SOURCE: Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Toward a Theory of Gendered Reading.” Reader, no. 30 (fall 1993): 1-25.

[In the following essay, Linkin explores the connections between various reading theories and gender research and interpretation.]

INTRODUCTION

The intersection of reading theory and gender research continues to produce a variety of intriguing studies seeking to explore, describe, and account for projected differences between the ways men and women read, or better, between male and female modes of reading. Most scholarship still falls into the two areas Elizabeth Flynn noted in her “Gender and Reading”: either research into the reading behaviors of precollege students or interpretive analyses of literary texts by feminist critics whose resisting readings militate against the once prevalent form of “immasculation” Judith Fetterley named into common consciousness (the process by which female readers learned to identify as males, given a canon that so long privileged masculinist stories of separation over feminist stories of connection). However, a few studies over the years have tried to posit preliminary theories on gendered reading patterns for adults based on some form of empirical study, such as Norman Holland's “Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death,” and more recently, Flynn's “Gender and Reading,” David Bleich's “Gender Interests in Reading and Language,” and Susan Gabriel's “Gender, Reading, and Writing: Assignments, Expectations, and Responses.” These empirical studies share enough ground to allow for an initial articulation of a larger theory of gendered reading consonant with current views of genderlect—language variation based on gender—that insists on the primary role of power relations in identifying differences between the ways women and men respond to reading.

Both men and women read for power, but the manner of empowerment splits along lines made nearly predictable by our wide-ranging application of Carol Gilligan's work in the psychology of moral decision-making: where the female mode empowers through connection to a community, the male mode empowers through competition within a hierarchy. By using the term power relations, I hope not to complicate the already vexed issue of whether the cause of genderlect should be attributed to dominance (the powerful/powerless distinction) or difference (the two separate but equal male/female cultures approach), as Deborah Cameron frames the discussion in her “‘Not Gender Difference But the Difference Gender Makes’.” Given the political and social reality of women's and men's lives, both explanations might be conflated into one that acknowledges male and female modes as two separate but equal approaches conditioned by a world where men still dominate women who remain culturally subordinate, where the male mode continues to effect greater public viability than the female mode. Viewing genderlect as a social construction offers a useful way of thinking about the differences between male and female reading modes that empirical research brings to our attention. In the essay that follows, I review the four empirical studies cited above and two new studies conducted by students in my “Gender and Language” seminar to explore their implications for a theory of gendered reading that points to the ways cultural power informs a reading process demonstrably different for men and for women, as well as the significance such difference holds for us as teachers and scholars.

BACKGROUND

That there might be a difference between the ways men and women read, suggesting the need for a larger theory of gendered reading, is an issue that rises out of many fields but surely begins with Gilligan's groundbreaking study In A Different Voice, which argues for seeing male and female development along separate tracks. Extending the work of Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering, Gilligan posits male identity is formed by a process of separation that focuses on hierarchical relations, which leads to an ethic of justice based on conflicting rights, whereas female identity is formed through a series of connections that emphasize community relations, which leads to an ethic of care based on competing responsibilities. Of course, these categorical differences are not exclusively sexual ones: both men and women make moral decisions informed by justice and care, but if there is a continuum ranging from justice to care, more males will cluster in the justice section and more females will cluster in the care section. What Gilligan's framework contributes of particular importance to reading theory is the notion of hierarchy for males and community for females insofar as these concepts seem to manifest as male dominance and female cooperative relations (if we can consider these terms without any implicitly loaded valuation): while male mode interactions with texts underline hierarchical relations, female mode interactions with the texts reflect efforts to cooperate. In simple terms, when men read they are more apt to accept or reject; when women read, they try to understand (and will be more likely to blame themselves than the texts for inadequacy, a psychological habit we recognize in daily life that extends to reading habits).

There is a relatively steady line of development from Gilligan's work in the psychology of moral decision-making to Deborah Tannen's immensely popular and intelligent discussion of conversational differences in You Just Don't Understand. Just as Gilligan shows how the female mode employs an ethic of care that requires personal context for moral decision-making and the male mode uses an ethic of justice that works well in hypothetical or public situations, Tannen contrasts the ways men engage in more public asymmetrical conversational interactions that manifest competition with the ways women participate in more private symmetrical interactions to maintain community. Such contrasting of public and private spheres is an important factor in both reading theory and linguistics: Dale Spender's polemical Man Made Language argues that men construct the language as part of their use of public space as women in private space can not. How does this dichotomous view of public versus private extend to reading theory? When women inhabit the public space their position is not guaranteed; they must always work harder to understand the public space (the female mode of “cooperation”) rather than agree or disagree (the male mode of “dominance”). Because it has not been typical for women to be involved in the determination of public space, women struggle to be part of the conversation.

The example of the male generic “he” suggests a way of understanding the phenomenon of women trying to comprehend their position in public space: the generic “he” will always refer to and include men but will not always refer to and include women, so that a male reader does not have to question whether or not he is being referred to (he can simply go ahead and work through the implications of the reading) whereas a female reader must always pause to perform the extra step of determining whether or not she is being included (before she can go ahead and work through the implications of the reading). The male reader immediately and opportunely engages the text in a different way than the female reader; the female reader necessarily has to work at a level of comprehension, of understanding, of making sense of her place in the culture before she can approach or participate in the male reader's level of accepting or rejecting. She must perform this extra work unless she manages to immasculate herself and read as the male reader. As Alicia Ostriker comments in reviewing her long critical and poetical engagement with the works of William Blake, he

provided me personally with a credo. ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ The difficulty is that Blake did not really mean to include me in the term ‘man,’ just as John Donne did not mean to include me when he said that no man was an island.

(72-73)

The example of women's conversational habits similarly suggests a basic cooperative or accommodation principle operative in the female mode. As Pamela Fishman's analysis reveals in “Interaction: The Work Women Do,” women seem to work harder to maintain conversational interaction by initiating more prospective topics of conversation among which men select; transferring this finding to reading theory suggests that women are looking for openings, looking for conversational interactions to occur, interested in having the conversation between book and self maintained, whereas men can accept or reject (again). Just as women accommodate men in conversational interaction, they attempt to accommodate the text in their reading strategies because the text is dominant as purveyor of culture (whereas men experience less need to accommodate the text as they are establishing hierarchical relations within the culture they already inhabit). Or so our theoretical studies might suggest; but what does empirical research show us about reading patterns for men and women?

FOUR EMPIRICAL STUDIES: HOLLAND, FLYNN, BLEICH, GABRIEL

If there is one common denominator among the four published studies, it speaks to connections between gender, power, and the reading process. In “Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death,” Holland summarizes a set of student reader responses to the conclusion of King Lear to demonstrate the values of transactive teaching and unexpectedly uncovers a gendered difference: only the women discuss the father-daughter relationship and only the men identify feelings of helplessness in facing Cordelia's death. Because Holland is not looking for gender reading differences at the outset, but happens upon them in his analysis of transactive teaching (teaching that suppositionally values the female mode over the male mode in asking for student responses based on “feelings, associations, persons” over “the intellectual, analytical response of the ordinary English class,” 277), he manages to avoid the great sinkhole Nina Baym identifies as a source of fault in most studies of gendered reading: researchers tend to find evidence supporting exactly what they seek to prove (“The Feminist Teacher of Literature: Feminist or Teacher?”). What Holland finds true of the ten students' writings he cites is that five of the women “brought their own experience as daughters to their experiencing and shaping of this father-daughter relationship” (280-81), while a sixth empathized with Kent; four of the men “bring out various feelings of helplessness and even sexual impotence in response to the death of Cordelia” (283). Holland acknowledges that these ten do not account for all the responses, but sees them reflecting the different ways men and women read power:

What began as individual associations opened out first into self-discovery, then into discovering the ways we men and women brought our society's assigning of power to men and compliance to women into the ending of King Lear.

(284)

Among his concluding remarks, Holland observes how “the men brought to the play a need, typical of men in our society, to feel powerfully in control of events. The women brought the problem of coping with patriarchal culture” (285).

Power also informs the reading process Flynn outlines in “Gender and Reading.” Describing reading as a confrontation or interaction between a readerly “self” and the textual “other,” Flynn posits three potential outcomes: the reader resists or dominates the text (and remains unchanged); the reader submits to the text (and loses self); or the reader learns from the text without losing critical distance to achieve a coherent reading in a kind of dialogical interaction (and enhances self). Analyzing the written responses of fifty-two college students (twenty-six males and twenty-six females) to three frequently anthologized short stories—Joyce's “Araby,” Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants,” and Woolf's “Kew Gardens”—she discovers that more of the men seem to engage in confrontational reading strategies that entail resisting or submitting to the text, while more of the women seem to achieve interactive coherence in their reading.

For “Araby,” Flynn notes the male readers primarily resisted or submitted to the text whereas the female readers were “better able to achieve a balance between detachment and involvement” (276). Of course “Araby” is a problematic story in that it depicts a male initiation that male readers might want to resist (whereas female readers might feel less involvement). For “Hills Like White Elephants,” however, Flynn observes strikingly similar results: “once again, men students were often closer to the extremes of domination or submission, and the women were often closer to the interactive center” (276). Interestingly, Flynn's analysis of student responses to “Kew Gardens” does not offer up the same pattern in that there are fewer efforts to dominate the text. Of course, “Kew Gardens” is also problematic in ways diametrically opposite to “Araby” insofar as Woolf is a feminist writer whose narrative style may speak more easily to the fluid ego boundaries of the female (as Chodorow identifies development) than the oedipally-constructed male. Unfortunately, Flynn makes no effort to account for the effect the gender of her short story writers might have on readers. Given the power relations frame for genderlect, it is reasonable to wonder whether male readers have a greater tendency to compete with male writers and female readers are more apt to connect with female writers. Just as Tannen points out that men and women often interact at cross-purposes in conversation, so too readers and writers of opposite gender. In Flynn's study, most readers submit to “Kew Gardens,” but a small percentage achieve critical detachment, and more of these readers are female than male.

