لخّصلي

we are now assuming that there already exists the situation favorable to the student’s spon- taneous and personal response to literature. We assume also that through the kind of group discussion described in the preceding chapter, the students have stimulated one another to organize the scattered elements of their response and to formulate their interpretations and judgments. The teacher will have led the group to elab- orate their opmions so that the fundamental points of agreement and disagreement have become clear.
The teacher’s task now becomes one of helping each student toward a clarification of his response as the basis for an even more intense and fuller participation in what the literary work offers. One aspect of this, we have said, involves understanding and critical revalua- tion by the student of his own preoccupations and as- sumptions. The teacher can help in this process only if he understands some of the possible forces molding the student’s response and can anticipate some of the major needs and concerns of adolescents in our society.
In the interchange of ideas, the student will be led
to compare his reactions with those of other students, of the teacher, and if necessary, of established critics. He will see that a particular work may give rise to attitudes and judgments different from his own. Some interpreta- tions, he will discover, are more defensible than others, in terms of the work as a whole. Yet he will also be- come aware of the fact that sometimes more than one reasonable interpretation is possible.^ From this inter- play of ideas the question will arise: Wh^ was his reac- tion different from the other students’? Why did he choose one particular slant rather than another? Why did certain phases of the book or poem strike him more forcibly than others? Why did he misinterpret or ig- nore certain elements? The attainment of a truer vision of the work will require the disengagement of the pass- ing or irrelevant from the fundamental and appropri- ate elements in his response. What was there in his state of mind that led to a distorted or partial view of the work? What in his temperament and past experi-
ce helped him to understand it more adequately?
We have already been reminded of the fact that the
"^reading of a particular work at a particular moment by
a particular reader will be a highly complex process. "Anything in the reader’s past experience, any of his present preoccupations, his needs and frustrations—even his present physical state—may enter actively into the nature of his primary spontaneous response. In some cases, these things will conduce to a ri^er and more balanced reaction to the work. In other cases, they will
limit or distort the reader’s image of it. It is important that the teacher of literature be aware of some of the personal factors that will inevitably affect the equation represented by book plus reader.
The experienced teacher will undoubtedly be able to recall many illustrations of responses to literature colar.ed by some personal factor. Some personal preoc- cupation or some automatic response to a minor phrase or to the general subject of the work will lead the stu- dent to a violent reaction that has very little to do with the work itself. A word such as home or mother or a phrase such as my country, with their many conven- tional sentimental associations, may often set off an automatic reaction that tends to blind the reader to the context in which the poet had presented these words. The same thing happens on perhaps an even larger scale in connection with fiction and drama. A young college graduate recently expressed herself most forcibly concerning Anna Karenina. She had no sympathy, she said, for Anna, who was so preoccupied with her own affairs and who probably did not appreciate her hus- band. He was undoubtedly the kind of man who loves deeply but is unable to communicate his feelings to others. When the young woman was informed of the more usual interpretation of Anna’s husband and was asked to point out in the work itself the basis for her interpretation, she replied, “But there are people like that, with very warm hearts and intense affections, who are unable to let others know it. Why, my own father is like that!’’
The personal sources of this reader’s blindness to the author’s intention were revealed here in clearer terms than is usually possible in a classroom or a school situa- tion. Something accidental to the book had caused her to identify Karenin with her father. This is typical, however, of the less obvious ways in which we tend to project upon a book something out of our own experi- ence which probably has been only vaguely suggested. In this case, it destroyed the effect which Tolstoy un- doubtedly intended. Often, the most vigorous and ob- stinate expressions of a seemingly wilful misreading may be caused by some such projection into the work of the student’s own experience or preoccupation. Some- times such a projection may cause the reader to have a much more violent emotional experience than the au- thor himself planned. Rosamond Lehmann might have been astonished at hearing a seventeen-year-old girl recently pronounce Invitation to the Waltz “the great- est tragedy I ever read.’’ It is not difficult to deduce that this girl’s own personal history and present preoc- cupations would explain her reaction to this wistful story of a young girl’s not too happy first ball.^
It is always easier to detect the influence of the read- I er’s preoccupations and past experiences when, as in the
preceding instances, they lead to an interpretation dif- ferent from the author’s probable intention. The con- tent of the reader’s past life and present concerns plays an equally important part, however, in enabling him to have a rich and balanced response to a given liter- ary work. Every personality which reacts to the work of art has incorporated a fund of attitudes and inter- ests deposited by former interactions with the environ- ment.
Past literary experiences, of course, make up an im- portant part of this equipment which the reader brings
to literature, but it is a part which has usually been emphasized to the exclusion of other elements derived from general life experience. In order to share the author’sinsight,thereaderneednothavehadidentical ^ experiences, but he must have experienced some needs, some emotions, some organization of concepts, some circumstancesandrelationships,fromwhichhecancon- / struct the “new” situations, emotions, and understand- ings set forth in the literary work.
Moreover, the work will have been a vital experience to the extent that these new elements can be assimilated into, and hence even modify, that original bac^round of personality. For if he shares the author’s vision whole-heartedly, it is because the reader possesses notq only the psychological potentialities but also the men- 1 tal readiness to participate in just this vicarious experi- ence. In a motion-picture theatre recently, a ten-year- old boy was heard to exclaim, just as the hero and heroine fell into the traditional closing embrace, “This
is the part that I always hate!” That feeling is evidently not shared by the millions of adults who view such pic- tures weekly. This quite obvious point concerning read- iness is one that is often forgotten when literature treat- ing more complex situations and insights is involved. The teacher, particularly, needs to remember that in the molding of any specific literary experience what the student brings to literature is as important as the literaryjyork itself.
