Reader+Response

= =

=**Reader Response in "The Yellow Wallpaper"**=

A [very brief] definition of reader response: Looking at a text based on how a reader interprets it. This school of literary theory focuses on how a reader interprets a piece of literature and asks the rhetorical question //can a text exist without the reader?//

Stanley Fish and Reader Response
Stanley Fish (as seen on the left) is a very well known literary critic who specializes in reader response theories. As the current chair of the English Department at Duke University, Fish is more than a credible authority on literary theory.

In order to fully understand Fish’s reader response theories, it is necessary to know how he defines the school of reader response. “As reading occurs through time, the experience of literature involves a continuous readjustment of perceptions, ideas and evaluations, with the meaning of the work encountered in the experience of it. Literature becomes a process in which its criticism involves the processing of phrases and sentences in a slow sequence of decisions, revisions, anticipations, reversals and recoveries.” (Ling)

Essentially, he says that the act of reading something is how a reader interprets what they are reading. His phenomenology theory places the entire emphasis on the reader in order to determine the meaning of a work.

Fish, Reader Response, and "The Yellow Wallpaper"[[image:modernism1.jpg width="239" height="345" align="right"]]
According to Fish, before I even began to read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I already had some preconceived ideas about what the text might be about. That is completely true and reading this text through a reader response lens helped me to understand how I came to conclusions about the text the first time I read it. Of course, this would be ridiculously long if I went into detail talking about every piece of evidence in the text that made helped me to figure out the meaning of the text.

Prior to reading this text for the first time, I went into it not knowing anything about Gilman or the story. I chose to focus on the title and I got a mental image of everything I could connotatively relate to the words yellow and wallpaper. The yellow theme made me think of some songs (see music player), a sick feeling, and being scared. Wallpaper was a less important item in my mind’s database because all that came to mind was the stuff you put on the walls that has designs on it.

Upon reading the text, I realized that my thoughts about being unwell associated with the color yellow directly correlated with the mental state of the narrator. I knew that the primary focus of the text was going to be concerning the narrator and whether she is crazy or not.

In the beginning she starts off by telling the reader that she knows she is sick despite the fact that her husband, who is a doctor, “does not believe [she is] sick” (578). Because of the ideas that I brought into reading this story about the connotations of yellow, I believed the narrator was mentally unwell and that her husband was missing something, causing his misdiagnosis. Initially, the narrator doesn’t act too out of the ordinary—she writes whenever she can, talks to her husband when he spends time with her, and she seems to have quite an imagination. It isn’t until she begins to dwell on the yellow wallpaper that she begins to lose credibility as a reliable narrator. From “watching so much at night” the narrator begins to believe that there is a woman, or many women, living within the design of the yellow wallpaper (587).

The final line of the story more than sealed the deal on the crazy theory for me. I can just imagine this woman crawling around all creepy-like over her husband’s body. She had to “creep over him every time” because he had inconveniently fallen over from fainting and landed in her crawling path (590). Any sane person probably would have been more concerned that with their spouse’s health, but this bizarre display of priorities serves to reestablish the fact that the narrator was mentally unstable.

I find it very interesting that the three songs with yellow in the title that I thought of are rather strange and, dare I say, odd. Is it a coincidence that these lyrics and the narrator seem to be a little nonsensical? Listen for yourself!

media type="custom" key="76748" (By Jaclyn Vasquez)

Resources: 1. [|Stanley Fish Info] Ling, C. L. (2002). The Author, the Text, and the Reader: a study of reader-response theories, and some views on how the objectivity of the literary text is or is not distinguished from the subjectivity of the reader's r [Electronic version]. //The London School of Journalism//.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-Paper." Vol. C. __The Heath Anthology of American Literature__. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.