Warning us about the limitations of her study (and noting that, for the most part, these fifty-two first-time readers submit to textual difficulties), Flynn tentatively concludes:

male students sometimes react to disturbing stories by rejecting them or by dominating them, a strategy, it seems, that women do not often employ. The study also suggests that women more often arrive at meaningful interpretations of stories because they more frequently break free of submissive entanglement in a text and evaluate characters and events with critical detachment.

(285)

Because her reading theory ironically establishes a hierarchy that implicitly favors the female mode over the male mode—the best kind of reading achieves interactive coherence rather than dominance or submission—Flynn's theory operates within a gendered framework that Baym harshly critiques: bad readers (resistant males and submissive males and females) engage in power relations while good readers (females) cooperate. But if we strip away the evaluative frame overlaying the empirical results, the findings point to a gender difference in reading that correlates exactly with a female mode empowered through connection and a male mode empowered through competition.

David Bleich seems to step outside the power differential of reading gender in his discussion of “Gender Interests in Reading and Language,” but a reanalysis of the data he offers as evidence reflects an implicit power division. Describing a seminar on “Comparative Literary Response Patterns of Men and Women” he conducted with seven students who analyzed one another's response statements to works of prose fiction by Herman Melville and Emily Brontë and lyric poetry by William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, Bleich locates a significant difference in gendered readings of genre: whereas men and women read lyric poetry similarly, focusing on a strong lyric voice, they read prose fiction differently. The men were equally conscious of a strong narrative voice, but the women seemed to enter into the fictive world without focusing on the voice that narrated the world into being. Like Isaiah Smithson, who calls this investigation a “questionable study” (10), I find this study troubling; beyond the fact that Bleich participates in the group he also teaches and grades, the excerpts Bleich cites do not always support his thesis. Indeed, Flynn's framework offers a much more useful way of categorizing at least the responses to fiction in that the men engage in clearly hierarchical relations with the texts while the women seem to interact.

Both of the male subjects Bleich cites in his study, Mr. C and Mr. Bleich himself, submit to Melville in their voicing of affinity and respect even as they seek to dominate him. For Mr. C, Melville offers a writing model with whom he can now identify (and presumably one day surpass):

Melville is one of the few authors for whom I feel a detailed affinity. … I resolved to go underground, as I imagine Melville also did in his mid-thirties, from which vantage point I could scrutinize the possibility of receptiveness in others or launch an unexpected assault that would strike dismay and fear in others. … I feel a fellowship with Melville, and sympathize with his sorrows, burdens, self-irony, scorn and suppressed rage.

(241)

Mr. Bleich's response to Melville suggestively portrays a later stage of the kind of relationship Mr. C experiences in that he seems positively gleeful (and insulting) in overcoming his former submission to Melville's power:

I remembered only the power of the stories. … I became aware that the way things were said were as if I had said them after long-deliberation. … Is the man who cannot speak also the cock who cannot write? … I begin to read the narrators as men, and the objects of their attention as women. I begin to think that, whether cultural or biological, this silent element is the woman in Melville—either a real woman, or a part of himself he associates with women that he considers unavailable to himself.

(244)

That Mr. Bleich seeks to dominate Melville by “reducing” him to a woman is a strategy of resistance both men find rather effective in their surprisingly violent responses to Brontë. For Mr. C, all attempts to dominate Brontë fail; repeatedly referring to her as “Emily,” even reading a biography of her before rereading her literary work to minimize his sense of distance from her, Mr. C admits his efforts to tame or control Brontë

reminds me of similar attempts of mine to “fully” understand and master the viewpoints and emotional responses of real-life friends and lovers. One … continually awed me with her ferocious energy and baffled me with her kaleidoscopic changed [sic] of mood; quite often I felt uncomfortably off-balance in her presence. … I was both awed and irritated by several instances of Emily's behavior.

(240)

Astonishing as Mr. C's admission is, Mr. Bleich goes even further in delineating his rage in having to submit to Brontë's power; reading the representation of men in Wuthering Heights as dogs ruled by their master, woman, he sees Heathcliff's death as the fulfillment of Isabella's

choice remark, “Heathcliff, if I were you, I'd go stretch myself over her grave and die like a faithful dog.” This is more or less what he does. He did what his wife told him to do. All the dogs that appear at the onset of the novel annoying the hapless Lockwood began to make a little more sense as I read of Emily Brontë's fond attachment to her bulldog, Keeper. These dogs are men—wild, hungry, and incomprehensibly loyal to their master—woman. … Lockwood is a contrivance … so that the female principle can have its say.

(242-43)

If there is a cross-gender effect in the reading for power frame, both Mr. C and Mr. Bleich demonstrate it through the virulence of their responses, showing how much more difficult it is to submit to a female writer of whom they might more readily anticipate efforts to connect rather than dominate.

By contrast, the two women respondents cited make connections between the events in Wuthering Heights and their own worlds. Rather than dominate or submit to Brontë, Ms. B concentrates on parallels between the reality the novel projects and the reality she has known, coming to an understanding of the personalities and relationships in Wuthering Heights by conflating them with models from her life: Catherine and her mother, Heathcliff and herself, Linton and her father, Isabella and herself. As Bleich points out, “Ms. B's response is able to articulate the analogy of feeling without interpolating a judgment of the characters. Such moves also appear in her response to Melville's stories” (245-46). Ms. D offers a similarly interactive reading of Wuthering Heights in exploring the degree of identity she shares with Catherine; when it comes to Melville, however, Ms. D's brief excerpt indicates strong feminist resistance to Melville's canonical status:

I read “Billy Budd” about one year ago in a course I liked a lot. And it is also due to this course that I started associating Melville with one of these “major writers” forever concerned with a universal truth, with mysterious mysticism, all so much more highly evaluated than the “trivial” occupation of so-called minor writers with domestic and regional concerns.

(248-49)

Bleich dismisses the way in which Ms. D's response refers to the author—he contends, of course, that men focus on the writers of prose fiction whereas women enter into the created world—but her resistance to Melville seems to be so great that she refuses to enter into his world. And given the worlds Melville constructs, the only way she can enter into them in this gendered reading framework is as the immasculated reader, the female who reads herself as male. But Ms. D engages in a kind of hierarchical relation with Melville as the feminist resisting reader; she does not attempt to dominate Melville as the male resisting readers did Brontë (that is, through minimizing achievement), but simply rejects any degree of participation.

The poetry responses are equally interesting in reflecting gender differences. Once again, the two male subjects demonstrate hierarchical concerns in describing the extent of their resistance or submission to Wordsworth and Dickinson. Mr. C couches his resistance to Wordsworth in a kind of competitive comparison of their different childhoods—

In general, I am left cold by Wordsworth's idealization of childhood and boyhood in “Resolution” and “Intimations.” Perhaps that is because I did not enjoy the unusual freedom Wordsworth seems to have been allowed while a boy.

(249)

—while Bleich acknowledges how he finally submits to the power of Wordsworth's voice after hearing the poetry read authoritatively by his descendent, Jonathan Wordsworth, in “suitable British tones” (251). Both men inexplicably invoke gender in resisting or dominating Dickinson (as they did for Brontë). Mr. C reports he alternately feels like a father or older brother to “Emily,” the “endearing little urchin” or “young girl fantasizing that she is a boy child” in “My life had stood / a Loaded Gun,” a poem that invites him to read himself as the Master to whom “Emily is incestuously attracted … and I am not repelled, though made uneasy, by that knowledge” (250). Mr. Bleich carries the emphasis on Dickinson's sexuality even further by focusing on her “quintessentially womanly intelligence … her economy of expression is seductive, leaving ‘pregnant’ ‘gaps’ in my perception of the thought, that gives me the feeling of being thus ‘loaded’” (251).

Neither woman refers to gender as such. Ms. B arguably interacts with both poets, moving back and forth between the poems, the poets, and her personal response to academic life; Ms. D expresses a sense of distance from Wordsworth which she hopes to overcome by reading a biography that will make more tenable the kind of interaction she experiences with Dickinson. And how different her voice in describing what she hopes to accomplish in reading that biography compared to Mr. C's pre-emptive reading of a biography on Brontë:

At this point I feel it would have been good to know something more about Wordsworth, some biographical information in order to get close to him as a person and to create a picture of him with which I could establish some kind of contact.

(253)

Interactive connection or hierarchical ordering: using Flynn's terms descriptively—without the implicit valuation her own study invokes (though these terms are loaded)—offers a cogent means of identifying the difference among the responses Bleich records.

These first three empirical studies find commonality in the way gendered reading reflects power differences between a male mode that asserts independence or separation through hierarchical relations and a female mode that seeks connection or likeness through participation in a network of relations. In the fourth study, “Gender, Reading, and Writing: Assignments, Expectations, and Responses,” Gabriel tests for gender identification in the reading process, hypothesizing that men primarily identify with male protagonists whereas women identify with both female and male protagonists (because women have learned to function as immasculated readers). Gabriel had 129 students (85 women and 44 men) compose journal responses in the voices of two characters who experience sexual initiations: George in Anderson's “Nobody Knows” and Liz in Hemingway's “Up In Michigan.” Confounding her expectations, male and female students expressed comparable degrees of difficulty identifying with the other (although the women were slightly better able to identify with a male protagonist than the men did with a female protagonist).