Part of our equipment for helping the adolescent to fuller literary experience will therefore be an under- standing of adolescent concerns and an awareness of some of the possible personal factors that may limit or enhance his response.
Every opportunity for coming to understand the in- dividual student will therefore be valuable. Under the usual teaching conditions, these opportunities are un- fortunately only too rare. All the more reason, there- fore, for the teacher to work out some general under- standing of the possible experiences and preoccupations typical of the particular group of students with which he is dealing. Since in this book our attention is cen- tered particularly on the high-school and early college years, it will be useful to suggest some answers to the question: What does the adolescent bring to literature?
Our discussTo^^mll not attempt to He inclusive. We shall merely try to suggest some of the awarenesses of adolescent concerns that will be helpful to the teacher in his attempt to understand the student’s spontaneous
response to literature. A knowledge of typical adoles- cent preoccupations will also influence the teacher in the choice of literary materials.
The ADOLESCENT READER to whom we offer the experi- ence of literature comes to it out of a mass of absorbing and conflicting influences. It has become a cliche to de- scribe as a time of storm and stress this period when the child is coming into possession of the physical and nervous endowments with which he will function as an adult. The marked physical changes that occur at this time probably have been excessively blamed for the difficulties that beset the adolescent years. Anthropolo- gists have pointed out to us societies such as Samoa where these physical changes occur without emotional upheaval. In other cultures, the period of personal tur- moil may fall at an entirely different age and without reference to physiological changes. Nevertheless, with- out making these changes the sole reason for all the problems of adolescence, we are justified in believing that in our society they do have certain emotional reper- cussions. The girl or boy is made more or less aware of these physical readjustments and recognizes certain transformations in his emotional drives and personality traits. A heightened self-consciousness and curiosity about the seif usually follows. It is obvious that this will affect his attitude toward the essentially human art of literature.
The self-consciousness of the adolescent seems often
to center about a concern with normality.® He is wor- ried by what seems to be any deviation from the “nor- mal.” His size, his height, his weight, his speed in move- ment, his strength, are constantly measured against what is considered appropriate for his age and social group. Philip Carey’s self-consciousness about his de- formed foot, in Of Human Bondage, is symbolic of the agonies of embarrassment that many boys and girls suf- fer because of much slighter and perhaps almost unde- tectable deviations from what they have come to con- sider normal. Temperamental traits are subjected to equally searching scrutiny: aggressiveness or shyness, physical courage or timidity, the capacity to make friends, will be measured against some kind of norm.
Even the subtler emotional traits, feelings of anger and envy, of loyalty and affection toward others, may trouble him if he is not sure that others have similar feelings. He seeks some standards against which to meas- ure himself and derives his sense of them from a great many different sources. We shall later consider the ways in which literary experience may liberate him from too narrow a concept of normality.^ At this point, we wish principally to stress the fact that we must be aware of this preoccupation as at least a possible factor in our students’ response to particular works.
The distress, insecurity, and bewilderment that often accompany these physical and social changes are prob-
ably in large part due to the lack of mental preparation for them. Particularly is this true of our cultural prud- ishness concerning^ sex. In other societies, sexual matu- ration brings with it no insecurity because from early childhood the youth has been prepared for it. The adolescent in our culture who has suddenly been intro- duced to knowledge about sex will necessarily feel its impact as something extremely personal to himself. Even when he has been properly prepared, the nervous- ness, prudery, and even prurience of the attitudes toward sex in the society about him will undoubtedly cause complications. It is in spite of these tensions that the boy and girl must make an adjustment to this newly recognized phase of their nature.
Even teachers who are aware of this preoccupation of yofreR”too^ften tend to evade or gloss over anything in literature that might have a direct bearing on this vital concern. Yet this rules out one of the most unfail- ingly powerful factors in the student’s experience with literature. There is, of course, the opposing danger that the adult, whose sense of this phase of experience is nec- essarily different from that of the adolescent, may be excessively zealous to prove his emancipation and may thus make the adolescent too self-conscious about sex. We do not need to reenforce this self-consciousness, al- ready sufficiently stimulated by advertisements, moving pictures, and fiction. Our responsibility is to vouchsafe a frank and wholesome recognition of the importance and potential beauty and dignity of this aspect of man’s life
Psychologists and sociologists confirm our observation that at this adolescent period the youth develops a cer- tain social consciousness. Like Philip Carey, he wishes to find out “man’s relation to the world he lives in, man’s relation with the men among whom he lives, and, finally, man’s relation to himself.’’ The adolescent be- comes more conscious of himself as a member of a fam- ily and a community. He becomes eager to impress others, to gain their friendship, and to be admitted into special groups. This leads often to intense self- consciousness concerning his own nature and personal- ity and to a great interest in the ways in which people influence one another. Any one who associates with adolescents will know how they experiment with vari- ous ways of approaching people; they seem to “try on” different social personalities as one might “try on” new clothes.
