I strongly encourage you to run possible ideas, or even a draft of a paper, past me before going too far. Also remember to avoid the obvious in your interpretations and push for ideas that other people may have missed. Use examples and quotes to support ALL your claims. Isolate a theme in the text and show how the work seeks to resolve the problems, ambiguities and ironies it proposes.
All great literature is meant to entertain as well as to inform.
Read slowly and carefully and demonstrate how the figures of speech, point of view, diction, recurrent ideas or events work toward that theme. Make sure you can state the theme as a sentence, and try to avoid the overtly obvious. Move very slowly through the text and explain how you interpret each part of the story. React to the text as a whole, but you may want to consider how other readers would interpret this work. Imagine yourself as a different gender reading this work.