They did reveal rather significant interpretive differences, however: as George, men celebrated coming of age while women expressed hopes for beginning a relationship (Gabriel points out the story explicitly rejects this possibility); as Liz, women focused on feeling overpowered after saying “no” whereas none of the men acknowledged Liz's saying “no” (and many asserted she wanted to be overpowered). When the women inhabited male or female character voices, they wrote as female mode readers focused on relationships and empowerment through connection; when the men inhabited female or male character voices, they wrote as male mode readers focused on independence and hierarchical power. No matter what the stories themselves offered up as true, both male and female readers rewrote these stories to reflect their own gendered vision of themselves, imposing that vision on the characters they were told to inhabit. Gabriel's work suggests how deeply ingrained gendered expectations and reading patterns are: not only do we experience great difficulty identifying with the other, but we also project the enculturated truths of our respective gender onto the other when we are asked to inhabit the other's identity. If such projection of gender identity occurs with regularity, it may not be possible for women to operate as immasculated readers. Moreover, it may be much harder for us to read and share in one another's stories than we have ever imagined.

TWO EMPIRICAL STUDIES: BILLINGS, ENGLEBRECHT

During the spring of 1991, I taught two graduate seminars on “Gender and Language” at New Mexico State University. My first lesson in reader response occurred before the course began when I was informed that my original title—“Women and Language”—used exclusionary language (Backlash, indeed). Several students conducted empirical studies testing discrete language samples for genderlect, hoping to get at the underlying assumptions behind a reader's response to gender by asking respondents to identify gender in reading samples and then account for their assignation of gender; in other words, how a reader's cultural assumptions about gender influence the reading process, how men and women read maleness and femaleness. I offer a brief overview of two studies: Claudia Billings on drama and Grushenka Englebrecht on poetry. Although both exhibit design flaws, consider them first efforts that render preliminary results intriguing enough to invite further exploration.

For the first study, Billings distributed excerpts from Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Shepherd's True West to twenty-one freshmen composition students (9 men and 12 women). She selected these two plays for their several similarities—both are contemporary works concerned with family relationships, set in kitchens of family homes, and distinctly regional in approach—and their important difference: for Billings, Henley's play embodies the female mode of intimacy, connections, and community while Shepherd's play invokes the male mode of independence, hierarchy, and contests. The excerpts she chose highlight interaction between Henley's sisters Babe and Meg, and Shepherd's brothers Lee and Austin; students were asked to name the gender of these characters, to explain what helped them make their choices, and to list specific words or phrases that enabled them to determine the characters' gender (see Appendix 1).

For Crimes of the Heart, all nine men agreed that Babe must be female because of the expressions she used, her tone of voice, the way she talked, and that she was talkative; they pointed to word choices or actions to support their case: she used the word “Mama” several times, used the words “imagine” and “angels” (for them denotative of female speech), and “she stuck her head in the oven.” The women were more divided in their identification of Babe; the more than half who identified her as female pointed less to her specific word choices or actions than to her interactions: one said “she seemed to understand fully Mama's feelings. It seems more of a female trait” while another argued her femaleness because of “the careful way she tells the story of her mother hanging herself and the cat,” and a third identified her as female “because it seems that females always need an explanation and an in-depth one at that, to explain monumental happenings in their life.” Billings accounts for these fairly different rationales by citing and extending Bleich's observation that “women enter the world of the novel” (239) to drama. What I observe in her results is that the men look at Babe's language sample to make a case whereas the women connect with Babe's efforts to make connections within her own life when they identify her as female; curiously, the smaller group of women who identify Babe as male make no connection with her, but cite the same case-making evidence as the men who identify her as female. For Babe, the women engage in an interactive reading when they identify her as female but look at her behavior in the same way the men do when they perceive her as male.

For True West, 7 of the 9 men and 10 of the 12 women identify Austin as male, justifying their choice by pointing to his use of “short abrupt phrases,” “straight-forward answers,” and his use of slang and incorrect grammar. Several of the women, however, also discussed his behavior: one said “usually men are left in charge of things when someone goes away,” while another said “he was confident about being in charge,” a third said he was male “because he is so quiet,” and a fourth said “he was left alone (in the house)[;] most girls, at least the ones that I know[,] don't like to be alone. They have friends over to keep them company.” Perhaps just as they do for Henley's character Babe, these female readers are entering into the world of the play, making connections between their worlds and these characters. While they did not connect with him in any personal way, only the women viewed his behavior in an interactive mode or tried to account for their assignation of gender this way. What Billings's study points to in a tentative way is a gendered difference in case-making strategies dependent on affiliation: when male and female readers read maleness they seem to process their recognition through the male mode that locates justice in a hierarchical ordering of conflicting rights occurring in public or hypothetical situations. While male readers continue to use a male mode in accounting for their recognition of femaleness, female readers switch to the female mode characterized by an ethic of care based on competing responsibilities, on connection, and on personal context.

