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  • Subjective Literary Interpretation:"Outside Over Where"?
  • Gary D. Schmidt (bio)
Michael Steig . Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Early in my teaching career, I assigned D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse Winner" to an introductory class in literature. During the ensuing discussion, my students evaluated the ironic equivalencies Lawrence sets up between love, luck, and money, making all the kinds of connections an instructor might expect. And then, from the back of the room, a student aggressively argued that we were all misreading the story, that the story was in fact about demon possession. Nothing could shake that student's iron belief in that reading; not facts of Lawrence's biography, not thematic considerations, not the inappropriateness of that reading in the face of the text. We ended the discussion unsatisfactorily, on an agree to disagree basis, and it was only years later that I realized that student's influence on my own reading of the story when I found myself suggesting to another class that Paul was indeed possessed by what might be the most powerful demon of all: the need to be loved.

I begin this review with a personal anecdote for two reasons. First, those readers who find such anecdotes intrusive had best turn to a text other than Steig's Stories of Reading, or at least not venture past the second chapter. Second, the anecdote demonstrates Steig's principal claim in this study: that subjective readings, readings by an individual who can account for and articulate the influences which have formed that reading, can, in a social setting like a classroom, contribute to others' understanding of the work under consideration, no matter how peculiar (here used in the sense of being unique to an individual) that reading might be.

Michael Steig uses many anecdotes to demonstrate this claim. For example, he cites one student's interpretation of Murdstone's hostility to his young stepson, David Copperfield, which that student found totally justified. Class discussion revealed that this student's recent relationship with a divorced woman had been ended by her hostile son, but Steig does [End Page 115] not dismiss this reading despite its origin, arguing instead that it suggests a new perspective on Murdstone's actions and points out that though the point of view in David Copperfield is consistently limited to that of David, that limitation itself implies the presence of other points of view, other realities beyond the limitations of David's perspective, which the reader can infer on the basis of his or her subjective impressions, and which thus become part of a reading of a literary work.

"The goal of this process . . . is not only to demonstrate further a method of interpretive reading through response, but to address the larger issues of the social process of becoming aware of the responses of other readers and what kinds of intersubjective understanding it can produce, as well as the relevance for reading of conceptualizing of the author's relationship to his text" (106), writes Steig. He spends the first two chapters of Stories of Reading arguing theoretically for the validity of this kind of reading, setting himself against critics like Stanley Fish, E. D. Hirsch, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser. The next nine chapters are a practical working out of this theoretical approach in works by Emily Brönte, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, and Maurice Sendak.

If Sendak seems out of place in this list of prominent Victorians, he does demonstrate Steig's dual interest in the Victorian novel and children's literature. More importantly, his presence is a working out of Steig's avowed insistence that he would "offend against . . . the traditional canon of English literature" by refusing to accept the distinction between children's literature and adult literature, a distinction which is "primarily a matter of intellectual snobbery—when it is not simply a matter of marketing and library classification" (xvii), a claim which, though perhaps a bit overstated, would be applauded by most critics of children's literature.

Steig concedes that there are some who find subjective readings irrelevant to the...

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