Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
15.6 The resisting reader
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning
At the same time, no account of the positioning of the reader would be complete without some attention to the way readers may also generate alternative readings. One influential approach to alternative readings is that developed by Judith Fetterley (1981) around the term the resisting reader, that is, a reader who does not accept the assumptions and knowledges that the text presents in the dominant reading, but resists them to construct an oppositional reading. Both male and female readers can read critically or oppositionally, as Jonathan Culler (1983) has shown, but it is often more in a woman’s interest to read in this way. Thus with the Conrad text discussed earlier (pp. 183-4), a resisting reader will focus on the assumptions that seem to make the text intelligible (for example, by focusing on the use and effects of ’they’ and ’we’).
In the following extract from a song by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy (1997) it is possible to trace two distinct readings, a dominant reading and a resisting reading:
If . . .
If you were the road I’d go all the way
If you were the night I’d sleep in the day
If you were the day I’d cry in the night
’Cause you are the way the truth and the light
If you were a tree I could put my arms around you
And you could not complain
If you were a tree I could carve my name into your side
And you would not cry, ’cause trees don’t cry
If you were a man I’d still love you
If you were a drink I’d drink my fill of you
If you were attacked I would kill for you
If your name was Jack I’d change mine to Jill for you
If you were a horse I’d clean the crap out of your stable
And never once complain
If you were a horse I could ride you through the fields at dawn
Through the day until the day was gone
I could sing about you in my songs
As we rode away into the setting sun
If you were my little girl I would find it hard to let you go
If you were my sister I would find it doubly so
If you were a dog I’d feed you scraps from off the table
Though my wife complains
If you were my dog I am sure you’d like it better
Then you’d be my loyal four-legged friend
You’d never have to think again
And we could be together ’til the end.
The dominant reading of this song is shaped by a series of conditional propositions that involve the reader and the narrator in a series of statements that
map out a position whereby the singer and the audience are assumed to share certain attitudes towards romance. The reader is directly addressed here, so that he or she has to decide as to whether he or she takes up the position of the ’I’ or the ’you’, the addresser or the addressee. However, the content of the song is not simple: at one and the same time, the singer articulates an excessively romantic form of love, while ironizing the grounds on which those romantic utterances are made. In some ways, the singer, in true postmodernist fashion, can be seen to be pushing the expression of romantic feeling beyond the realms of current discursive norms in that, instead of comparing the person he loves to flowers and birds, he compares her to horses and dogs. In this lies the humour of the song since the singer uses the sort of language that is generally not permissible within romantic songs (for example, ’crap’) and also makes statements such as ’If you were a man I’d still love you’. In this reading of the song, the singer is making excessive, humorous statements that the reader is expected to find ironizing and funny.
The resisting reading of this song would take issue with this position of postmodernist ironizing, since its playful instability seems to offer no basis from which to criticize the song. However, in this seemingly playful song, the woman is objectified just as in more openly sexist songs - she is represented as a loyal dog who is given scraps, a passive horse who is ridden, a tree on whom the singer carves his name, or a drink that is consumed by the singer (albeit in this slightly distanced, conditional form). Perhaps the oddest line in the song is in the final stanza: ’If you were a dog I’d feed you scraps from off the table / Though my wife complains’. If the loved one were a dog she would be loyal and would ’never have to think again’. Female agency is deleted in this song, even though on the surface it seems to be gesturing towards a more playful and anti-sexist interpretation.4
Resisting readings may be produced for most texts, and may focus on the representation of a range of issues, such as race, class and sexual preference. For example, Cora Kaplan has questioned the way that white women have assumed that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple refers to women in general rather than Black women in particular, and she challenges the universalizing discussions there have been of the book, which erase the discussion of race issues that the text raises (Kaplan, 1986). Lesbian readers might argue for a foregrounding of the elements in the text that focus on the female characters’ love for one another (Hobby and White, 1991). In a similar way, some postcolonial theorists have begun to reread canonical literary texts in order to focus on elements such as slavery and complicity in colonialism, which earlier readers of the texts in the past have overlooked or tried to ignore (Said, 1993). Other post-colonial critics have analysed the way that Eurocentrism pervades much of the representational practices within Western culture (Shohat and Stam, 1994).5 Adopting such an approach, the reader can first trace and describe the dominant reading of the text and then refuse this particular position in order to focus on other elements of the text. In this way, the reader is positively enabled and encouraged to assume power and responsibility in relation to the text and to the determination of its meaning. Instead of the traditional view of the reader as a passive recipient of information, the reader is enabled to construct meaning for him- or herself.