The second study conducted in the “Gender and Language” seminar offers a similar finding. A poet herself, Englebrecht is sensitive to critical claims that “women poets have (and do) labor under the extra burden of either suppressing their femaleness and ‘writing like a man’ or ‘writing like a woman’ and risking rejection” (1), and so chose to explore whether a reader's perception of a poet's gender influences responses to poetry. Offering excerpts from two poems on parenting—Sharon Olds's “Looking at Them Asleep” and Galway Kinnell's “Little-Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”—she studied the responses of three groups of college readers: freshman composition students, sophomore and junior creative writers, and senior and graduate students in a literature class: 28 women and 27 men. Englebrecht asked students to identify the poet's gender, account for the identification, point to stylistic differences, respond personally to the poems, and identify which one they preferred (see Appendix 2). Students were fairly adept at identifying gender (approximately two thirds read Kinnell as male and Olds as female); what surprised Englebrecht was the marked way students accounted for their gender identifications by using what she considered stereotypic terms denoting male and female modes. In order of frequency, Kinnell's language was identified as choppy, distant, difficult, metaphorical, abstract, negative, intellectual, abrupt, cryptic, and technical; Olds's language was identified as accessible, emotional, tender and loving, intimate, flowing, prose-like, direct, cute or sweet, soft, and nice (see Appendix 3).

While readers generally agreed in applying these terms, men and women did reveal a significant preference in their particular use of adjectives: women were twice as likely to call Kinnell's language distant, negative, and choppy whereas men were twice as likely to call it difficult and abrupt. Women were twice as likely to call Olds's language emotional, tender, intimate, and flowing whereas men were twice as likely to call it accessible, cute, and nice. These adjective preferences point to a gender difference in the ways these students responded to poetry: the women comment on their ability to form an emotional connection with both poems (distant/negative or tender/intimate); the men comment on their ability to understand the poems (difficult or accessible). In a sense, the men exhibit hierarchical reading responses—dominating or resisting the text—especially when they use the somewhat belittling adjectives “cute” and “nice” for Olds. This adjectival difference matches the two primary rationales for students' overwhelming preference for Olds over Kinnell (43 to 11): Olds was easier to understand and conveyed emotion better. More of the men spoke to the issue of comprehending the poem (they liked Olds better because they understood her poem, could dominate the reading experience); more of the women not only spoke to the emotional pull of Olds's poem but also offered interactive readings that introduced their own experience as mothers or daughters (none of the men identified their experience as fathers or sons). Like Holland's study of student responses to the death of Cordelia in King Lear, Englebrecht's study reveals how female readers engage in a female mode characterized by connection and personal context as they relate their experiences as women to fictive women.

Although both student researchers indicated disappointment with their results—they wanted definitive linguistic markers demonstrating genderlect in clear-cut, unequivocable terms that might be cited easily in academic studies—I think their work adds significantly to our increasing awareness of the way genderlect is expressed: again and again, the men employed male mode strategies to make cases in accounting for their hierarchical reading of maleness and femaleness and the women used female mode techniques that invoked the personal when they connectively read femaleness. While some women also read maleness in female mode, others crossed over to male mode in reading maleness and thereby offered a concrete example of immasculation in operation. For me as teacher, the evaluations Billings and Englebrecht offer of their work prove as interesting as the physical results of their studies; their disappointment in presumably failing to uncover hard data underscores the value attached to male mode strategies in the public academic environment: despite (or perhaps because of) their semester-long investigations into genderlect and power relations, they both want to make cases for their research based on a hierarchical ordering of discrete units of information. That perfectly understandable desire says a great deal about the implications of a larger theory of gendered reading—and, necessarily, gendered writing—for teaching, for research, and for evaluation.

READING AND WRITING GENDERED LANGUAGE

If more and more researchers are right to see the case-making hierarchical mode as male and the connective personal mode as female, what implications do these two modes have for our valuation of reading and writing? On the one hand, we have Flynn and others (including myself) valuing a form of interactive reading that sounds very much like female mode—reading that empowers through invoking the personal to understand the public—over the male mode of hierarchical reading that situates reading in a power struggle. On the other hand, we have a mighty host of traditional English professors (also including myself) who insist students learn to write the formal academic style of public, impersonal male mode discourse (which accounts, in part, for the concerns Billings and Englebrecht express). Pushing a little harder on these two opposing hands introduces the possibility of identifying not only separate male and female modes for gendered reading and gendered writing, but also an implicit gendering of reading and writing activities as currently valued in academe that perpetuates old stereotypes: the private act of receptive reading enacts female mode while the public process of active writing transacts male mode. But somewhere between these two hands, gently cupped like water that cannot be contained, beginning to overflow arbitrary boundaries, already seeping through our clenched fingers, a third possibility emerges: most recently the voices of critics such as Jane Tompkins, Olivia Frey, or Marianna Torgovnick articulate a more sophisticated version of personalized reading and writing that seeks to combine the case-making strategies of male mode with the contextualized community foregrounded in female mode.

