Just a warning, domestic abuse is mentioned throughout this post.
While we were reading and discussing reader response theory, there was one poem that I continually thought about, which was My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke. The reason I kept coming back to this particular poem was because of the drastically different responses I have seen people have after reading it for the first time. The majority of people, after reading this, seem to think it is a cute poem about a father teaching his child how to dance. Others interpret it as a child being physically abused by the father. Since these are two very different interpretations, I think this poem could benefit from some reader response criticism. Reader response criticism has many different subsections, all of which are useful, but the most useful here are transactional reader response theory and psychological reader response theory.
Transactional response theory looks at both the text and how the reader reacts to it, which could explain how there are two different interpretations. My Papa’s Waltz has a lot of “indeterminate meaning, or… ‘gaps’ in the text… which allow or even invite readers to create their own interpretation.”[1] The images of the drunk father moving around while the child clings to them, the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, the frowning mother, and the father’s battered hand can either lend themselves to a picture of an abusive family or a father that is having fun with his child despite hard times. This piece also has a lot of syntax that can be interpreted multiple ways. The father “beats time on [the child’s] head / with a palm caked hard by dirt”.[2] Beat, here, can be used to describe some sort of tapping or similar motion to keep time with the music they are dancing to, or to describe the father hitting the child. “At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle” can similarly be interpreted two ways.[3] Either the child is being hit with a belt, or the child is so small that their ear only comes up to the father’s belt. This poem leaves a lot of what is being shown up to the reader to interpret, which is what makes it a good candidate for reader response criticism.
Psychological response theory looks at how the reader’s
motives and experiences influence how the reader interacts with the text, which
could explain how the readers are coming to different responses. Everyone brings their own experiences and
biases with them when they go to read something. In my experience, someone who has a less than
good home life is more likely to read this poem through the domestic abuse lens
than someone who has a great home life. It
could be that the reader is projecting their own experiences onto the poem or
that their experiences just set them up to see it a certain way. Either way, something psychological seems to
be at play in reader interpretation of this poem.
[1] “Reader-Response Criticsim.” Critical Theory Today: a User-Friendly Guide, by Lois Tyson, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015, pp. 161–197.
[2] [3] Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/my-papas-waltz.
Creative Reading 