The initiated adult tends to forget the awakening curiosity of the adolescent eager to see behind the facade of appearances. During childhood, he has ac- cepted the bare framework of relationships as they have presented themselves to him, in his family, in his neigh- borhood, or in the larger world. Now as he nears adult years, he finds these relationships acquiring new and unsuspected meanings. Parents who had been taken for granted, their relation to one another summed up in their common parental role, are suddenly seen to have other hitherto unsuspected intense emotional ties. Again and again in biographical novels we are shown the adolescent hero or heroine suddenly made aware of this
hidden emotional life of their parents with all its de- mands and satisfactions, its irritations and disillusion- ments.
Thus it is with much of the adult world. The boy and girl are faced with the question: What are the personal emotional realities behind the world of appearances? What indeed does it mean to the individual—and po- tentially to me, the adolescent, about to “live”—to be a leader or a follower, to be a member of a community, to earn one’s living, to create a family, a circle of friends, to meet the ups and downs of fate, to know love and birth and death? What does it “feel like,” from within, to be this kind of person or that? To be angelic, cruel, dominating, passive? What are the satisfactions, what are the elements, of the many roles that may be played? He is no longer satisfied with a childlike acceptance of the mere external gestures and trappings as of silhouettes against a screen. He wishes to experience these things from within. It is often to literature—and principally fiction—that he turns. Here he finds not only emotional release for the impulses already strong within him, but denied satisfaction in his life as a minor; he finds also through vicarious experience the insight he craves into the possibilities that life offers, the possible roles open to him, the possible situations in which he may find himself.
Being still in the dependent childhood relation to the family, yet feeling himself practically an adult, the youth often begins to question the authority of the
family. Even in a stable well-integrated society, such as pre-industrial, agricultural America, the period of ado- lescence brings with it a heightened tension within the family group. The youth seeks ways of asserting his ex- istence as an individual apart from it. He sets up the goal of psychological as well as economic independence. These attitudes frequently come into conflict with the desire of the family to continue its dominance, and with the psychic need on the part of the parents to feel them- selves still an essential force in the life of their offspring. These strains and stresses make the whole subject of family relationships a field of particular interest to the adolescent. We should at least help him to understand the function that our culture assigns to the family in the life of the individual. He needs also to become more aware than ever before of his parents as personalities with emotional needs of their own. He will profit also from a clear understanding of the nature of both de- pendence and independence. Yet in the education and training that are given the adolescent in America there is little to enlighten him along these lines.® He will sense these needs and curiosities, and here again, it will be often only from the reflection of life offered by lit- erature that he will acquire these insights.
These conflicts and difficulties are tremendously com- plicated for the present-day adolescent, of course, by the fact that he is living at a moment when our society is
singularly lacking in consistency, when changes in our economic and social attitudes are going on with un- precedented speed, when few of the traditional ideas re- main unquestioned. The young boy and girl who have grown up within the relatively stable pattern set by the family are suddenly catapulted into a world of innum- berable alternative patterns; the burden of many choices is placed upon them. They often find the ways of life, the ideas, and the activities that have been valued within the family, ill adapted to the conditions of a changing world. More than probably any other generation, they have the opportunity to formulate their own ideal life patterns. It is no longer assumed that the families they create will be organized on one pattern; an extraor- dinary range of possible relationships with their mates and with their children can be envisaged. Similarly, in their choice of work the settled values need no longer hold. The prestige of the successful business man has somewhat dwindled; the social value of the artist, the scientist, or the artisan is increasingly recognized. Similar breadth of choice and challenge to personal crea- tion meet the adolescent as he seeks to develop a social philosophy and a set of values.
In ironic contrast to the bewilderingly generous choice of goals that presents itself are the heartbreaking obstacles toward their attainment created by our present economic disorganization. This too has enormously heightened all of the characteristic problems of ado- lescence. Economic independence seems often an impos- sible goal, or if it is attained at all, it is in such limited
form that a full adult life including marriage and a fam- ily is impossible. Formerly, in the years of prosperity and expansion, political questions or concern with pos- sible alternative organizations of society often seemed remote and academic to the adolescent involved in plans for his own personal life. Today, even the least socially conscious individual is forced into some recognition of the influence of the surrounding society upon him. Here again, the teacher or professor will fail to convey a living sense of literature if he goes blithely on his academic way without recognizing that the student turns to literature out of this welter of shifting and uncertain social conditions.
Probably because of the jolt that our habitual atti- tudes have received, we have become somewhat more aware of the automatic and indirect ways in which we acquire our ideas of the roles open to us in life. In a stable society, we should absorb from our childhood ex- perience in the family and from the community about us the image of the behavior, the appropriate attitudes, the rights and the responsibilities of, for example, the various family roles. The young man probably would automatically assume in his turn the roles of husband and parent, without even consciously defining their at- tributes. He would need only to follow unquestioningly the well-channeled paths of social behavior.
Although more of these aspects of behavior have been forced into consciousness in our age of transition, it is still in the same automatic and indirect way that much of our behavior is patterned. We have absorbed ready-
made standards and attitudes from the family back- ground, from the lives of neighbors, from the images of accepted patterns of behavior with which we are sur- rounded. The very emotions with which we most spon- taneously meet a situation have, after all, been learned through the force of cultural suggestion. If a woman is indignant and jealous at the thought of her husband taking a second mate, it is because from childhood on she has constantly observed that situation coupled with that reaction. For the same reason, the native African woman will automatically express pleasure and grati- tude when her husband proposes to take a second wife. Our sense of the culturally approved emotional reac- tions, our notions of right and wrong, our sense of the appropriate types of behavior, are in largest measure the result of such unconscious assimilation.