In the spirit and the letter of that third possibility, I offer an anecdote: I recently visited a state university where English department faculty discussed ways to encourage minority students; several minority faculty members spoke to the issue by invoking their personal experiences as students and teachers. One movingly described how hard she worked to erase her Hispanic accent—and, for a long time, heritage—so that she might “pass” as Anglo and succeed in the academic world; only when she had achieved academic success did she begin the painful process of acknowledging her heritage to restore it. I thought of my own ethnicity, and my own needs as a student: a child of immigrant parents with little education, outside the cultural norm that my schoolfriends so easily inhabited, all I wanted from my education was the knowledge of how to operate successfully in the society that existed around me. I wanted to learn the rules; I wanted to know how to speak so that people would hear me. Isn't this what we all need? Until we are enculturated into the mode of public discourse society acknowledges, until we learn the language and “dialect of the father tongue” (as Jane Tompkins names it in “Me and My Shadow”), we cannot participate in that larger conversation that enables us to constitute a society that develops, in part, out of personal vision. Whether it be immasculation or an acceptably unaccented version of the English language, those of us yet on the margins of public discourse have located strategies that enable us to pass into the public domain. As readers of the text of society and culture, we seek connection through accommodation, through cooperation with that from which we have been precluded; female mode provides a means of gaining entrance into the public arena governed by hierarchy, by the male reading mode of accepting or rejecting. But once we learn to speak so that others can hear us—and surely our experience teaches us such discourse inhabits the male mode—we can begin the struggle to recall the personal, to reinvoke the suppressed, and say whatever we like.

What I would like to say is, very simply, this: let us recognize the existence and validity of female mode and male mode strategies as strategies that operate in different contexts, that perhaps neither is complete by itself but can be effective in given situations, that neither is gender-specific in a biological essentialist sense but rather a socially constructed sensibility that can prove enabling to both men and women, and that what we are beginning to identify as a gendered difference in reading and writing can become two equally empowering modes that balance and complement one another. Let us bear these two modes in mind as we read and respond to student writing, to creative writing, and to scholarly writing; let us locate value differently in recognizing the need for readings that alternately cooperate or dominate, connect or compete, engage in community relations or order hierarchical relations. In “An Other Space: A Future For Feminism?” Jane Moore invites us to reconsider the issue of textual mastery by citing a reader's report that accuses Jane Gallop of failing to comprehend Lacan (in Reading Lacan) because Gallop's style deliberately resists suggesting her absolute command over Lacan's texts. Questioning Gallop's knowledge and expertise, the reader's report operates in male mode to insist on mastery, a comprehensive reading, and expert understanding. Of course, the reader is right to expect that Gallop has something of value to say; but immersion in male mode blinds the reader to the perspective female mode reveals. That is, Gallop knows a great deal about Lacan but rejects the philosophical premise (or at least writerly pretense) that her knowledge can ever be absolute. I suspect we can all think of examples that multiply this instance. As readers forming judgments of writing, we need to increase our awareness of the ways male and female reading modes determine comprehension and connection, and implement our awareness of gendered reading to establish new criteria for evaluation. Therein a difference lies.

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. “The Feminist Teacher of Literature: Feminist or Teacher?” Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy. Ed. S. Gabriel and I. Smithson. 60-77.

Billings, Claudia. “Gender and Language in Theatre Literature.” Unpublished essay, New Mexico State University, 1991.

Bleich, David. “Gender Interests in Reading and Language.” Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Ed. E. Flynn and P. Schweickart. 234-66.

Cameron, Deborah. “‘Not Gender Difference But the Difference Gender Makes’—Explanation in Research on Sex and Language.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 94 (1992): 13-26.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Englebrecht, Grushenka. “The Language of Parenting.” Unpublished essay, New Mexico State University, 1991.

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. NY: Crown P, 1991.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977.

Fishman, Pamela. “Interaction: The Work Women Do.” Language, Gender, and Society. Ed. Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramerae, and Nancy Henley. 1978; Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1983. 89-101.

Flynn, Elizabeth A.. “Gender and Reading.” Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Ed. E. Flynn and P. Schweickart. 267-88.

Flynn, Elizabeth A. and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Frey, Olivia. “Beyond Literary Darwinism: Women's Voices and Critical Discourse.” College English 52 (1990): 507-26.

