Kolodny 1980

A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts
Author(s): Annette Kolodny

Reviewed work(s):
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3, On Narrative and Narratives: II (Spring, 1980),
pp. 451-467
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468938 .
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A Map for Rereading:
Or, Gender and the Interpretation of
Literary Texts
Annette Kolodny
PPEALING PARTICULARLY to a generation still in the process of

divorcing itself from the New Critics' habit of bracketing off
any text as an entity in itself, as though "it could be read,
understood, and criticized entirely in its own terms,"1 Harold Bloom
has proposed a dialectical theory of influence between poets and
poets, as well as between poems and poems which, in essence, does
away with the static notion of a fixed or knowable text. As he argued
in A Map of Misreading in 1975, "a poem is a response to a poem, as a
poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent." Thus, for
Bloom, "poems ... are neither about 'subjects' nor about 'themselves.'
They are necessarily about otherpoems."2
To read or to know a poem, according to Bloom, engages the
reader in an attempt to map the psychodynamic relations by which
the poet at hand has willfully misunderstood the work of some pre-
cursor (either single or composite) in order to correct, rewrite, or
appropriate the prior poetic vision as his own. As first introduced in
The Anxietyof Influence in 1973, the resultant "wholly different practi-
cal criticism ... give[s] up the failed enterprise of seeking to 'under-
stand' any single poem as an entity in itself" and "pursue[s] instead the
quest of learning to read any poem as its poet's deliberate misin-
terpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or of poetry in general."3
What one deciphers in the process of reading, then, is not any discrete
entity but, rather, a complex relational event, "itself a synecdoche for
a larger whole including other texts."4 "Reading a text is necessarily
the reading of a whole system of texts," Bloom explains in Kabbalah
and Criticism, "and meaning is always wandering around between
texts" (KC, pp. 107-8).
To help purchase assent for this "wholly different practical crit-
icism," Bloom asserted an identity between critics and poets as coequal
participants in the same "belated and all-but-impossible act" of read-
ing (which, as he hastens to explain in A Map of Misreading, "if strong
is always a misreading"-p. 3). As it is a drama of epic proportions, in
Bloom's terms, when the ephebe poet attempts to appropriate and
Copyright© 1980 by New LiteraryHistory, The University of Virginia
452 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
then correct a precursor's meaning, so, too, for the critic, his own
inevitable misreadings or misprisionsare no less heroic-nor any the
less creative. "Poets' misinterpretations or poems" may be "more
drastic than critics' misinterpretations or criticism," Bloom admits, but
since he recognizes no such thing as "interpretations but only misin-
terpretations ... all criticism" is necessarily elevated to a species of
"prose poetry" (AI, pp. 94-95). The critic's performance, thereby,
takes place as one more "act of misprision [which] displaces an earlier
act of misprision"-presumably the poet's or perhaps that of a prior
critic; and, in this sense, the critic participates in that same act of
"defensive warfare" before his own critical forebears, or even before
the poet himself, as the poet presumably enacted before his poetic
father/precursor (KC, pp. 125, 104, 108). Their legacy, whether as
poetry or as "prose poetry" criticism, consequently establishes the
strong survivors of these psychic battles as figures whom others, in the
future, will need to overcome in their turn: "A poet is strong because
poets after him must work to evade him. A critic is strong if his
readings similarly provoke other readings."5 It is unquestionably
Bloom's most brilliant rhetorical stroke, persuading not so much by
virtue of the logic of his argument as by the pleasure his (intended
and mostly male) readership will take in the discovery that their own
activity replicates the psychic adventures of The Poet, every critic's
figura of heroism.6
What is left out of account, however, is the fact that whether we
speak of poets and critics "reading" texts or writers "reading" (and
thereby recording for us) the world, we are calling attention to inter-
pretive strategies that are learned, historically determined, and
thereby necessarily gender-inflected. As others have elsewhere ques-
tioned the adequacy of Bloom's paradigm of poetic influence to ex-
plain the production of poetry by women,7 so now I propose to ex-
amine analogous limitations in his model for the reading-and hence
critical-process (since both, after all, derive from his revisionist ren-
dering of the Freudian family romance). To begin with, to locate that
"meaning" which "is always wandering around between texts" (KC, pp.
107-8), Bloom assumes a community of readers (and, thereby, crit-
ics) who know that same "whole system of texts" within which the
specific poet at hand has enacted his misprision.The canonical sense of
a shared and coherent literary tradition is thereby essential to the
utility of Bloom's paradigm of literary influence as well as to his no-
tions of reading (and misreading). "What happens if one tries to write,
or to teach, or to think or even to read without the sense of a tradi-
tion?" Bloom asks in A Map of Misreading. "Why," as he himself well
understands, "nothing at all happens, just nothing. You cannot write
A MAP FOR REREADING 453
or teach or think or even read without imitation, and what you imitate
is what another person has done, that person's writing or teaching or
thinking or reading. Your relation to what informs that person is
tradition, for tradition is influence that extends past one generation, a
carrying-over of influence" (MM, p. 32).
So long as the poems and poets he chooses for scrutiny participate
in the "continuity that began in the sixth century B.C. when Homer
first became a schoolbook for the Greeks" (MM, pp. 33-34), Bloom
has a great deal to tell us about the carrying over of literary influence;
where he must remain silent is where carrying over takes place among
readers and writers who in fact have been, or at least have experi-
enced themselves as, cut off and alien from that dominant tradition.
Virginia Woolf made the distinction vividly over a half-century ago, in
A Room of One's Own, when she described being barred entrance,
because of her sex, to a "famous library" in which was housed,
among others, a Milton manuscript. Cursing the "Oxbridge" edifice,
"venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its
breast," she returns to her room at the inn later that night, still pon-
dering "how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is
worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and pros-
perity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other
and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the
mind of a writer."8 And, she might have added, on the mind of a
reader as well. For while my main concern here is with reading (albeit
largely and perhaps imperfectly defined), I think it worth noting that
there exists an intimate interaction between readers and writers in
and through which each defines for the other what s/he is about.
"The effect ... of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer"
will communicate itself, in one way or another, to her readers; and,
indeed, may respond to her readers' sense of exclusion from high
(or highbrow) culture.
An American instance provides perhaps the best example. Delim-
ited by the lack of formal or classical education, and constrained by
the social and aesthetic norms of their day to conceptualizing "au-
thorship as a profession rather than a calling, as work and not art,"9
the vastly popular women novelists of the so-called feminine fifties
often enough, and somewhat defensively, made a virtue of their sad
necessities by invoking an audience of readers for whom aspirations to
"literature" were as inappropriate as they were for the writer. As Nina
Baym remarks in her recent study Woman'sFiction, "often the women
deliberately and even proudly disavowed membership in an artistic
fraternity." "'Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the
reading lamp in the livingroom, and not for the library shelves,'"
Baym quotes Marion Harland from the introduction to Harland's

autobiography; and then, at greater length, Baym cites Fanny Fern's
dedicatory pages to her novel Rose Clark:
When the frost curtains the windows, when the wind whistles fiercely at the
key-hole, when the bright fire glows, and the tea-trayis removed, and father
in his slippered feet lolls in his arm-chair;and mother with her nimble needle
"makesauld claes look amaistas weel as new,"and grandmammadrawscloser
to the chimney-corner,and Tommy with his plate of chestnuts nestles con-
tentedly at her feet; then let my unpretending story be read. For such an
hour, for such an audience, was it written.
Should any dictionary on legs rap inopportunelyat the door for admittance,
send him away to the groaning shelves of some musty library,where "litera-
ture" lies embalmed, with its stony eyes, fleshless joints, and ossified heart, in
faultless preservation.10
If a bit overdone, prefaces like these nonetheless point up the self-

consciousness with which writers like Fern and Harland perceived
themselves as excluded from the dominant literary tradition and as
writing for an audience of readers similarly excluded. To quote Baym
again, these "women were expected to write specifically for their own
sex and within the tradition of their woman's culture rather than
within the Great Tradition. They never presented themselves as fol-
lowers in the footsteps of Milton or Spenser.""
On the one hand, of course, increased literacy (if not substantially
improved conditions of education) marked the generation of Ameri-
can women at midcentury, opening a vast market for a literature
which would treat the contexts of their lives-the sewing circle rather
than the whaling ship, the nursery instead of the lawyer's office-as
functional symbols of the human condition.12 On the other hand,
while this vast new audience must certainly be credited with shaping
the features of what then became popular women's fiction, it is also
the case that the writers in their turn both responded to and helped to
formulate their readers' tastes and habits. And both together, I would
suggest, found this a means of accepting (or at least coping with) the
barred entryway that was to distress Virginia Woolf so in the next
century. But these facts of our literary history also suggest that from
the 1850s on, in America at least, the meanings "wandering around
between texts" were wandering around somewhat different groups of
texts where male and female readers were concerned.13 So that with
the advent of women "who wished to be regarded as artists rather
than careerists,"14 toward the end of the nineteenth century, there
arose the critical problem with which we are still plagued and which
Bloom so determinedly ignores: the problem of reading any text as "a
synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts" when that

necessarily assumed "whole system of texts" in which it is embedded is
foreign to one's reading knowledge.
The appearance of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening in 1899, for
example, perplexed readers familiar with her earlier (and intention-
ally "regional") short stories not so much because it turned away from
themes or subject matter implicit in her earlier work, nor even less
because it dealt with female sensuality and extramarital sexuality, but
because her elaboration of those materials deviated radically from the
accepted norms of women's fiction out of which her audience so
largely derived its expectations. The nuances and consequences of
passion and individual temperament, after all, fairly define the focus
of most of her preceding fictions. "That the book is strong and that
Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of feminine
character will not be denied," wrote the anonymous reviewer for the
Chicago Times-Herald. What marked an unacceptable "new depar-
ture" for this critic, then, was the impropriety of Chopin's focus on
material previously edited out of the popular genteel novels by and
about women which, somewhat inarticulately, s/he translated into the
accusation that Chopin had "enter[ed] the overworked field of sex
fiction."15
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's initial difficulty in seeing "The Yellow
Wallpaper" into print repeated the problem, albeit in a somewhat
different context: for her story located itself not as any deviation from
a previous tradition of women's fiction but, instead, as a continuation
of a genre popularized by Poe. And insofar as Americans had earlier
learned to follow the fictive processes of aberrant perception and
mental breakdown in his work, they should have provided Gilman,
one would imagine, with a ready-made audience for her protagonist's
progressively debilitating fantasies of entrapment and liberation. As
they had entered popular fiction by the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, the linguistic markers for those processes were at once
heavily male-gendered and highly idiosyncratic, having more to do
with individual temperament than with social or cultural situations
per se. As a result, it would appear that the reading strategies by
which cracks in ancestral walls and suggestions of unchecked mas-
culine willfulness were immediately noted as both symbolically and
semantically relevant did not, for some reason, necessarily carryover to
"the nursery at the top of the house" with its windows barred, nor
even less to the forced submission of the woman who must "take great
pains to control myself before" her physician husband.16
A reader today seeking meaning in the way Harold Bloom outlines
that process might note, of course, a fleeting resemblance between the
upstairs chamber in Gilman-with its bed nailed to the floor, its win-
dows barred, and metal rings fixed to the walls-and Poe's evocation
of the dungeon chambers of Toledo; in fact, a credible argument
might be made for reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" as Gilman's
willful and purposeful misprision of "The Pit and the Pendulum."
Both stories, after all, involve a sane mind entrapped in an insanity-
inducing situation. Gilman's "message" might then be that the equiv-
alent revolution by which the speaking voice of the Poe tale is released
to both sanity and freedom is unavailable to her heroine. No deus ex
machina, no General Lasalle triumphantly entering the city, no "out-
stretched arm" to prevent Gilman's protagonist from falling into her
own internal "abyss" is conceivable, given the rules of the social con-
text in which Gilman's narrative is embedded. When gender is taken
into account, then, so this interpretation would run, Gilman is saying
that the nature of the trap envisioned must be understood as qualita-
tively different, and so too the possible escape routes.
Contemporary readers of "The Yellow Wallpaper," however, were
apparently unprepared to make such connections. Those fond of Poe
could not easily transfer their sense of mental derangement to the
mind of a comfortable middle-class wife and mother; and those for
whom the woman in the home was a familiar literary character were
hard-pressed to comprehend so extreme an anatomy of the psychic
price she paid. Horace Scudder, the editor of The AtlanticMonthlywho
first rejected the story, wrote only that "I could not forgive myself if I
made others as miserable as I have made myself!" (Hedges, p. 40).
And even William Dean Howells, who found the story "chilling" and
admired it sufficiently to reprint it in 1920, some twenty-eight years
after its first publication (in The New England Magazine of May 1892),
like most readers, either failed to notice or neglected to report "the
connection between the insanity and the sex, or sexual role, of the
victim" (Hedges, p. 41). For readers at the turn of the century, then,
that "meaning" which "is always wandering around between texts"
had as yet failed to find connective pathways linking the fanciers of
Poe to the devotees of popular women's fiction, or the shortcut be-
tween Gilman's short story and the myriad published feminist
analyses of the ills of society (some of them written by Gilman herself).
Without such connective contexts, Poe continued as a well-traveled
road, while Gilman's story, lacking the possibility of further influence,
became a literary dead-end.
In one sense, by hinting at an audience of male readers as ill-
equipped to follow the symbolic significance of the narrator's pro-
gressive breakdown as was her doctor-husband to diagnose properly
the significance of his wife's fascination with the wallpaper's pattern-
ings; and by predicating a female readership as yet unprepared for