Thus it is that the adolescent will already possess a wealth of culturally absorbed attitudes and ideas of human behavior. And it will be principally through this same process of unconscious cultural absorption that he will build up his images of the possible future roles that life offers. Innumerable influences in his environ- ment will have given him a definite image, for instance, of the possible ways of behavior and feeling, even of the kind of temperament, appropriate or possible for a man or a woman. His parents and his family, through their own example and through explicit statement of the accepted attitudes, will have done much at an early point to set this mold. These will have been reenforced not only by the men and women about him
but also by the images presented in newspapers, books, and magazines, and in that exceedingly potent influ- ence, the moving picture. The image of the man as dominant, masterful, superior, the woman, emotional, dependent, clinging, in need of help and guidance, is, for instance, the one most often and most forcibly pre- sented to us even in this supposed age of woman’s emancipation.
We are constantly bombarded with these images: in the actions and attitudes of the conventional members of the older and younger generations about us; in the distinctions, both subtle and crude, between the things proper for men and for women repeated endlessly in the newspapers and popular magazines; in the types presented with monotonous similarity on the screen. And we must recall, literature is another of these image- forming media. The human complications that are rec- ognized as important and valid enough to be given ex- plicit attention in fiction, in the newspapers, or in motion pictures reflect overwhelmingly the stereotyped notions of masculine and feminine nature and behavior. In the great majority of cases, these images will condi- tion the actions, feelings, and choices of the individual.
Even in the case of the post-war generation that seems in such large measure to have broken away from these conceptions, the pressure of these older more deeply rooted images is still felt. The redefinitions of possible roles for man and woman and of the possible relation- ships between them has gone on constantly in terms of revolt or readjustment to the older attitudes which still
permeate our environment. The present generation of adolescents particularly is subjected to the conflicting pressures of contradictory images. On the one hand, the traditional notions of the behavior of man and woman are being constantly reiterated; on the other hand, the adolescent meets with increasing frequency images of men and women behaving in ways alien to the tradi- tional ideas. Women enter into activities thought ap- propriate only for men; children are given freedom that would formerly have been considered dangerous; grandmothers behave in ways formerly thought scandal- ous.
The adolescent’s own assumption of adult roles can- not therefore be as automatic as in the case of the youth in a more stable society. His choices, nevertheless, will probably in large part be made on an emotional basis. Against the weight and pressure of the traditionally ac- cepted image, there will be exerted the dramatic appeal of the new and perhaps more practical image. In many cases, the assumption of the new type of role will be made only under the compulsion of new economic and social conditions. The old attitudes and habits of re- sponse will be constantly intruding themselves, compli- cating the individual’s life, creating insecurity and con- fusion.
It is with such attitudes and preoccupations that the adolescent comes to his experience of literature. Any- thing that his reading may contribute must take its place in the complex web of influences acting upon him. His attention will be diverted to those phases of any work
that apply most clearly to his own emotional tensions and perplexities. He may often conceal with seeming indifference the reactions dictated by his particular obsessions, yet a teaching situation such as we have out- lined in the preceding chapter would encourage him to give articulate expression to his emotional responsOo Moreover, we must face the fact that if a work, no mat- ter how intense and stirring the teacher may think it, does not meet any of the adolescent’s needs, he will remain indifferent to it.
The teacher should be aware of still another con- ditioning factor which will affect the student’s sensitiv- ity to literature. The individualistic emphasis of our society builds up a frequent reluctance to see the im- plications for others of our own actions, or to under- stand the validity of the needs and drives that motivate other people’s actions. The fact that the success of the individual must so often be at the expense of others places a premium upon this kind of blindness to the needs and feelings of others. We teachers of literature must take this cultural pressure into account, since it is so directly opposed to the attitude of mind we are attempting to foster. For the very nature of the literary experience is a living into the experiences of others and a comprehension of the goals and aspirations of per- sonalities different from our own.
Furthermore, much of what the student reads and sees will tend to coarsen his sensibilities and to make him less able to respond fully to the complex and subtle nature of good literature. We cannot afford to ignore
the crude pictures of human behavior and motivation offered to their millions of readers by the newspapers, or the oversimplified and false images of life presented by the pulp magazines. Not even the school as a whole, let alone the teacher of literature with his much more limited scope, can hope fully to counterbalance the great weight of the influences met in the surrounding society and in such institutions as the newspaper or the mov- ing picture. The mere reading of a play by Shakespeare, or a novel by George Eliot or Henry James, cannot in itself be expected to wipe out the effect of all the desensitizing influences met outside the school or col- lege.
Yet this is not a reason for assuming a defeatist atti- tude that would limit our hope of influence to the gifted student or the one with unusually favorable back- ground. On the contrary, we must broaden our under- standing of our function. We must do more than merely expose the student to great art. Although the reading of a novel will not in itself counteract all the unfavor- able pressures, it may be made a means for helping the student to develop some resistance to those influences. And we can accomplish this only if we remain con- stantly aware of the nature of the social forces acting upon the student.
