Glancing over my peers’ blogposts, I can see that some of us had a similar thought about reader-response theory in general; that it can be particularly useful and poignant when viewing works that touch on sensitive or controversial topics. This, of course, is because readers react in vastly different ways to these kinds of issues, and so, if the reader is giving the text meaning, but many readers are split from authorial intent or each other, this gives the text many possible branches from which an understanding may be born. And I think Stanley Fish touches on another reason why this happens, from a baser human level. He says, “Not that the reader falls and becomes one of Satan’s party. His involvement in the speech does not directly compromise his position… since his response (somewhat unconscious) is to a performance rather than to a point of view…” (10). While Fish is talking specifically about readers in Paradise Lost, this can be taken in a broader sense. Readers do not want to feel like their morality is compromised, challenged, or otherwise tested when reading about difficult topics. But they do. And this is a response to a self-generated interpretation, which, to me, becomes especially thought-provoking in psychological reader-response theory.

In Critical Theory Today, psychological reader-response theory is rooted in the concept that readers react to what they’re reading as they would react to real life situations, and people who adhere to this theory, like Norman Holland, are focused on what this reaction reveals about the reader, not the text (Tyson, 174). Lois Tyson goes on to explain the analytical descriptions of how psychological reader-response theorist would figure out what a reader’s reaction means about them, but I am more interested in the complexities of why people interpret texts to make themselves feel more comfortable in their reality, beyond just that they want to be comfortable. Since the process is unconscious, I think it isn’t much of a stretch to say that it’s more complicated.

On that note, I want to bring up one of the most emotionally charged and complicated texts that I know. I don’t have enough space to go fully into detail about VC Andrews’ My Sweet Audrina right here, but this gothic horror novel deals with everything from gang rape to child abuse, unexpected deaths to adulterous affairs to disabilities both mental and physical. It slams the button of issues people don’t normally want to think about, and so, unsurprisingly, it tends to be a banned book. So then how would a reader response to all the atrocities in this book and then adjust according to psychological reader-response theory? Why would they bother at all? I think a key point component of a reader’s interpretation goes into why they’re bothering to read a text. And a simple answer seems to be thank God that isn’t me. In My Sweet Audrina, the reader is hit with horror after horror without much room to breathe. To continue to engage with it, I think psychologically, it must provide people with the relief that it is only fiction, and it does this by distorting reality in interesting ways. But on the other hand, the readers who put the book down and never pick it back up are equally relevant. If the reader has the power to give meaning to a text as most of the different kinds of reader-response say, and if the reader’s reaction says something about them on the psychological axis, then there is something meaningful in halting the entire process and refusing to engage. This may seem like a half-finished analysis, but one that a reader certainly has the right to choose, especially if reader-response theorists are handing them the reigns.   

Works Cited

Andrews, V.C. My Sweet Audrina. Pocket Books, 1982.

Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost. New York, Macmillan, 1967.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3^rded., Routledge, 2015.