Gabriel, Susan. “Gender, Reading, and Writing: Assignments, Expectations, and Responses.” Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy. Ed. S. Gabriel and I. Smithson. 127-139.

Gabriel, Susan and Isaiah Smithson, eds. Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1990.

Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Gilligan, Carol. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Holland, Norman. “Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death.” College English 39 (1977): 276-85.

Moore, Jane. “An Other Space: A Future for Feminism?” New Feminist Discourses. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. London: Routledge, 1992. 65-79.

Ostriker, Alicia. “My William Blake.” The Romantics and Us. Ed. Gene Ruoff. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 67-88.

Smithson, Isaiah. “Introduction: Investigating Gender, Power, and Pedagogy.” Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy. Ed. S. Gabriel and I. Smithson. 1-27.

Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. London: Routledge, 1980.

Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. NY: Morrow, 1990.

Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” NLH 19 (1987): 169-78.

———. “Pedagogy of the Distressed.” College English 52 (1990): 653-60.

Torgovnick, Marianna. “Experimental Critical Writing.” Profession 90 (1990): 25-27.

Appendix 1: Student Handout Billings, “Gender and Language in Theatre Literature”

Script #1 [Henley, Crimes of the Heart 3]

B: I know why she did it.

M: What? Why who did what?

B: Mama. I know why she hung that cat along with her.

M: You do?

B: It's ‘cause she was afraid of dying all alone.

M: Was she?

B: She felt so unsure, you know, as to what was coming. It seems the best thing coming up would be a lot of angels and all of them singing. But I imagine they have high, scary voices and little gold pointed fingers that are as sharp as blades and you don't want to meet ‘em all alone. You'd be afraid to meet ‘em all alone. So it wasn't like what people were saying about her hating that cat. Fact is, she loved that cat. She needed him with her ‘cause she felt so alone.

M: Oh, B … B. Why, B? Why?

B: Why what?

M: Why did you stick your head into the oven?!

B: I don't know, M. I'm having a bad day. It's been a real bad day …

Script #2 [Shepherd, True West 1.1]

L: So, Mom took off for Alaska, huh?

A: Yeah.

L: Sorta' left you in charge.

A: Well she knew I was coming down here so she offered me the place.

L: You keepin' the plants watered?

A: Yeah.

L: Keepin' the sink clean? She don't like even a single tea leaf in the sink ya' know.

A: Yeah, I know.

L: She gonna' be up there a long time?

A: I don't know.

L: Kinda' nice for you, huh? Whole place to yourself.

A: Yeah, it's great.

Questions:

What is the gender of character “B”? “M”? “L”? “A”?

What helped you decide the gender of the character?

List specific words or phrases the characters used that helped you decide this.

Appendix 2: Student Handout Englebrecht, “The Language of Parenting”

A [Kinnell, “Little-Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”]

Yes,

you cling because

I, like you, only sooner

than you, will go down

the path of vanished alphabets,

the roadlessness

to the other side of the darkness,

your arms

like the shoes left behind,

like the adjectives in the halting speech

of very old men

which used to be able to call up the forgotten nouns.

B [Olds, “Looking at Them Asleep”]

—and I know if I wake her she'll

smile and turn her face toward me though

half asleep and open her eyes and I

know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit

up and stare about him in blue

unrecognition. Oh my Lord how I

know these two. When love comes to me and says

what do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Questions:

Identify the gender of the writer of each poem.

Why do you think poem A is written by a poet of the gender you identified?

Why do you think poem B is written by a poet of the gender you identified?

Point out any differences you noted in the style of writing of these two poems.

What do these differences imply for you?

Respond personally to each of these poems. What do each mean to you? Can you identify with the feelings expressed in either of the poems? Why?

Which of the poems do you like better?

Why do you think that you like that particular poem better?

Appendix 3: Student Totals Englebrecht, “The Language of Parenting”

Table #1: Poet Gender Identifications
OLDS/F	OLDS/M	KINN/F	KINN/M	TOTALS
M 18	09	09	18	27
F 20	08	08	20	28
38	17	17	38	55

Table #2: Poet Preferences
	OLDS	KINNELL	TOTALS
MALE	20	07	27
FEMALE	23	04	27
	43	11	54

Table #3: Adjectival Descriptions of Poetic Language
KINNELL	M	F	TOT	OLDS	M	F	TOT
choppy	3	7	10	accessible	8	5	13
distant	3	7	10	emotional	5	8	13
difficult	6	2	8	tender/loving	4	8	12
metaphorical	3	4	7	intimate	2	6	8
abstract	4	3	7	flowing	2	5	7
negative	1	3	4	prose-like	2	2	4
intellectual	2	2	4	direct	1	2	3
abrupt	3	0	3	cute/sweet	2	0	2
cryptic	1	0	1	soft	1	1	2
technical	0	1	1	nice	1	0	1
	26	29	55		28	37	65