Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1988 Gendered Reading Communities: The Feminization of Reader Response Criticism and a Dialogics of Reading Patricia Lorimer Lundberg Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lundberg, Patricia Lorimer, "Gendered Reading Communities: The Feminization of Reader Response Criticism and a Dialogics of Reading" (1988). Dissertations. 2575. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2575 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1988 Patricia Lorimer Lundberg GENDERED READING COMMUNITIES: THE FEMINIZATION OF READER RESPONSE CRITICISM AND A DIALOGICS OF READING by Patricia Lorimer Lundberg A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 1988 (c) 1988 Patricia Lorimer Lundberg ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the unflagging support that my dissertation committee, Professors Joyce Wexler, Micael Clarke, and Paul Jay, have afforded me as we interacted in a polyvocal and beneficially conflictual way during the long period of time that marked the researching, writing, read­ ing, re-writing and re-reading of this dissertation. I trust that it reflects the expanded perspective I feel I have gained from their shared knowledge. I am equally grateful to my husband George, without whose emotional and financial support and untiring editorial assistance this work would not be; to my children, George and Motoko, Charles and Naoko, Carol, Christopher, and Melinda, whose understanding and patience during my years of graduate study I shall never forget; and to my parents, who humored me in my quest. I should also like to acknowledge the generosity shown by Professors Jane Marcus and Pamela Caughie in reading and commenting on portions of my work. ii VITA The author, Patricia Lorimer Lundberg, is the daughter of Josephine (Mortimer) Blacklidge and William Blacklidge. She was born February 7, 1944 in Chicago, Illinois. Her elementary education was obtained at St. Gertrude School in Chicago, Illinois. Her secondary education was completed in 1962 at St. Scholastica Academy in Chicago, Illinois. Her undergraduate work was accomplished at the Univer­ sity of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, during the 1962-3 and 1963-4 academic years and at Loyola University of Chicago from 1981 to 1984. She was on the dean's list throughout her under­ graduate program and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts Summa Cum Laude in January 1984 and the degree of Master of Arts in May 1985. She was awarded Graduate Teaching and Re­ search Assistantships from August 1983 through August 1987 and an Arthur J. Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship from August 1987 through May 1988. Ms. Lorimer Lundberg currently teaches English Litera­ ture at Loyola University of Chicago. Previous experience included working at the American Society of Clinical Pathol­ ogists from 1973 to 1982, as Executive Assistant, Deputy Director and Director of the ASCP Press, the Society's publishing division. iii The following are her publications: 1. "George Eliot: Mary Ann Evans•s Subversive Tool in MJ_ggJ_~~-:i::g_h?", ~.!=_1,!_tjJ_~§_J_I'! __!_h~.J:!9_ve_! 18: 3 ( Fal 1 1986) : 270-82. 2. "The Three Worlds of Love in _Tr_g_i~~.!? ... 9:!"1_4 .. ..9.:i::.~~~~," Rroc~~dJ.11g~ e>J :t;l::l~ I,l linc::>:i.-.? M§!d_i~v?:L A.~~qci~t).gn 1_9_~.f.?, Volume Three, DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1987; 34-59. 3. "Gender Offender! Will the Epicene yet Save JAMA?" JAMA 259:12 (March 25, 1988): 1809 (Letter). 4. "Reply: Epicene Pronouns--Obliterate, Slash, or Plural­ ize?" ~AMA 260:10 (September 9, 1988): 1407. 5. "Still More on Sex, Gender, and Language." (Review of _!3ram!!l~.L.. §!...nd ___G_enger, by Dennis Baron. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986). AmerJ_~~m Speec.h 63 (Summer 1988): 169-75. 6. "Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison, pseud. Lucas Malet, Brj_!_i_fill_~ome!L_Wr-i ter_~, Ed. Janet Todd, NY: Crossroad­ /Ungar /Continuum, forthcoming in 1988. 7. "The Elusive BeowuJ..:~ Poet Self-Represented in the I­ Narrator and the Scops," .~all State y~_i_ve_:i::_5-liY.J[.Ql'.'_um, forthcoming in 1988. 8. "Dialogically Feminist Reading: A Critique of Reader­ Response Criticism and a Dialogics of Reading." Reader: Ess_?ys in___ ~eader-Orie~ted theqxyi Cri tici~mL and __R_edaJI.Qgy, forthcoming in 1989. 9. "The Dialogic Search for Community in Charlotte Bronte 1 s Novels." feminism and_th~_Dialogic. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry. U of Illinois P, forthcoming . .. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii VITA .. iii Chapter I. FEMINIZING READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM 1 Introduction: The Author, The Text, The Reader, Meaning, and Gender ... 1 Response Theory: Iser, Prince, Fish, and Community 13 Bakhtin's Dialogics and Conflictual Communities 19 The Feminist Literary Project 27 Feminizing Reader-Response Criticism 34 Feminizing and Dialogizing Interpretive Communities .. 42 II. THE I-NARRATOR AND THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY 53 The Dialogical Double Discourse Between I-Narrator and Reader, Reader and Author 53 The Case for I-Narrators 59 The Reading Communities of the I-Narrators in the Novels of Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Bronte ....... 72 III. AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL DILEMMA: CONRAD AND MARLOW'S CONSENSUAL INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY. 76 Marlow's Epistemological Dilemma 80 Dialogic Reading Strategies for the Marlow Novels . 101 v IV. CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S CONFLICTED COMMUNITIES OF PILGRIM NARRATORS AND READERS . 134 The Dialogic Search for Community in Charlotte Bronte's Novels 134 The Brontean Search for Community 144 Other Voices in Bronte 1 s Novels 186 v. GENDERED READING COMMUNITIES: IMPLICATIONS OF A DIALOGICS OF READING 192 VI. WORKS CITED . 202 vi CHAPTER I FEMINIZING READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM Myth Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask you one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said. "When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered Man. You didn't say anything about women." "When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include women too. Every­ one knows that." She said, "That's what you think." Muriel Rukeyser Introduction: The Author, The Text, The Reader, Meaning, and Gender In recent years, scrutiny of how literary texts pro- duce meaning has challenged conventional assumptions about what constitutes the author, the text, and the reader, as well as how they interrelate. Many critics now accept that attitudes or intentions of the actual, historical author are extremely difficult to fix through analysis of his or her 1 texts or biography, although psychobiographical approaches 1 Most literary critics have adopted this post-Romantic notion of the inaccessibility of the author. See for exam­ ple Jonathan Culler's "Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading": " . the assumptions of writers are of difficult access and their statements about their own works are motivated by such varied factors that one is 1 2 of ten suggest what we suppose are responsible conclusions 2 about authorial attitudes in a given text. Research into authorship invites such theoretical formulations as Wayne Booth's "implied author" and Roland Barthes's insistence on 3 the theoretical death of the actual author. As the locus of meaning has shifted from author to reader, the unity of the text has become increasingly suspect as multiple readers deny its objective meaning or its claims to ''truth" and seek validity elsewhere. Most recently, in a movement from a positive hermen- eutics that posits valid interpretations in meaningful texts toward a negative one that calls into question the very continually led astray if one tries to infer from them the conventions assumed. 11 (51) 2 Such approaches are common in feminist criticism that searches out women's experience. Two notable examples are Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's pioneer study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth­ Century Literary Imagination, and Ann Robinson Taylor's Male Novelists and Their Female Voices: Literary Masquerades. See also Allan Gardner Lloyd Smith's Eve Tempted: Writing and Sexuality in Hawthorne's Fiction for a study that is both psychobiographical and Iserian reader-response in approach. 3 In his Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth has attempted to locate an authorial entity whose values and norms are repre­ sented in the text. Roland Barthes, on the other hand, denies the validity of a textual message from an "author- God" and proclaims the "birth of the reader . at the cost of the death of the author'' (Image, Music, Text 148). See also Michel Foucault's "author function": the attitudes we ascribe to "the author" are "projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertin­ ent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions