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

15.4 Dominant readings
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Recent theorizing of interpreting texts, particularly in cultural/media studies, has drawn on Stuart Hall’s work on encoding and decoding (Hall, 1973; Van Zoonan, 1994). This assumes that the message that is encoded in the text by the author is not the same as the message that is decoded by the reader. However, it is possible to argue that there are clues to what might constitute a dominant reading, that is, the reading that seems to be self-evident; it is the one that is ratified by common sense or by other ideologies that are available within the society of the time. Thus, rather than simply assuming that the reader will have certain knowledges to make sense of the text, the dominant reading makes sense only through drawing on larger ’stories’ circulating through society. For example, many texts have a dominant reading that accords with conventional notions of femininity.

In an advertisement for Lancome eye make-up, the dominant reading is that women who want to look like the person depicted should use Lancome eye make-up. On the right of the advertisement there is a representation of a beautiful woman and to the left are the words ’L’origine. Pebble grey, moss

green, cedar wood, senna brown. These are the subtle harmonies of original colour, colours drawn from Nature herself.’ Below this there is a representation of the eye make-up and this is linked to the depiction of the woman by Lancome’s trademark rose motif.

In order to make sense of this advertisement, we have to decode a range of elements: first, that the natural is good. This is signalled by the inclusion of reference to colours that are ’drawn from Nature herself’ and named after natural substances (pebble grey, cedar wood). It is also signalled by the inclusion of the Lancome trademark, which is a white stylized rose running horizontally across the image, linking the woman and the make-up. The juxtaposition (see Unit 12) of the woman, natural elements, the supposedly ’natural’ make-up and the fact that Nature is referred to as ’her’ produces a dominant reading of this text, which offers itself for interpretation in ways that suggest the following kinds of connections between elements:

✵ the make-up is coloured in the same way as nature;

✵ natural ingredients are good;

✵ feminine women have a special relationship with nature;

✵ women who would like to be thought to be feminine will buy the make-up.

These are not statements that the text makes explicitly, but in order to make coherent sense of this very fragmented text the reader has to draw on these larger discourses about femininity and its relation to the natural. In this way, therefore, ideological assumptions that circulate and constitute systems of shared knowledge allow the preferred sense of a particular text to seem self- evident.²

While a text will normally proffer one particular preferred or dominant reading, there is always the potential for other, contrary readings of the same text, as will be explored later. However, in order to make sense of the text as a coherent whole, the dominant reading is the one that readers can generally recognize easily and that they may therefore choose, unless they have political or personal reasons for challenging this reading.