texts which mirrored back, with symbolic exemplariness, certain pat-
terns underlying their empirical reality, "The Yellow Wallpaper" an-
ticipated its own reception. For insofar as writing and reading repre-
sent linguistically-based interpretive strategies-the first for the re-
cording of a reality (that has, obviously, in a sense, already been "read")
and the second for the deciphering of that recording (and thus also
the further decoding of a prior imputed reality)-the wife's progres-
sive descent into madness provides a kind of commentary upon, in-
deed is revealed in terms of, the sexual politics inherent in the ma-
nipulation of those strategies. We are presented at the outset with a
protagonist who, ostensibly for her own good, is denied both activities
and who, in the course of accommodating herself to that deprivation,
comes more and more to experience her self as a text which can
neither get read nor recorded.
In his doubly authoritative role as both husband and doctor, John
not only appropriates the interpretive processes of reading-
diagnosing his wife's illness and thereby selecting what may be un-
derstood of her "meaning"; reading to her, rather than allowing her
to read for herself-but, as well, he determines what may get written
and hence communicated. For her part, the protagonist avers, she
does not agree with her husband's ideas: "Personally, I believe that
congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good." But
given the fact of her marriage to "a physician of high standing" who
"assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter
with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical
tendency-what is one to do?" she asks. Since her husband (and by
extension the rest of the world) will not heed what she says of herself,
she attempts instead to communicate it to "this ... dead paper ... a
great relief to my mind." But John's insistent opposition gradually
erodes even this outlet for her since, as she admits, "it does exhaust me
a good deal-having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy
opposition" (p. 10). At the sound of his approach, following upon her
first attempt to describe "those sprawling flamboyant patterns" in the
wallpaper, she declares, "There comes John, and I must put this
away,-he hates to have me write a word" (p. 13).
Successively isolated from conversational exchanges, prohibited
free access to pen and paper, and thus increasingly denied what Jean
Ricardou has called "the local exercise of syntax and vocabulary,"17
the protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper" experiences the extreme
extrapolation of those linguistic tools to the processes of perception
and response. In fact, it follows directly upon a sequence in which: (1)
she acknowledges that John's opposition to her writing has begun to
make "the effort ... greater than the relief"; (2) John refuses to let
her "go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia"; and (3) as a kind
of punctuation mark to that denial, John carries her "upstairs and laid
me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head." It is
after these events, I repeat, that the narrator first makes out the dim
shape lurking "behind the outside pattern" in the wallpaper: "it is like
a woman stooping down and creeping" (pp. 21-22).
From that point on, the narrator progressively gives up the attempt
to record her reality and instead begins to read it-as symbolically
adumbrated in her compulsion to discover a consistent and coherent
pattern amid "the sprawling outlines" of the wallpaper's apparently
"pointless pattern" (pp. 20, 19). Selectively emphasizing one section of
the pattern while repressing others, reorganizing and regrouping
past impressions into newer, more fully realized configurations-as
one might with any complex formal text-the speaking voice becomes
obsessed with her quest for meaning, jealous even of her husband's or
his sister's momentary interest in the paper. Having caught her
sister-in-law "with her hand on it once," the narrator declares, "I
know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that no-
body shall find it out but myself!" (p. 27). As the pattern changes with
the changing light in the room, so too do her interpretations of it.
And what is not quite so apparent by daylight becomes glaringly so at
night: "At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light,
lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside
pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be." "By
daylight," in contrast (like the protagonist herself), "she is subdued,
quiet" (p. 26).
As she becomes wholly taken up with the exercise of these interpre-
tive strategies, so, too, she claims, her "life is very much more exciting
now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to
look forward to, to watch" (p. 27). What she is watching, of course, is
her own psyche writ large; and the closer she comes to "reading" in
the wallpaper the underlying if unacknowledged patterns of her
real-life experience, the less frequent becomes that delicate oscillation
between surrender to or involvement in and the more distanced ob-
servation of developing meaning. Slowly but surely the narrative voice
ceases to distinguish itself from the woman in the wallpaper pattern,
finally asserting that "I don't want anybody to get that woman out at
night but myself" (p. 31), and concluding with a confusion of pro-
nouns that merges into a grammatical statement of identity:
As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawland shake the
pattern, I got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, and I shook and she pulled, and before morning we
had peeled off yards of that paper.
[P. 32, my italics]
She is, in a sense, now totally surrendered to what is quite literally her
own text-or, rather, her self as text. But in decoding its (or her)
meaning, what she has succeeded in doing is discovering the sym-
bolization of her own untenable and unacceptable reality. To escape
that reality she attempts the destruction of the paper which seemingly
encodes it: the pattern of bars entrapping the creeping woman. " 'I've
got out at last,' said I, 'in spite of you and Jane. I've pulled off most of
the paper, so you can't put me back!' " (p. 36). Their paper pages may
be torn and moldy (as is, in fact, the smelly wallpaper), but the mean-
ing of texts is not so easily destroyed. Liberation here is liberation only
into madness: for in decoding her own projections onto the paper, the
protagonist had managed merely to reencode them once more, and
now more firmly than ever, within.
With the last paragraphs of the story, John faints away-
presumably in shock at his wife's now totally delusional state. He has
repeatedly misdiagnosed, or misread, the heavily edited behavior with
which his wife has presented herself to him; and never once has he
divined what his wife sees in the wallpaper. But given his freedom to
read (or, in this case, misread) books, people, and the world as he
chooses, he is hardly forced to discover for himself so extreme a text.
To exploit Bloom's often useful terminology once again, then, Gil-
man's story represents not so much an object for the recurrent mis-
readings, or misprisions, of readers and critics (though this, or course,
continues to occur) as an exploration, within itself, of the gender-
inflected interpretive strategies responsible for our mutual misread-
ings, and even horrific misprisions, across sex lines. If neither male
nor female reading audiences were prepared to decode properly
"The Yellow Wallpaper," even less, Gilman understood, were they
prepared to comprehend one another.
It is unfortunate that Gilman's story was so quickly relegated to the
backwaters of our literary landscape because, coming as it did at the
end of the nineteenth century, it spoke to a growing concern among
American women who would be serious writers: it spoke, that is, to
their strong sense of writing out of nondominant or subcultural tra-
ditions (both literary and otherwise), coupled with an acute sensitivity
to the fact that since women and men learn to read different worlds,
different groups of texts are available to their reading and writing
strategies. Had "The Yellow Wallpaper" been able to stand as a po-
tential precursor for the generation of subsequent corrections and
revisions, then, as in Bloom's paradigm, it might have made possible a

