SOURCE: Murfin, Ross C. “Reader-Response Criticism and The Turn of the Screw.” In Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Henry James, ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ edited by Peter G. Beidler, pp. 152-59. Boston Mass.: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Murfin explains the basics of reader-response criticism, applying these theories to a reading of Henry James' Turn of the Screw.]

WHAT IS READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM?

Students are routinely asked in English courses for their reactions to texts they are reading. Sometimes there are so many different reactions that we may wonder whether everyone has read the same text. And some students respond so idiosyncratically to what they read that we say their responses are “totally off the wall.”

Reader-response critics are interested in the variety of our responses. Reader-response criticism raises theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work are the same as its meanings, whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses are more valid than, or superior to, others. It asks us to pose the following questions: What have we internalized that helps us determine what is and what isn't “off the wall”? In other words, what is the wall, and what standards help us to define it?

Reader-response criticism also provides models that are useful in answering such questions. Adena Rosmarin has suggested that a work can be likened to an incomplete work of sculpture: to see it fully, we must complete it imaginatively, taking care to do so in a way that responsibly takes into account what is there. An introduction to several other models of reader-response theory will allow you to understand better the reader-oriented essay that follows as well as to see a variety of ways in which, as a reader-response critic, you might respond to literary works.

Reader-response criticism, which emerged during the 1970s, focuses on what texts do to, or in, the mind of the reader, rather than regarding a text as something with properties exclusively its own. A poem, Louise M. Rosenblatt wrote as early as 1969, “is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.” Rosenblatt knew her definition would be difficult for many to accept: “The idea that a poem presupposes a reader actively involved with a text,” she wrote, “is particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations” (127).

Rosenblatt is implicitly referring to the formalists, the old “New Critics,” when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the notion that readers help make poems. Formalists preferred to discuss “the poem itself,” the “concrete work of art,” the “real poem.” And they refused to describe what a work of literature makes a reader “live through.” In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley defined as fallacious the very notion that a reader's response is part of the meaning of a literary work:

The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). … It begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological effects of a poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome … is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.

(21)

Reader-response critics take issue with their formalist predecessors. Stanley Fish, author of a highly influential article entitled “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” (1970), argues that any school of criticism that would see a work of literature as an object, that would claim to describe what it is and never what it does, is guilty of misconstruing what literature and reading really are. Literature exists when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective force. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process. Formalists assume it is a spatial one as they step back and survey the literary work as if it were an object spread out before them. They may find elegant patterns in the texts they examine and reexamine, but they fail to take into account that the work is quite different to a reader who is turning the pages and being moved, or affected, by lines that appear and disappear as the reader reads.

In a discussion of the effect that a sentence penned by the seventeenth-century physician Thomas Browne has on a reader reading, Fish pauses to say this about his analysis and also, by extension, about the overall critical strategy he has largely developed: “Whatever is persuasive and illuminating about [it] … is the result of my substituting for one question—what does this sentence mean?—another, more operational question—what does this sentence do?” He then quotes a line from John Milton's Paradise Lost, a line that refers to Satan and the other fallen angels: “Nor did they not perceive their evil plight.” Whereas more traditional critics might say that the “meaning” of the line is “They did perceive their evil plight,” Fish relates the uncertain movement of the reader's mind to that half-satisfying interpretation. Furthermore, he declares that “the reader's inability to tell whether or not ‘they’ do perceive and his involuntary question … are part of the line's meaning, even though they take place in the mind, not on the page” (Text 26).

This stress on what pages do to minds pervades the writings of most, if not all, reader-response critics. Wolfgang Iser, author of The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976), finds texts to be full of “gaps,” and these gaps, or “blanks,” as he sometimes calls them, powerfully affect the reader. The reader is forced to explain them, to connect what the gaps separate, literally to create in his or her mind a poem or novel or play that isn't in the text but that the text incites. Stephen Booth, who greatly influenced Fish, equally emphasizes what words, sentences, and passages “do.” He stresses in his analyses the “reading experience that results” from a “multiplicity of organizations” in, say, a Shakespeare sonnet (Essay ix). Sometimes these organizations don't make complete sense, and sometimes they even seem curiously contradictory. But that is precisely what interests reader-response critics, who, unlike formalists, are at least as interested in fragmentary, inconclusive, and even unfinished texts as in polished, unified works. For it is the reader's struggle to make sense of a challenging work that reader-response critics seek to describe.

In Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972), Fish reveals his preference for literature that makes readers work at making meaning. He contrasts two kinds of literary presentation. By the phrase “rhetorical presentation,” he describes literature that reflects and reinforces opinions that readers already hold; by “dialectical presentation,” he refers to works that prod and provoke. A dialectical text, rather than presenting an opinion as if it were truth, challenges readers to discover truths on their own. Such a text may not even have the kind of symmetry that formalist critics seek. Instead of offering a “single, sustained argument,” a dialectical text, or self-consuming artifact, may be “so arranged that to enter into the spirit and assumptions of any one of [its] … units is implicitly to reject the spirit and assumptions of the unit immediately preceding” (Artifacts 9). Such a text needs a reader-response critic to elucidate its workings. Another kind of critic is likely to try to explain why the units are unified and coherent, not why such units are contradicting and “consuming” their predecessors. The reader-response critic proceeds by describing the reader's way of dealing with the sudden twists and turns that characterize the dialectical text, making the reader return to earlier passages and see them in an entirely new light.

“The value of such a procedure,” Fish has written, “is predicated on the idea of meaning as an event,” not as something “located (presumed to be embedded) in the utterance” or “verbal object as a thing in itself” (Text 28). By redefining meaning as an event, the reader-response critic once again locates meaning in time: the reader's time. A text exists and signifies while it is being read, and what it signifies or means will depend, to no small extent, on when it is read. (Paradise Lost had some meanings for a seventeenth-century Puritan that it would not have for a twentieth-century atheist.)

With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind of the reader, with the redefinition of the literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a concurrent redefinition of the reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those ideas that an author has planted in a text. “The reader is active,” Rosenblatt insists (123). Fish begins “Literature in the Reader” with a similar observation: “If at this moment someone were to ask, ‘what are you doing,’ you might reply, ‘I am reading,’ and thereby acknowledge that reading is … something you do” (Text 22). In “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” he is even more provocative: “Interpreters do not decode poems: they make them” (Text 327). Iser, in focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on what is not expressed, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker. In an essay entitled “Interaction between Text and Reader,” he argues that what is missing from a narrative causes the reader to fill in the blanks creatively.

Iser's title implies a cooperation between reader and text that is also implied by Rosenblatt's definition of a poem as “what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text.” Indeed, Rosenblatt borrowed the term “transactional” to describe the dynamics of the reading process, which in her view involves interdependent texts and readers interacting. The view that texts and readers make poems together, though, is not shared by all interpreters generally thought of as reader-response critics. Steven Mailloux has divided reader-response critics into several categories, one of which he labels “subjective.” Subjective critics, like David Bleich (or Norman Holland after his conversion by Bleich), assume what Mailloux calls the “absolute priority of individual selves as creators of texts” (Conventions 31). In other words, these critics do not see the reader's response as one “guided” by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-seated, personal, psychological needs. What they find in texts is, in Holland's phrase, their own “identity theme.” Holland has argued that as readers we use “the literary work to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire” (“UNITY” 816).

Subjective critics, as you may already have guessed, often find themselves confronted with the following question: If all interpretation is a function of private, psychological identity, then why have so many readers interpreted, say, Shakespeare's Hamlet in the same way? Different subjective critics have answered the question differently. Holland simply has said that common identity themes exist, such as that involving an oedipal fantasy. Fish, who went through a subjectivist stage, has provided a different answer. In “Interpreting the Variorum,” he argues that the “stability of interpretation among readers” is a function of shared “interpretive strategies.” These strategies, which “exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read,” are held in common by “interpretive communities” such as the one comprised by American college students reading a novel as a class assignment (Text 167, 171).

As I have suggested in the paragraph above, reader-response criticism is not a monolithic school of thought, as is assumed by some detractors who like to talk about the “School of Fish.” Several of the critics mentioned thus far have, over time, adopted different versions of reader-response criticism. I have hinted at Holland's growing subjectivism as well as the evolution of Fish's own thought. Fish, having at first viewed meaning as the cooperative production of readers and texts, went on to become a subjectivist, and very nearly a “deconstructor” ready to suggest that all criticism is imaginative creation, fiction about literature, or metafiction. In developing the notion of interpretive communities, however, Fish has become more of a social, structuralist, reader-response critic; currently, he is engaged in studying reading communities and their interpretive conventions in order to understand the conditions that give rise to a work's intelligibility.

