Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

15.2 Direct address
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Most texts present themselves as ignoring the presence of a reader. Yet some texts do address the reader in a direct manner, for example, by calling him or her ’dear reader’ or ’you’. Advertisements in particular often address the reader in a very direct manner, as the following caption in New! magazine demonstrates:

Copy these A-listers and get your hair to shine by nourishing it both inside and out.

(New!, April 2005)

This calls upon the reader directly by first ordering her to ’copy’ celebrities, addressing her as ’you’ and by referring to ’your hair’. It makes assumptions about the reader that she can be included in a group of people who are concerned about their hair shining and it also assumes that she would like to emulate famous celebrities who have shining hair. Some texts also address only a small proportion of their potential audience, as in the following advert for the Chocolate Tasting Club:

Attention all chocolate enthusiasts! why do we love it so MUCH? YOUR CHOCOLATE BLISS POINT EXPLAINED. THE MOST DELICIOUS DRINKING CHOCOLATE YOU WILL EVER TASTE.

Since this advert was distributed fairly widely, it might be assumed that it is addressing all people who like chocolate; however, nearly all of the images within the advertisement are of women eating chocolate. Furthermore, this notion that the advert is primarily addressed to women is affirmed since the language used is that of sexual seduction (’good chocolate seduces . . . flooding our senses with a deep pleasure’; ’voluptuous . . . lusciously wicked’) and there is a history of adverts that equate chocolate with sexual stimulation for women Thus, while the direct address is to ’we’ and ’you’, the implied reader is in fact restricted to women who like chocolate. Thus, the real reader and the implied reader may not always match up. However, as will be argued in the next section, although the reader is relegated to the position of an ’overhearer’, this still may have an effect on him or her, by encouraging them to agree with particular statements or ideas.

Direct address can also be found in novels. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), for example, begins with Huck as narrator introducing himself to the reader: ’You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.’ The narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick(1851) begins by inviting the reader to ’Call me Ishmael’ and then takes the reader on an imaginary journey, asking the reader to look and to respond to rhetorical questions. Sometimes, novels address the reader as ’reader’ - the most famous example is perhaps the first sentence in the last chapter of Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre (1847): ’Reader, I married him.’ Such strategies of direct address work to position the reader in relation to the text and to the narrator, although the precise implications of this need to be worked out in each case.

Even plays, which generally present the action and dialogue as if there were no audience or reader, may sometimes include a character who directly addresses the reader/audience. Such a character, sometimes operating as the chorus, is often detached from the play’s action and acts as a type of narrator. The chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V asks the members of the audience to use their imagination to help the players present large-scale historical actions on the stage:

. . . let us, ciphers to the great account,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies.

Yet, we need to be wary of assuming that all instances in which a text addresses someone in the second person (you) are directly addressing the reader. In poetry, for example, instances of direct address are more likely to refer to what is called the ’addressee’ than to the reader. In other words, many poems are addressed to someone other than the reader.