james thurber's the secret life of walter mitty

By rebelling against the text, the female reader not only has to understand the point of view of the author and the male audience, but she also has to formulate her own opinions and create a sort of dialogue between the text and herself. But in so doing, she is also distancing herself from the text, not fully embracing it or its meaning in her life. By misreading a text, the woman reader understands it in a way that is conventional and acceptable to the literary world. Mitty, I realized that it is imperative that women rebel against the texts that would oppress them. But after reading the story again and paying attention to the portrayal of Mrs. Mitty would just let Walter daydream in peace. I found myself initially wishing that Mrs.

It is certain that women misread “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I did. The first draft of Amy’s paper begins with a journal entry that she wrote to generate ideas for her paper: Now Amy was in a bind: as a female reader, how was she to find humor in such stereotypes of men and women?Īmy’s paper blends textual and cultural reader-response theory-the use of gap filling with the notion that gender influences reading strategies. Mitty becomes a stereotypical nagging wife and seems to take on the active male role, while Walter becomes passive, more in line with another stereotype that is placed upon a woman.

And Amy realized that the humor in Thurber’s essay results because he inverts these binaries, because Mrs. Such a chart, of course, suggests that one category is privileged over another: reason over emotion, good over evil, light over darkness, active over passive, strong over weak, and husband over wife. MenĪmy also added to the list other binaries that she had encountered in discussions in other college classes, many outside of English literature: Husband They studied Ian MacLean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman, which provides a binary chart of the perceived differences between men and women:Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Her goal in the paper was to examine why she had this shift in interpretation of the story.Īmy had just taken a Shakespeare course where they learned about the Renaissance notions of women and men. In fact, she realized that the story now irritated her. She discovered, however, that her response to the story was quite different than it had been when she read it in high school. Since Amy was in search of a story to do a reader-response paper on, she thought she might return to a story she knew quite well.

James thurber's the secret life of walter mitty