form of fiction by women capable not only of commenting upon but
even of overcoming that impasse. That it did not-nor did any other
woman's fiction become canonical in the United States18-meant that,
again and again, each woman who took up the pen had to confront
anew her bleak premonition that, both as writers and as readers,
women too easily became isolated islands of symbolic significance,
available only to, and decipherable only by, one another.19 If any
Bloomian "meaning" wanders around between women's texts, there-
fore, it must be precisely this shared apprehension.
On the face of it such statements should appear nothing less than
commonsensical, especially to those most recent theorists of reading
who combine an increased attentiveness to the meaning-making role of
the reader in the deciphering of texts with a recognition of the links
between our "reading" of texts and our "reading" of the world and
one another. Among them, Bloom himself seems quite clearly to un-
derstand this when, in Kabbalahand Criticism,he declares: "That which
you are, that only can you read" (KC, p. 96). Extrapolating from his
description of the processes involved in the reading of literary texts to
a larger comment on our ability to take in or decipher those around
us, Wolfgang Iser has lately theorized that "we can only make some-
one else's thought into an absorbing theme for ourselves, provided
the virtual background of our own personality can adapt to it."20
Anticipating such pronouncements in almost everything they have
been composing for over a hundred years now, the women who wrote
fiction, most especially, translated these observations into the struc-
tures of their stories by invoking that single feature which critics like
Iser and Bloom still manage so resolutely to ignore: and that is, the
crucial importance of the sex of the "interpreter" in that process which
Nelly Furman has called "the active attribution of significance to for-
mal signifiers."21 Antedating both Bloom and Iser by over fifty years,
for example, Susan Keating Glaspell's 1917 short story "A Jury of Her
Peers" explores the necessary (but generally ignored) gender marking
which must constitute any definition of "peers" in the complex process
of unraveling truth or meaning.22
The opening paragraph of Glaspell's story serves, essentially, to
alert the reader to the significations to follow: Martha Hale, inter-
rupted at her kitchen chores, must drop "everything right where it
was" in order to hurry off with her husband and the others. In so
doing, "her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen," noting with
distress "that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all
ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted." The point,
of course, is that highly unusual circumstances demand this of her,
and "it was no ordinary thing that called her away." When she seats
herself "in the big two-seated buggy" alongside her impatient farmer
husband, the sheriff and his wife, and the county attorney, the story
proper begins.
All five drive to a neighboring farm where a murder has been
committed-the farmer strangled, his wife already arrested. The men
intend to seek clues to the motive for the crime, while the women are,
ostensibly, simply to gather together the few necessities required by
the wife incarcerated in the town jail. Immediately upon approaching
the place, however, the very act of perception becomes sex-coded: the
men look at the house only to talk "about what had happened," while
the women note the geographical topography which makes it, re-
peatedly in the narrative, "a lonesome-looking place." Once inside,
the men " 'go upstairs first-then out to the barn and around there' "
in their search for clues (even though the actual crime took place in
the upstairs master bedroom), while the women are left to the kitchen
and parlor. Convinced as they are of "the insignificance of kitchen
things," the men cannot properly attend to what these might reveal
and, instead, seek elsewhere for " 'a clue to the motive,' " so necessary
if the county attorney is to make his case. Indeed, it is the peculiar
irony of the story that although the men never question their attribu-
tion of guilt to Minnie Foster, they nonetheless cannot meaningfully
interpret this farm wife's world-her kitchen and parlor. And, ar-
rogantly certain that the women would not even " 'know a clue if they
did come upon it,' " they thereby leave the discovery of the clu'es, and
the consequent unraveling of the motive, to those who do, in fact,
command the proper interpretive strategies.
Exploiting the information sketched into the opening, Glaspell has
the neighbor, Mrs. Hale, and the sheriff's wife, Mrs. Peters, note,
among the supposedly insignificant kitchen things, the unusual, and
on a farm unlikely, remnants of kitchen chores left "half done," de-
noting an interruption of some serious nature. Additionally, where
the men could discern no signs of " 'anger-or sudden feeling'" to
substantiate a motive, the women comprehend the implications of
some "fine, even sewing" gone suddenly awry, " 'as if she didn't know
what she was about!'" Finally, of course, the very drabness of the
house, the miserliness of the husband to which it attests, the old and
broken stove, the patchwork that has become Minnie Foster's
wardrobe-all these make the women uncomfortably aware that to
acknowledge fully the meaning of what they are seeing is " 'to get her
own house to turn against her!' " Discovery by discovery, they destroy
the mounting evidence-evidence which the men, at any rate, cannot
