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Gaps in Perception: Feminist Reading Responses

© Jessica Laccetti

If Derridian deconstructions propose that which is absent, one might view female readers as exiles of narrative since women are said to already occupy Kristeva's semiotic; that place of absence, silence, and incoherence which certain discourses repress. If a central question for literary feminisms, then, concerns the "situatedness" of the reader, answers revolve around politics of power. According to Fetterley, "...literature is male. [It] neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate." Excluding women from literature means that exile and "powerlessness characterize woman's experience of reading."

What happens, then, when women insert themselves into these types of gaps which exist in both fiction and reader-response theories? One possibility, as Schweickart says, is that "[t] he feminist entry into the conversation [on reader response theories] brings the nature of the text back into the foreground." With this acknowledgement comes an emphasis on the possibility for and plurality of "educated" and "competent" readings.

By acknowledging this multiplicity of reading strategies, Judith Fetterley's notion of the "resisting reader" parallels Kristeva's emphasis on the need for a "critical subjectivity" on the part of the female reader. While Kristeva articulates a politics of "tender aggression" involved in reading and writing, Fetterley advises women to be aware of the "impalpable designs" male-authored texts have on women. Male-authored texts immasculate women so "the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself." This alienation from oneself creates a woman reader who is doubly oppressed; it is not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one's experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly, the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male - to be universal - ...is to be not female.

Although, to a certain extent, "male" texts create an irreducible (female) alienation, there is a concomitant potential for resistance. Thus, the feature most constitutive of "women's" reading, according to Fetterley and Janice Radway, is a drive to "resist, alter, and reappropriate" certain texts and meanings. With this urge in mind, Radway affirms the combative and compensatory aspects of reading romantic fiction: [i] t is combative in the sense that it enables [women readers] to refuse the other-directed social role prescribed for them by their position within the institution of marriage. In picking up a book...they refuse temporarily their family's otherwise constant demand that they attend to the wants of others even as they act deliberately to do something for their own private pleasure. Their activity is compensatory...in that it permits them to focus on themselves and to carve out a solitary space within an arena where their self-interest is usually identified with the interests of others and where they are defined as a public resource to be mined at will by the family. Hence the romance reading "can be seen as an activity of mild protest and longing for reform necessitated by those institutions' failure to satisfy the emotional needs of women.