is taken from a novel called Tess of the d’Urbervilles and shows a conversation between Tess, a working class girl, and Alec, a wealthy man of the upper classes.

He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said,

‘Bye the bye, Tess, your father has a new cob to-day. Somebody gave it to him.’

‘Somebody? You!’

D’Urberville nodded.

‘O how very good of you that is!’ she exclaimed, with a painful sense of awkwardness of having to thank him just then.

‘And the children have some toys.’

‘I didn’t know – you ever sent them anything!’ she murmured, much moved. ‘I almost wish you had not – yet, I almost wish it!’

‘Why, dear?’

‘It – hampers me so.’

‘Tessy – don’t you love me ever so little now?’

‘I’m grateful,’ she reluctantly admitted. ‘But I fear I do not –’

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

This extract suggests some conflicting themes. For example:

• unrequited love
• power in relationships
• conflict in relationships
• differences between the classes