In spite of the gaps between reader-response critics and even between the assumptions that they have held at various stages of their respective careers, all try to answer similar questions and to use similar strategies to describe the reader's response to a given text. One question these critics are commonly asked has already been discussed: Why do individual readers come up with such similar interpretations if meaning is not embedded in the work itself? Other recurring, troubling questions include the following interrelated ones: Just who is the reader? (Or, to place the emphasis differently, Just who is the reader?) Aren't you reader-response critics just talking about your own idiosyncratic responses when you describe what a line from Paradise Lost “does” in and to “the reader's” mind? What about my responses? What if they're different? Will you be willing to say that all responses are equally valid?

Fish defines “the reader” in this way: “the reader is the informed reader.” The informed reader is someone who is “sufficiently experienced as a reader to have internalized the properties of literary discourses, including everything from the most local of devices (figures of speech, etc.) to whole genres.” And, of course, the informed reader is in full possession of the “semantic knowledge” (knowledge of idioms, for instance) assumed by the text (Artifacts 406).

Other reader-response critics use terms besides “the informed reader” to define “the reader,” and these other terms mean slightly different things. Wayne Booth uses the phrase “the implied reader” to mean the reader “created by the work.” (Only “by agreeing to play the role of this created audience,” Susan Suleiman explains, “can an actual reader correctly understand and appreciate the work” [8].) Gerard Genette and Gerald Prince prefer to speak of “the narratee, … the necessary counterpart of a given narrator, that is, the person or figure who receives a narrative” (Suleiman 13). Like Booth, Iser employs the term “the implied reader,” but he also uses “the educated reader” when he refers to what Fish calls the “informed” or “intended” reader. Thus, with different terms, each critic denies the claim that reader-response criticism might lead people to think that there are as many correct interpretations of a work as there are readers to read it.

As Mailloux has shown, reader-response critics share not only questions, answers, concepts, and terms for those concepts but also strategies of reading. Two of the basic “moves,” as he calls them, are to show that a work gives readers something to do, and to describe what the reader does by way of response. And there are more complex moves as well. For instance, a reader-response critic might typically (1) cite direct references to reading in the text, in order to justify the focus on reading and show that the inside of the text is continuous with what the reader is doing; (2) show how other nonreading situations in the text nonetheless mirror the situation the reader is in (“Fish shows how in Paradise Lost Michael's teaching of Adam in Book XI resembles Milton's teaching of the reader throughout the poem”); and (3) show, therefore, that the reader's response is, or is perfectly analogous to, the topic of the story. For Stephen Booth, Hamlet is the tragic story of “an audience that cannot make up its mind.” In the view of Roger Easson, Blake's Jerusalem “may be read as a poem about the experience of reading Jerusalem” (Mailloux, “Learning” 103).

In the pages that follow this introduction, one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century, Wayne C. Booth, poses a series of related questions. Why have so many interpretations of The Turn of the Screw been published? Why are they all so different, even contradictory? (Critics don't even agree on whether the ghosts are real or invented; how Miles dies; and whether James's tale is a classic “horror story” or a subtle example of modern psychological fiction.) In addition to asking why The Turn of the Screw has proved so controversial, Booth asks even more basic and important questions, such as: “What is the value of writing and reading controversial essays about such a work?” (165). Indeed, what is to be gained by debating about the meaning of any text?

To reveal the answers that Booth eventually arrives at would be to spoil the fun of his essay's unfolding argument. Suffice it to say here that in the process of coming to his carefully worked-out conclusions he roughly divides all known interpretations of The Turn of the Screw into three broad groups: those readings he calls “straight” (a straight reading views the ghosts as being real, the story as a horror story); those readings he calls “ironic” (according to an ironic reading, the ghosts are the imaginings of a mad governess and the tale is a disguised psychological study); and those readings he calls “mazed” (these are “readings that see the story as itself rejecting any one interpretation” [169]). Booth then proceeds by weighing the positive and negative effects of these three kinds of readings on the reader, asking in each case how a friend might be affected or changed—psychologically and/or morally—by being a “straight,” “ironic,” or “mazed” reader of The Turn of the Screw.

Booth states early on that he is writing “ethical criticism,” which he classifies as “a version of what is now generally called reader-response criticism.” As old as Plato's aesthetic philosophy, ethical criticism is interested not only in how readers respond to the same text in a variety of ways but also in the ethical implications of those various responses. As a practitioner of ethical criticism, Booth consistently—in his own words—invites us “to probe … the possible rewards for responding to this story in one way rather than another” (165).