recognize as such; and, sealing the bond between them as conspirators
in saving Minnie Foster, they hide from the men the canary with its
neck broken, the penultimate clue to the strangling of a husband who
had so systematically destroyed all life, beauty, and music in his wife's
environment.
Opposing against one another male and female realms of meaning
and activity-the barn and the kitchen-Glaspell's narrative not only
invites a semiotic analysis but, indeed, performs that analysis for us. If
the absent Minnie Foster is the "transmitter" or "sender" in this
schema, then only the women are competent "receivers" or "readers"
of her "message," since they alone share not only her context (the
supposed insignificance of kitchen things) but, as a result, the con-
ceptual patterns which make up her world. To those outside the
shared systems of quilting and knotting, roller towels and bad stoves,
with all their symbolic significations, these may appear trivial, even
irrelevant to meaning; but to those within the system, they comprise
the totality of the message: in this case, a reordering of who in fact has
been murdered and, with that, what has constituted the real crime in
the story.
For while the two women who visit Minnie Foster's house slowly but
surely decipher the symbolic significance of her action-causing her
husband's neck to be broken because he had earlier broken her ca-
nary's neck-the narrative itself functions, for the reader, as a further
decoding of what that symbolic action says about itself. The essential
crime in the story, we come to realize, has been the husband's in-
exorable strangulation, over the years, of Minnie Foster's spirit and
personality; and the culpable criminality is the complicity of the
women who had permitted the isolation and the loneliness to domi-
nate Minnie Foster's existence: " 'I wish I had come over to see Minnie
Foster sometimes,' " declares her neighbor guiltily. " 'I can see now-'
She did not put it into words."
"I wish you'd seen Minnie Foster," [says Mrs. Hale to the sheriffs wife]
"when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the
choir and sang."
The pictureof that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for
twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she
could bear.
"Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while!" she cried. "That was a
crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?"
The recognition is itself, of course, a kind of punishment. With it
comes, as well, another recognition, as Mrs. Peters reveals experiences
in her own life of analogous isolation, desperate loneliness, and bru-
tality at the hands of a male. Finally they conclude: "'We all go
through the same things-it's all just a different kind of the same
thing! If it weren't-why do you and I understand? Why do we
know-what we know this minute?'" By this point the narrative em-
phasis has shifted: To understand why it is that they know what they
now know is for these women to recognize the profoundly sex-linked
world of meaning which they inhabit; to discover how specialized is
their ability to read that world is to discover anew their own shared
isolation within it.
While neither the Gilman nor the Glaspell story necessarily
excludes the male as reader-indeed, both in a way are directed spe-
cifically at educating him to become a better reader-they do,
nonetheless, insist that, however inadvertently, he is a differentkind of
reader and that, where women are concerned, he is often an inade-
quate reader. In the first instance, because the husband cannot
properly diagnose his wife or attend to her reality, the result is hor-
rific: the wife descends into madness. In the second, because the men
cannot even recognize as such the very clues for which they search,
the ending is a happy one: Minnie Foster is to be set free, no motive
having been discovered by which to prosecute her. In both, however,
the same point is being made: lacking familiarity with the women's
imaginative universe, that universe within which their acts are signs,23
the men in these stories can neither read nor comprehend the mean-
ings of the women closest to them-and this in spite of the apparent
sharing of a common language. It is, in short, a fictive rendering of
the dilemma of the woman writer. For while we may all agree that in
our daily conversational exchanges men and women speak more or
less meaningfully and effectively with one another, thus fostering the
illusion of a wholly shared common language, it is also the case that
where figurative usage is invoked-that usage which often enough
marks the highly specialized language of literature-it "can be inacces-
sible to all but those who share information about one another's
knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and attitudes."24 Symbolic representa-
tions, in other words, depend on a fund of shared recognitions and
potential inference. For their intended impact to take hold in the
reader's imagination, the author simply must, like Minnie Foster, be
able to call upon a shared context with her audience; where she can-
not, or dare not, she may revert to silence, to the imitation of male
forms, or, like the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper," to total with-
drawal and isolation into madness.
It may be objected, of course, that I have somewhat stretched my
argument so as to conflate (or perhaps confuse?) all interpretive
strategies with language processes, specifically reading. But in each
instance, it is the survival of the woman as text-Gilman's narrator and
Glaspell's Minnie Foster-that is at stake; and the competence of her

