Reader-response criticism, as its name implies, emphasizes the reader’s experience over the work itself. This approach to literature describes what goes on in the reader’s mind during the process of reading a text and also the way communities of readers cooperate to advance an interpretation. In a sense, all critical approaches (especially psychological and mythological criticism) concern themselves with a reader’s response to literature, but there is a stronger emphasis in reader-response criticism on the reader’s active construction of the text’s meaning. Although many critical theories inform reader-response criticism, all reader-response critics aim to describe the reader’s experience of a work: in effect we get a reading of the reader, who comes to the work with certain expectations and assumptions, which are either met or not met. Hence the consciousness of the reader — produced by reading the work — is the subject matter of reader-response critics. Just as writing is a creative act, reading is too, since it also leads to the production of a text.
Reader-response critics do not assume that a literary work is a finished product with fixed formal properties, as, for example, formalist critics do. Instead, the literary work is seen as an evolving creation of the reader as he or she processes characters, plots, images, and other elements while reading, and also how reading communities (such as your class) are vital in directing the trajectory of interpretation. Some reader-response critics argue that this act of creative reading is, to a degree, controlled by the text, but it can produce many interpretations of the same text by different readers. There is no single definitive reading of a work, because the crucial assumption is that readers create rather than discover meanings in texts. Readers who have gone back to works they had read earlier in their lives often find that a later reading draws very different responses from them. What earlier seemed unimportant is now crucial; what at first seemed central is now barely worth noting. The reason, put simply, is that two different people have read the same text. Reader-response critics are not after the “correct” reading of the text or what the author presumably intended; instead they are interested in the reader’s experience with the text.
Reader-response criticism calls attention to how we read and to what influences our readings. It does not attempt to define what a literary work means on the page but rather what it does to an informed reader, a reader who understands the language and conventions used in a given work. Reader-response criticism is not a rationale for mistaken or bizarre readings of works but an exploration of the possibilities for a plurality of readings shaped by readers’ experiences with the text. This kind of strategy can help us understand how our responses are shaped by both the text and ourselves.
Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” illustrates how reader-response critical strategies read the reader. Chopin doesn’t say that Mrs. Mallard’s marriage is repressive; instead, that troubling fact dawns on the reader at the same time that the recognition forces its way into Mrs. Mallard’s consciousness. Her surprise is also the reader’s because although she remains in the midst of intense grief, she is on the threshold of a startling discovery about the new possibilities life offers. How the reader responds to that discovery, however, is not entirely controlled by Chopin. One reader, perhaps someone who has recently lost a spouse, might find Mrs. Mallard’s “joy” indeed “monstrous” and selfish. Certainly that’s how Mrs. Mallard’s doctors — the seemingly authoritative diagnosticians in the story — would very likely read her. But for other readers Mrs. Mallard’s feelings require no justification. Such readers might find Chopin’s ending to the story more ironic than she seems to have intended because Mrs. Mallard’s death could be read as Chopin’s inability to envision a protagonist who has the strength of her convictions. In contrast, a reader in 1894 might have seen the ending as Mrs. Mallard’s only escape from the repressive marriage her husband’s assumed death suddenly allowed her to see. A reader in our times probably would argue that it was the marriage that should have died rather than Mrs. Mallard, that she had other alternatives, not just obligations (as the doctors would have insisted), to consider.
By imagining different readers, we can imagine a variety of responses to the story that are influenced by the readers’ own impressions, memories, or experiences with marriage. Such imagining suggests the ways in which reader-response criticism opens up texts to a number of interpretations. As one final example, consider how readers’ responses to “The Story of an Hour” would be affected if it were printed in two different magazines, read in the context of either Ms. or Good Housekeeping. What assumptions and beliefs would each magazine’s readership be likely to bring to the story? How do you think the respective experiences and values of each magazine’s readers would influence their readings? For a sample reader-response student paper on see “Differences in Responses to Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour.”