When an individual student reads a particular work, there will come into play one of the innumerable pos- sible variations upon our general picture of adolescent concerns. The particular community background of the
Student will be a factor; whether he comes from the North or the South, from city or country, will affect the nature of the understanding and the prejudices that he brings to the book. Stribling’s The Forge or Green’s This Body the Earth will elicit a very different response from students of northern and southern background. Main Street and Manhattan Transfer will not mean the same thing to the city boy and the country boy. The daughters of a railway magnate or mill owner and of a factory worker will probably react differently to Nor- ris’ The Octopus or Anderson’s Poor White. And when we turn to the literature of the past and of England, these same differences hold. The fact that our American population is becoming increasingly urban may explain the growing difficulty of keeping alive the love of Eng- lish poetry, so permeated by country imagery.
The STUDENT WILL BRING to his reading the moral and religious code and social philosophy assimilated from his family and community background. His parents may stem from a Main Street setting, or they may have turned from a life such as F. Scott Fitzgerald pictured to assume the duties of parenthood. The adolescents who will be coming to our schools and colleges in the next few years especially will reflect this diversity of moral atmosphere. The religious background of the student also often plays an important part. In a class studying Milton’s Paradise Lost, the girl who was a de- vout Catholic presented a very different response from
the one who had been brought up in an agnostic milieu. Similarly, a discussion of Romeo and Juliet was given a rather unusual turn by one student’s insistence that there was no tragedy since the lovers would be reunited after death. Similar problems will arise in connection with social and economic views. The child of well-to-do, middle-class parents who, after reading Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, insists that “some people like to be dirty and ragged and just won’t work’’ will have rather a special approach to Dickens’ Hard Times or Hugo’s Les Miserahles. Such things will necessarily affect the nature of the student’s sensitivity or imperviousness to the special emphasis and quality of literary works.
Nor is it only these broader and more easily detected differences of equipment that affect our problem. The adolescent preoccupation with family relations may take a wide variety of forms. The degree of adjustment or maladjustment between the student’s parents will have many unconscious reverberations in the student’s recep- tivities or antagonisms. This may not often take so de- cided a form as in the case of the student who confessed that she had hated almost every story or play she had read in high school because they ended on the note “they lived happily ever after,’’ so contradictory to the image of her own parents’ unhappy disagreements. Authors, she felt, must be in some vast conspiracy of untruth. Here, certainly, is an instance in which ac- quaintance with some of the contemporary novels deal- ing with marital maladjustments might have led the
Student to realize that the writer attempts to illuminate
the whole range of human experience and that, there- fore, his images of possible happiness might also be given some credence.
The student’s own relations with his parents will also be a conditioning factor in his approach to literature. His identification with a domineering father, for in- stance, may make him get greater emotional satisfac- tion from images of successfully imposed authority than from images of an individual independently working out his own fate.
Anything, of course, that has entered into and shaped the development of the student’s personality will be significant also for his literary development. We cannot attempt here even to enumerate the major factors that have been recognized as typical in our society. Nor can the teacher in dealing with the student hope to glimpse many of them, of whose import the student himself will be most of all unaware. Yet such general social attitudes ultimately will condition the whole texture of the stu- dent’s experience of life as well as of literature. We should at least be conscious of the presence of these elements in the interplay between the book and the per- sonality. Failures in sensitivity, lack of understanding, and seemingly distorted reactions often have their roots in these factors in personality. By helping the student to understand and evaluate his personal emphases, we shall help him to arrive at a more balanced and more lucid sense of literature.
There is very little systematic information avail- able concerning the specific ways in which the individual personality colors the response to literature. The book by Professor Richards which we have cited ® offers some valuable illustrations of individual reactions to poetry. His elaborate and subtle analyses of his students’ com- ments on poetry reveal some of the typical patterns of response, and his discussion of “Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses” is especially pertinent to our pres- ent consideration. Drawing on illustrations from his book as well as from the experience of other teachers, we shall attempt to place these findings in a social and psychological context.
One of the things that prevents the full impact of the literary work upon the mind of the reader is the fact that he usually brings to his reading a fund of ready-made, sharply crystallized ideas and habits of re- sponse. These responses are so easily touched off that they sometimes interfere with the reader’s understand- ing of what the author has said. Richards gives an illus- tration of this in several of his students’ comments on Edna Millay’s sonnet, “What’s this of death, from you who never will die?” The fact that this poem suggests at once that the subject is the question of immortality elicited various ready-made responses. These prevented the students from understanding either the idea or the effect that the poet was aiming at. The students intro-
duced a number of irrelevant discussions on death or responded to only certain phrases in the poem that had some connection with their own preconceived ideas on the subject.
A similar instance occurred in a discussion of “The Eve of St. Agnes.” One of the students announced that she thought the poem silly and sentimental. In personal conversation with the teacher, she defended this by add- ing that the poem was all about “romantic love twad- dle.” She happened to be at that early adolescent point of rebellion against the seeming adult obsession with this subject and therefore rejected anything that dealt with it. Obviously, she had not permitted herself a valid reading of the poem; she had therefore completely mis- understood its emphasis or the general effects with which Keats was concerned.