reading audience alone determines the outcome. Thus, in my view,
both stories intentionally function as highly specialized language acts
(called "literature") which examine the difficulty inherent in de-
ciphering other highly specialized realms of meaning-in this case,
women's conceptual and symbolic worlds. And further, the intended
emphasis in each is the inaccessibility of female meaning to male
interpretation.25 The fact that in recent years each story has increas-
ingly found its way into easily available textbooks, and hence into the
Women's Studies and American Literature classroom, to be read and
enjoyed by teachers and students of both sexes happily suggests that
their fictive premises are attributable not so much to necessity as to
contingency.26 Men can, after all, learn to apprehend the meanings
encoded in texts by and about women-just as women have learned to
become sensitive readers of Shakespeare and Milton, Hemingway and
Mailer.27Both stories function, in effect, as a prod to that very process
by alerting the reader to the fundamental problem of "reading" cor-
rectly within cohabiting but differently structured conceptual worlds.
To take seriously the implications of such relearned reading
strategies is to acknowledge that we are embarking upon a revisionist
rereading of our entire literary inheritance and, in that process, dem-
onstrating the full applicability of Bloom's second formula for
canon-formation, "You are or become what you read" (KC, p. 96). To
set ourselves the task of learning to read a wholly different set of texts
will make of us different kinds of readers (and perhaps different
kinds of people as well). But to set ourselves the task of doing this in a
public way, on behalf of women's texts specifically, engages us-as the
feminists among us have learned-in a challenge to the inevitable
issue of "authority... in all questions of canon-formation" (KC, p. 100).
It places us, in a sense, in a position analogous to that of the narrator
of "The Yellow Wallpaper," bound, if we are to survive, to challenge
the (accepted and generally male) authority who has traditionally
wielded the power to determine what may be written and how it shall
be read. It challenges fundamentally not only the shape of our canon
of major American authors but, indeed, that very "continuity that
began in the sixth century B.C. when Homer first became a school-
book for the Greeks" (MM, pp. 33-34).
It is no mere coincidence, therefore, that readers as diverse as
Adrienne Rich and Harold Bloom have arrived by various routes at
the conclusion that re-vision constitutes the key to an ongoing literary
history. Whether functioning as ephebe/poet or would-be critic,
Bloom's reader, as "revisionist," "strives to see again, so as to esteem
and estimate differently, so as then to aim 'correctively'" (MM, p. 4).
For Rich, "re-vision" entails "the act of looking back, of seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction."28
And each, as a result-though from different motives-strives to
make the "literary tradition ... the captive of the revisionary impulse"
(MM, p. 36). What Rich and other feminist critics intended by that
"re-visionism" has been the subject of this essay: not only would such
revisionary rereading open new avenues for comprehending male
texts but, as I have argued here, it would, as well, allow us to ap-
preciate the variety of women's literary expression, enabling us to take
it into serious account for perhaps the first time rather than, as we do
now, writing it off as caprice or exception, the irregularity in an
otherwise regular design. Looked at this way, feminist appeals to re-
visionary rereading, as opposed to Bloom's, offer us all a potential
enhancing of our capacity to read the world, our literary texts, and
even one another, anew.
To end where I began, then, Bloom's paradigm of poetic history,
when applied to women, proves useful only in a negative sense: for by
omitting the possibility of poet/mothers from his psychodynamic of
literary influence (allowing the feminine only the role of Muse-as
composite whore and mother), Bloom effectively masks the fact of an
othertradition entirely-that in which women taught one another how
to read and write about and out of their own unique (and sometimes
isolated) contexts. In so doing, however, he points up not only the
ignorance informing our literary history as it is currently taught in the
schools, but, as well, he pinpoints (however unwittingly) what must be
done to change our skewed perceptions: all readers, male and female
alike, must be taught first to recognize the existence of a significant
body of writing by women in America and, second, they must be
encouraged to learn how to read it within its own unique and in-
forming contexts of meaning and symbol. Re-visionaryrereading, if you
will. No more must we impose on future generations of readers the
inevitability of Norman Mailer's "terrible confession . . .-I have
nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today ... I
do not seem able to read them."29Nor should Bloom himself continue
to suffer an inability to express useful "judgment upon ... the 'liter-
ature of Women's Liberation.' "30
LEE, NEW HAMPSHIRE
NOTES
1 Albert William Levi, "De Interpretatione:Cognition and Context in the History of

