Reading Rhetorically-Flower and Haas

As a high school student, and even an undergraduate majoring in English, I often felt frustrated with my teachers who, like many others, seemed to privilege a single interpretation of a text.  I was never one to find that singular meaning my teachers professed and I hated passionately those students who did.  Why were they graced and I was not? 

It wasn't until my junior year in college that I felt some kind of affirmation for my often subversive interpretations and analyses of texts, what I now understand to be rhetorical readings.  I was taking a class on the works of Thomas Hardy.  I had been eagerly looking forward to the class, but I soon realized that once you've read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, you've read Hardy's oeuvre.  Yes, the settings and characters change, but the stories are, essentially, all the same.  I had already written two papers on Hardy's novels and was wracking my brain trying to find something different to say for my third paper.  Finally, the evening before the paper was due (I was not typically a procrastinator, but I couldn't overcome my writer's block), I gave up.  I started writing the same paper I had for the other two, just changing character names and settings.  But midway through, I started getting angry at Mr. Hardy.  "Couldn't you find something else to say about the way society treats women, you bumbling idiot?"  And out of anger and frustration, I started writing not about how women were always victims of English patriarchal society, but about how they were femme fatales.  That they ultimately caused the downfall of the male characters.   

This was, of course, bs.  I didn't really believe what I was writing, but I figured there was at least a possibility there and I could support it.  I was playing, really.  It felt good to write something so opposed to what we had been discussing all semester long.  But at some point, I liked what I was writing.  It was cathartic.  So I took a risk, revised the beginning of the paper to match my new purpose in writing and crafted a conclusion in which I made a rather broad claim that, in having his female characters embrace the very traits men accused them of--selfishness and vanity, Hardy was being more subversive than any of us have fully understood.  Two weeks later, I received the paper back from my professor with red ink all over it.  "I disagree!"  "I just can't agree here."  "Do you really think this?"  I feared looking at the back page, allowing the negative comments to haunt my mind for days.  Finally, when I no longer cared whether I failed the paper, for I was assured at least a C in the class,  I looked.  There, written in a hand rather smaller than I had expected, was something else I had not expected: a B+.  Below it was written a brief note that even though my views ran counter to everything my teacher valued and loved about Hardy, she appreciated my unique, rather brazen, perspective.  She was glad I had engaged with the text and found something new to say about it.

Needless to say, my professor's comment made quite an impression on me.  I was finally rewarded for my reading of a text.  For a good while afterward, I read every text with a suspicious eye.  What is going on in society that might have influenced this author's views? What is he or she really communicating?  What is he or she not communicating?  How might my own interpretation differ from the common reader and why?  I still read this way, but my motivations aren't so much to prove a writer (or a teacher) wrong. More than anything, I am motivated by a curiosity and an interest in discovering how and why my interpretations so often differ from those of others.