Subjects such as “home,” “mother,” “childhood,” “birth,” “death,” “my country,” possess whole constel- lations of fixed attitudes and automatic emotional re- flexes. The popularity of the writings of such authors as Edgar Guest and Ella Wheeler Wilcox depends in large part on the emotion-arousing efficacy of such sub- jects, regardless of what the poet himself may say about them. The discussions of D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano” by Richards’ students offers further examples of the ways in which ready-made responses and irrelevant associa- tions may interfere with the reading of any work that deals with a familiar subject (in this case recollections of a childhood scene with his mother playing at the piano). The Cambridge students were sufficiently so-
phisticated to be on their guard against the automatic appeal of such elements in Lawrence’s poem. For some of them, however, this also became a barrier to under- standing the poem. They recognized the stereotyped na- ture of the sentiments aroused in themselves by chance elements in the poem and blamed the poem for a con- ventionality inherent in their own feelings. They were so busy reacting emotionally against the possible auto- matic response to the idea of home and mother that they failed to react to the poem itself and see what Lawrence himself was expressing.
We are only too well acquainted with the power of even mediocre poetry to arouse an emotional response to patriotic and military subjects. The widespread suc- cess of such poems during the War was usually due to the fact that the whole environment was creating the intense emotions which the particular poem seemed to arouse. An emotional antipathy to war may be an equally powerful screen between the reader and the poem and may result in a like vitiation of critical judg- ment. After Housman’s recent death, an intelligent young man of decided pacifist beliefs picked up A Shropshire Lad and glanced at “1887,” written on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Shocked and in- dignant, he did not wish even to finish this poem that, by the very swing of its verse and the use of such tradi- tional phrases as “God has saved the Queen,” “sav- iours,” “the land they perished for,” seemed designed to arouse patriotic and warlike sentiments. If he had read the last stanza of the poem, he might possibly have
realized he had misread the earlier stanzas; it is more probable, however, that his strong preconceived re- sponse to the subject would have blinded him to the poem’s ironic meaning.
It seems likely that our students will come to litera- ture with increasingly strong and increasingly definite attitudes toward political and social themes. Such sub- jects are being discussed more frequently and more heatedly in their homes, in the newspapers, and over the radio. This suggests a whole complex of fixed atti- tudes and automatic responses which may cause dif- ficulties.
Richards reports such a stock response in the case of students whose antipathy to the glorification of royalty led them to object to a poem on George Meredith’s eightieth birthday which referred to him as “king of our hearts today.’’ (It must be recalled that the students had no clue such as the title would have offered.) At a performance of King Richard the Second in New York recently, one of the spectators revealed a similar blind- ness owing to anti-royalist sentiments. He was annoyed at the appeal that the play patently had for him. “Why should I care about whether Richard or Bolingbroke wins out? The whole idea of kingship is an anachronism for us today.’’ The emotional antipathies aroused by the fact that the play had to do with a king blinded him to its more universal interest, its subtly nuanced portrait of a man unable to wield the power thrust upon him, yet histrionically delighting in going through the mo- tions of command, and as histrionically savoring the
drama of his own downfall. If the play had been about a present-day dictator or about the president of a great corporation or a great university, our irate spectator would have been able to enjoy the revelation of a hu- man character that his automatic reaction to the idea “king” had obscured. We may sympathize with his po- litical views and yet regret that he was not able to handle his primary response in such a way as to appre- ciate the permanent values of the work before him.
Class feeling is also becoming increasingly evident in current judgments on literature. The college boy who rejects Henry James’ novels because he treats the life of the idle rich has his adult counterparts. Yet Marxian critics (such as Stephen Spender, in The Destructive Element) recognize the value of Henry James’ evocation of the subtle interplay of temperament upon tempera- ment and his searching image of the pre-war society. We have already mentioned the girl whose comment on a book about the East Side was merely that “some people just like to be dirty and ragged”—certainly a re- sponse that had nothing to do with what the author was presenting. This girl would probably read Oliver Twist without as articulate a phrasing of her idea, but can we hope that this same way of thinking would not be operating there too? When we consider the con- troversial nature of much of the literature being written today—novels such as Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here or poems such as MacLeish’s Public Speech, plays such as Green’s The House of Connelly or Anderson’s Winter- set— see even more clearly the need for preparing our
students to make sound literary judgments. At least their response to the general political and economic tendencies of the work should not prevent their paying attention to the sensuous, emotional, and intellectual elements actually embodied in the literary work. Their attitude toward its social implications is by no means irrelevant, but should be brought to bear upon the book itself, in its specific terms, and should not be a screen between the reader and the work.
We have been speaking mainly of stock responses elicited by the general subject of the work as a whole. This type of predetermined response is easily detected, since the nature of the work itself will forewarn us. We need to remember, however, that the same type of ex- cessive reaction may be produced by a word or a phrase or an episode in a work whose general theme has noth- ing to do with this particular prejudice or emotional fixation of the reader. We have seen an instance of this in the Cambridge students’ misreading of the poem on George Meredith merely because the word “king” set off an automatic response that was irrelevant to the poem as a whole. The young girl’s reaction to the love element in “The Eve of St. Agnes” is another illustration.
Our discussion of some of the conditions affecting the adolescent today has already suggested various other factors that would tend to implant in the student’s mind limited or stereotyped preconceptions. We have spoken, for example, of the influence of a rural or urban background or of sectional provincialism in building up stock responses. The southern girl who praised as
"good books” all of those that offered the romanticized picture of the South and condemned such works as Paul Green’s plays or Stribling’s novels obviously was not functioning on a literary level. The same thing would apply to the student whose response to White’s Fire in the Flint was that Kenneth Harper deserved his fate since he did not know his place as a Negro.