Ideas," Critical Inquiry, 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1976), 164.
2 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), p. 18 (hereafter cited as

MM).
3 Bloom, The Anxietyof Influence: A Theoryof Poetry (New York, 1973), p. 43 (hereafter
cited as AI).
4 Bloom, Kabbalahand Criticism(New York, 1975), p. 106 (hereafter cited as KC). This
concept is further refined in his Poetry and Repression:Revisionismfrom Blake to Stevens
(New Haven, 1976), p. 26, where Bloom describes poems as "defensive processes in
constant change, which is to say that poems themselves are acts of reading. A poem is ...
a fierce, proleptic debate with itself, as well as with precursor poems."
5 KC, p. 125; by way of example, and with a kind of Apollonian modesty, Bloom
demonstrates his own propensities for misreading, placing himself amid the excellent
company of those other Super Misreaders, Blake, Shelley, C. S. Lewis, Charles Wil-
liams, and T. S. Eliot (all of whom misread Milton's Satan), and only regrets the fact
"that the misreading of Blake and Shelley by Yeats is a lot stronger than the misreading
of Blake and Shelley by Bloom" (pp. 125-26).
6 In Poetry and Repression, p. 18, Bloom explains that "by 'reading' I intend to mean
the work both of poet and of critic, who themselves move from dialectic irony to
synecdochal representation as they confront the text before them."
7 See, for example, Joanne Feit Diehl's attempt to adapt the Bloomian model to the
psychodynamics of women's poetic production in " 'Come Slowly-Eden': An Explora-
tion of Women Poets and Their Muse," Signs, 3, No. 3 (Spring 1978), 572-87; and the
objections to that adaptation raised by Lillian Faderman and Louise Bernikow in their
Comments, Signs, 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1978), 188-91 and 191-95, respectively. More
recently, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have tried to correct the omission of
women writers from Bloom's male-centered literary history in The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-CenturyLiterary Imagination (New Haven,
1979).
8 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1928; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 9-10,
25-26.
9 Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America,
1820-1870 (Ithaca, 1978), p. 32.
10 See Baym, Woman'sFiction, pp. 32-33.
11 Ibid., p. 178.
12 I paraphrase rather freely here from some of Baym's acutely perceptive and highly
suggestive remarks, p. 14.
13 The problem of audience is complicated by the fact that in nineteenth-century
America distinct classes of so-called highbrow and lowbrow readers were emerging,
cutting across sex and class lines; and, for each sex, distinctly separate "serious" and
"popular" reading materials were also being marketed. Full discussion, however, is
beyond the scope of this essay. In its stead, I direct the reader to Henry Nash Smith's
clear and concise summation in the introductory chapter to his Democracyand the Novel:
Popular Resistanceto Classic American Writers(New York, 1978), pp. 1-15.
14 Baym, p. 178.
15 From "Books of the Day," Chicago Times-Herald(1 June 1899), p. 9; excerpted in
Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York, 1976), p. 149.
16 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, with Afterword by Elaine R.
Hedges (New York, 1973), pp. 12, 11. Page references to this edition will henceforth be
cited parenthetically in the text, with references to Hedges's excellent Afterword pre-
ceded by her name.
17 Jean Ricardou, "Composition Discomposed," tr. Erica Freiberg, Critical Inquiry, 3,
No. 1 (Autumn 1976), 90.
18 The possible exception here is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom'sCabin; or, Life
Among the Lowly (1852).
19 If, to some of the separatist advocates in our current wave of New Feminism, this
sounds like a wholly acceptable, even happy circumstance, we must nonetheless under-
stand that, for earlier generations of women artists, acceptance within male precincts
conferred the mutually understood marks of success and, in some quarters, vitally
needed access to publishing houses, serious critical attention, and even financial inde-
pendence. That this was not the case for the writers of domestic fictions around the
middle of the nineteenth century was a fortunate but anomalous circumstance. Insofar
as our artist-mothers were separatist, therefore, it was the result of impinging cultural
contexts and not (often) of their own choosing.
20 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communicationin Prose Fiction from
Bunyan to Beckett(Baltimore, 1974), p. 293.
21 Nelly Furman, "The Study of Women and Language: Comment on Vol. 3, No. 3,"
Signs, 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1978), 184.
22 First published in Every Week(15 March 1917), the story was then collected in Best
ShortStoriesof 1917, ed. Edward O'Brien (London, 1917). My source for the text is Mary
Anne Ferguson's Images of Women in Literature (Boston, 1973), pp. 370-85; for some
reason the story was dropped from Ferguson's 1975 revised edition but, as will be
indicated below, it is elsewhere collected. Since there are no textual difficulties involved,
I have omitted page references to any specific reprinting.
23 I here paraphrase Clifford Geertz, The Interpretationof Cultures (New York, 1973),
p. 13, and specifically direct the reader to the parable from Wittgenstein quoted on that
same page.
24 Ted Cohen, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," Critical Inquiry, 5, No. 1
(Autumn 1978), 78.
25 It is significant, I think, that the stories do not suggest any difficulty for the women
in apprehending the men's meanings. On the one hand this simply is not relevant to
either plot; and on the other, since in each narrative the men clearly control the public
realms of discourse, it would, of course, have been incumbent upon the women to learn
to understand them. Though masters need not learn the language of their slaves, the
reverse is never the case: for survival's sake, oppressed or subdominant groups always
study the nuances of meaning and gesture in those who control them.
26 For example, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" may be found, in addition to the
Feminist Press reprinting previously cited, in The Oven Birds: AmericanWomenon Wom-
anhood, 1820-1920, ed. Gail Parker (Garden City, 1972), pp. 317-34; and Glaspell's "A
Jury of Her Peers" is reprinted in AmericanVoices,AmericanWomen,ed. Lee R. Edwards
and Arlyn Diamond (New York, 1973), pp. 359-81.
27 That women may have paid a high psychological and emotional price for their
ability to read men's texts is beyond the scope of this essay, but I enthusiastically direct
the reader to Judith Fetterley's provocative study of the problem in her The Resisting
Reader: A Feminist Approachto American Fiction (Bloomington, 1978).
28 Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," College English,
34, No. 1 (October 1972), 18; rpt. in Adrienne Rich's Poetry, ed. Barbara Charlesworth
Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York, 1975), p. 90.
29 Norman Mailer, "Evaluations-Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in
the Room," collected in his Advertisements for Myself (New York, 1966), pp. 434-35.
30 MM, p. 36. What precisely Bloom intends by the phrase is nowhere made clear; for
the purposes of this essay, I have assumed that he is referring to the recently increased
publication of new titles by women writers.

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A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts

Author(s): Annette Kolodny

PPEALING PARTICULARLY to a generation still in the process of

Copyright© 1980 by New LiteraryHistory, The University of Virginia

Baym quotes Marion Harland from the introduction to Harland's

If a bit overdone, prefaces like these nonetheless point up the self-

synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts" when that

ings; and by predicating a female readership as yet unprepared for

revisions, then, as in Bloom's paradigm, it might have made possible a

Glaspell's Minnie Foster-that is at stake; and the competence of her

LEE, NEW HAMPSHIRE

1 Albert William Levi, "De Interpretatione:Cognition and Context in the History of

2 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), p. 18 (hereafter cited as

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