How can I perceptively analyse within my essay?

Basic analysis, whilst providing the framework for a deeper investigation into your material, is less likely to be awarded highly by your examiner. Where basic analysis looks at the general themes and points a text makes, perceptive analysis enables a broader understanding, linking between various points within the work and gaining a more thorough appreciation of why and how it interacts with itself and the reader. As an example, we can use Stanley and Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire; a basic analysis would be to read their turbulent, dangerous dynamic as a predator-prey relationship. Stanley's raw and potent masculinity poses a threat to Blanche’s delicate and vulnerable femininity, culminating in her suggested sexual assault in Scene Ten. Although an analysis of this scene is valuable, it can be seen as a framework to create broader, deeper points about behaviour and humanity throughout the play. A perceptive student would, for example, draw on the animalistic qualities both embody throughout the play. Blanche’s delicacy is embodied in her initial tentative arrival to Elysian Fields, where she seems as insubstantial and 'uncertain [...] a moth', providing an early indicator of her fragile yet frenetic energy. Yet her insistence that the nature of the men she is surrounded by is inherently brutal and primal creates a certain inevitability to the primitive collapse of social order in Scene Ten. Her assault can therefore be seen as a break in the social veneer constructed around her, predictably committed by the ‘ape-like’ Stanley. She knows him to be ‘a little bit on the primitive side’, one of ‘the brutes’, who snaps under the weight of social pressure and falls foul of his brutal, aggressive and hyper-masculine nature. By analysing Stanley’s behaviour throughout the play, we can understand that the predatory behaviour of Stanley, and his pursuit of his prey, Blanche, is hardly an isolated event. The cumulative approach is one of the many ways we can ensure that we include perceptive analysis within our essays; it suggests to the examiner that the material is understood as not just a series of singular occurrences, but a combination of Stanley and Blanche’s competing and strongly gendered energies, their social interactions within the established code of behaviour and the ongoing theme of predatory exploitation within the play. This perceptive approach is a simple way to build marks, and demonstrates a clear understanding of the play and provides a strong analysis.