The fixed ideas and emotional associations that clus- ter about family and sex relations may also lead to fre- quent irrelevant responses. An example of this is a Cam- bridge student’s condemnation of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Piano” on the ground that no sensible person would want to give up his adult independence and re- turn to the limitations of childhood. Evidently resent- ment at restraints placed upon him in childhood may explain this reader’s misunderstanding of the poem. His response was to something in his own mind and back- ground, not in the poem. An argument concerning the value of Fielding’s Tom Jones by a group of college girls also revealed the extent to which their reaction to the book was affected by each girl’s image of the ideal young man. In many cases the image was sufficiently crystallized to hinder a complete understanding of the various phases of Tom’s character that Fielding had presented.
In ADDITION TO PREVENTING an understanding of what is read through the projection upon it of ready-made irrelevant responses, this fund of rigid attitudes and habits of emotion may also seriously impair the reader’s.
judgment even of what he has understood. Richards shows us instances in which the reader had understood the fresh interpretation that the poem presented but condemned it because he was still dominated by the stereotyped conventional ideas and feelings on the sub- ject. Here, of course, we encounter the difficulties that arise from the fact that a student will have absorbed from his environment cruder standards than are worthy of the kind of literary experience made available to him.
Recently this was brought home very forcibly to a teacher who in his course in short-story writing was perplexed by the superficial nature of the students’ work. In his discussion of the problems presented by the short-story form, he had ranged through the whole field, selecting from such writers as Poe, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, Stevenson, Flaubert, Mansfield, and Wharton those stories that seemed in more subtle ways to handle problems only dimly suggested in the stu- dents’ writings. When he pushed his investigation fur- ther, however, he discovered that the usual literary diet of the students was not the work of writers of this cali- ber but the stereotyped products of the “pulp” or third- rate magazines.
The students’ justification of their reading was in psychological terms. “These stories were easy to read, offered no difficulties to the understanding. They ended happily and gave one a sense that success was not too difficult of attainment.” In some cases the explanation was merely that these cheap stories were more easily available. Obviously, the instructor’s expression of dis-
approval would have accomplished little. He wisely started from the level at which he found his students. By getting them to discuss some of the “pulp” stories they liked, he helped them to become aware of the stereotyped formulas and trick effects. The class then turned to other kinds of “escape” writing, such as Poe’s stories, which require a more complex response and a more subtle perception of the writer’s technique. The instructor’s aim was gradually to lead the students to approach without resistance those stories which he con- sidered most significant.
At once the human element entered, for it was ob- vious that the students w^ere seeking in the escape of cheap success stories a release from the sense of pres- sure and defeat that permeated the world in which they lived. They had to be willing to relinquish the easy re- laxing drug that made up their reading diet and to welcome the stimulating and challenging quality of those stories that attempted to present an honest and searching image of life.
One of the first things that the instructor had to do was to dissipate any feeling that the stories he suggested were to be studied principally from the formal point of view. The concern with technique had to be subor- dinated to a concern with the state of mind, the attitude toward people and life situations revealed by great writers of the short story. Fundamentally, this proved itself to be the sounder approach also to the problems of technique. The subtle qualities of mood, the ironic contrasts between personality and situation, the nature
of conflicts between characters, as well as the nature of the solutions of the conflicts—all these things were in- volved in an understanding of the technical means that the writers had employed. The students had been un- able to assimilate the examples of technical success in the short story because they had been unable or re- luctant to understand and assimilate the insights into life which the writers of those stories had sought to give. Again we are confronted with the need of building up, as a preliminary, basis for literary appreciatioa,a^richer, more refined, and more flexible sense of life.
It is extremely valuable for the teacher of literature to recognize the nature of some of these possible “stock responses.” We have seen that in large part they rep- resent the dogmatic platitudinous ideas about people and life that one meets on all sides: in the newspapers
and the moving pictures, or on the lips of the man on the street. Similarly, they show themselves in ways of feeling that have become so conventional as to have lost all individual quality or fine shades. Our popular songs are repositories of such sentiments. Such responses are aroused with great ease as we see in the commer- cialized appeal to stock sentiments represented by Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, or by much of our ad- vertising.
Yet the very essence of literature is a rejection of such stereotyped, superficial, and unshaded reactions to the mere outlines of situations or to the appeal of vague and generalized concepts. A poem or a novel grows out of some fresh insight into the quality of these things.
The reader, therefore, must possess a certain flexibility of mind, a freedom from rigid emotional habits, if he is ever to enter into the esthetic experiences the artist has made possible.
This is not to argue that our object should be to create in the student such a state of flexibility and such a passivity to new kinds of experience that he will lose all the advantages of an integrated personality or a set- tled structure of ideas of his own. Keats, who possessed this quality of sensitivity to fresh experience to a su- preme degree, speaks in one of his letters of the poet as one who possessed no character of his own because he could identify himself so completely with other forms of being and could adopt so readily new and untried forms of response. Precious as that capacity may be for the poet, in such an extreme form it is not a practical asset for the conduct of everyday affairs. A stock re- sponse may often, as Richards says, be a convenience. Just as it would be disastrous if at every occasion for walking we had to reason out the best way of putting one foot before the other, so in our intellectual and so- cial life ready-made attitudes and ideas are also useful. By automatically taking care of the major part of our life, they leave us energy for meeting the new and unprepared-for situations.
