Intro
Reader-Response theorist Norman N. Holland is totally into psychoanalysis. In his book The Nature of Literary Response: 5 Readers Reading, he asked—you guessed it—five readers to respond to a number of different texts, including Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily." It's a story about Emily Grierson, a Southern belle who is jilted by her lover and who ends up, well, you know, killing him and keeping his corpse in her bed for decades. Hey, we've all been there.
Let's look at a passage from the story below and see how a couple of Holland's readers responded to it:
Quote
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.
Analysis
Holland's readers were asked to respond to the phrase about Sartoris in the passage above: "Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron."
Holland's readers had very different responses to this phrase. One reader interpreted the phrase as ironic. The narrator uses heroic words like "fathered" and "edict," which makes us think that Colonel Sartoris did something really big. But as Holland's reader points out, what did Sartoris actually "father"? A really pathetic little rule forcing African-American women servants to wear aprons. Pretty ironic, no?
Another of Holland's readers read the vocabulary—and specifically the word "fathered"—as sexual. When we read that word, we can't help but think of all those illicit (and often violent) sexual relationships that took place between white men and black women in the South.
These are two very different responses to the very same little phrase in Faulkner's story, though they share some common features. Both are valid readings. The point is, as Holland says in 5 Readers Reading, people have very different responses to the same literary text. It all depends on their perspectives, their backgrounds, their preoccupations.