However much he may believe that we, as readers, may and should choose between compelling readings, Booth should not be confused with the kind of subjectivist critic who believes that a text means whatever we make it out to mean. Booth views the author as one who guides the reader's responses—and views readers as agents who are only free within certain limits to make interpretive choices. “Though no one reading can ever triumph over all others,” Booth writes, “there are better and worse readings. In short, ‘my’ readings, like yours, are inherently corrigible, improvable” (176).

As the quotation above amply demonstrates, Booth proves himself to be a reader-oriented critic not only by focusing on a variety of interpretive responses and their affective dimensions but also via his writing style. Throughout his essay, he addresses us directly, dares us to invent readings more preposterous than any that are extant, implores us to see that some readings are more dispensable than others, characterizes himself not as a writer of criticism but as a reader of James, and places his own readings in the contexts of other readings, including the four other readings (and the editor's critical history of the text) published in this volume!

Because of its provocative, reader-involving style, the essay you are about to read is one you will probably find highly unusual: unusual in that it is personal; unusual in that it is sometimes emotionally moving; and unusual, too, insofar as it suggests that what you are doing at this very moment has a value far greater than you may have supposed.

Some Introductions to Reader-Response Criticism

Fish, Stanley E. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” New Literary History 2 (1970): 123-61. Rpt. in Is There a Text in This Class? 21-67 and in Primeau 154-79.

Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. London: Methuen, 1987.

Holland, Norman N. “UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF.” PMLA 90 (1975): 813-22.

Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Mailloux, Steven. “Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-Response Criticism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 12 (1979): 93-108.

———. “Reader-Response Criticism?” Genre 10 (1977): 413-31.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. “Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading.” Journal of Reading Behavior 1 (1969): 31-47. Rpt. in Primeau 121-46.

Suleiman, Susan R. “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism.” Suleiman and Crosman 3-45.

Tompkins, Jane P. “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism.” Tompkins ix-xxiv.

Reader-Response Criticism in Anthologies and Collections

Garvin, Harry R., ed. Theories of Reading, Looking, and Listening. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1981. See the essays by Cain and Rosenblatt.

Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Primeau, Ronald, ed. Influx: Essays on Literary Influence. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1977. See the essays by Fish, Holland, and Rosenblatt.

Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. See especially the essays by Culler, Iser, and Todorov.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. See especially the essays by Bleich, Fish, Holland, Prince, and Tompkins.

Reader-Response Criticism: Some Major Works

Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Fish, Stanley Eugene. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

———. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. In this volume are collected most of Fish's most influential essays, including “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” “What It's Like to Read L'Allegro and Il Penseroso,” “Interpreting the Variorum,” “Is There a Text in This Class?” “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” and “What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?”

———. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.

———. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

Holland, Norman N. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Art of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

———. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Intro. Paul de Man. Brighton, Eng.: Harvester, 1982.

Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

———. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Messent, Peter. New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

Prince, Gerald. Narratology. New York: Mouton, 1982.

Rabinowitz, Peter. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.

Steig, Michael. Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Exemplary Short Readings of Major Texts

Anderson, Howard. “Tristram Shandy and the Reader's Imagination.” PMLA 86 (1971): 966-73.

Berger, Carole. “The Rake and the Reader in Jane Austen's Novels.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 15 (1975): 531-44.

Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Reinterpretations of English Drama: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia UP, 1969. 137-76.

Easson, Robert R. “William Blake and His Reader in Jerusalem.” Blake's Sublime Allegory. Ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph A. Wittreich. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973. 309-28.

Holland, Norman N. “A Portrait as Rebellion.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. R. B. Kershner. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1993. 279-94.

Kirk, Carey H. “Moby-Dick: The Challenge of Response.” Papers on Language and Literature 13 (1977): 383-90.

Leverenz, David. “Mrs. Hawthorne's Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter.” The Scarlet Letter: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C Murfin. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1991. 263-74.

Lowe-Evans, Mary. “Reading with a ‘Nicer Eye’: Responding to Frankenstein.” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1992. 215-29.

Rosmarin, Adena. “Darkening the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness.” Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C Murfin. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1989. 148-69.

Treichler, Paula A. “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening: A Linguistic Analysis.” The Awakening: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Nancy A. Walker. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1993. 308-28.

Reader-Response Approaches to The Turn of the Screw

Booth, Wayne C. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.

Heller, Terry. “The Turn of the Screw”: Bewildered Vision. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Other Work Referred to in “What Is Reader-Response Criticism?”

Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. See especially the discussion of “The Affective Fallacy,” with which reader-response critics have so sharply disagreed.