What is needed is sufficient flexibility to free one’s self from the stock response when it prevents a re- sponse more appropriate to the situation. This is as true of the problems encountered in our daily practical
lives, as it is of our encounters with literature. Much of the mismanagement of our lives, particularly in our personal relationships, is the result of our following a stereotyped and automatic reaction to the general out- lines of a situation instead of responding flexibly to the special characteristics and changing qualities of that situation. The mother, accustomed to her children’s dependence upon her for the management of their lives, continues to expect the same kind of dependence long after the children have grown beyond the need for it. During the years of America’s economic expansion, the idea develops that the man without a job is shiftless and unenterprising; when the Depression makes it impossi- ble for many of even the most enterprising to have jobs, this same attitude toward the unemployed persists in many quarters. The young man who has been accus- tomed to his mother’s housewifely attention to his phys- ical well-being becomes irritated when his wife, em- ployed in business, overlooks these things.
In the experience of literature, where we are lib- erated from the demands that practical life makes on us for speedy and economical response and action, this capacity for flexibility should surely be exercised and enlarged. Fundamentally, what we are seeHng^ is the development of individuals who will function less as automatic bundles of habits and more as flexible dis- criminating personalities. Our great heritage of literary experiences can be enjoyed and understood only by such personalities.
Our remarks concerning “stock responses’’ can be
translated into terms of the breadth or adequacy of the individual life experience. Something in the reader’s own background or personality prevents him from un- derstanding fully all that the author offers. His notions concerning possibilities of human behavior and char- acter may be too limited, or his moral code may be too narrow and rigid to apply adequately to the complex human situations and emotions presented in literature. In its simplest terms, we have seen, this inadequacy of experience may take the form of the city child’s in- ability to respond fully to country imagery; or a more extreme example is the Indian children’s difficulties with Restoration comedy. How much of the adolescent’s indifference to great literature is the result of inade- quate experience? How much of the shallowness or cap- tiousness of his opinions on books is a by-product of a
similar approach to situations in life?
Just as in medicine much of our knowledge concern-
ing normal and satisfactory physiological processes is derived from the study of pathological conditions, so our understanding of what goes on when an individual reads a poem or a novel is illuminated by study of the causes for inadequate responses to literature. They can help us to recognize the basic fact that any sound re- sponse to literature is equally depen^nt on the quality of the reader’s personal contribution. We do violence to a poem or a story when some obsession or blindness of ours clouds our vision of what the author has presented to us. We do justice to it when our own temperament and our own past experience permit us to see clearly
what the work itself offers, and to perceive its signifi- cance. Precisely because it appeals to certain elements in our own nature as our past experience has molded it, is the literary effect an intense one.
One can have no quarrel with the fact that the atti- tudes and ideas the reader brings to literature are the result of his past experience. Our concern is rather that if the student’s superstructure of ideas is built on too narrow a base, he should be helped to gain broader and deeper insight through literature itself. That is why our emphasis has been on the interaction between the reader and the literary work. When the reader becomes aware of the dynamic nature of that interaction, he may gain some critical consciousness of the strength or weaknesses of the emotional and intellectual equipment with which he approaches literature (and life). Since we interpret the book or poem in terms of our fund of past experiences, it is equally possible and necessary that we come to reinterpret our old sense of things in the light of this new literary experience, in the light of the new ways of thinking and feeling offered by the work of art. Only when this happens has there been a full interplay between book and reader, and hence a com- plete and rewarding literary experience.
The work of art can have this effect, we have seen, because it does more than merely recall to us elements out of our own past insights and emotions. It will pre- sent them in new patterns and new contexts. It will give them new resonance and make of them the basis
for new awarenesses and enriched understanding. It will tend to supplement and correct our own necessarily limited personal experience. Through the work of art, our habitual responses, our preoccupations and tem- peramental urges, may be given added significance. They will be related to the emotional and sensuous structure created by the author, and they will be brought into organic connection with broader and deeper streams of thought and feeling. Out of this will arise a wider perspective and a readjustment of the framework of values with which to meet further experi- ences in literature and in life.
These considerations reenforce the belief concerning
the teacher’s opportunities set forth at the end of Chap- ter 3. Given the fact that the personal contribution of the reader is an essential element in any vital reading of literature, progressive educators have been justified in their demand that we permit the student to have a spontaneous response to literature. But the preceding discussion makes more apparent the basis for our re- minder that this pioneering demand represents only the first step, absolutely essential though that first step is. Given the spontaneous response of the student, the ground is merely cleared for creative teaching. There remains the further responsibility for enabling the stu- dent to handle with intelligence and discrimination the personal factors that enter into his reaction to books. Our object will be to help the student, through a criti- cal scrutiny of his response to literary works, to under- stand and organize his personal attitudes aii^ to gain
the knowledge and the sense of values that will enable him to respond more fully and more justly to the work of literature.
In this chapter, we have been concerned principally with some of the major preoccupations and needs that the adolescent may bring to literature and that he must develop the ability to understand and evaluate. The teacher who is sensitive to such personal and tempera- mental concerns will see how intimately involved he must become in the attempt to help his students to handle social, psychological, and ethical concepts such as we outlined at the very opening of our discussion. The next chapter will approach the problem of the clarification of the student’s response more definitely in terms of the kinds of knowledge and technical informa- tion that will contribute to his further understanding of the literary work itself.