above. The evidence comes under three headings: identification, the polysemous text,
and contradictory readings.
IdentificationThe notion of identification has been a contentious issue for some time. The assumption
is that readers ‘identify with’ the protagonists, and thus take on their particular value
positions. Readers are thus ideologically constructed by their identification with the
character. D.W.Harding (1977) offered an alternative formulation of the reader as an
observer in a more detached and evaluative spectator role, and both Geoff Fox (1979)
and Robert Protherough (1983) suggest that such a straightforward notion as
identification does not account for the evidence that they collected from children and
young people. It is clear from their evidence that readers take up a range of positions of
greater or lesser involvement, and of varied focalisation. The ideological initiatives of the
1970s presupposed an identification model of response, and subsequent commentators
are still most fearful of what happens should a young person engage in unmediated
identification with characters constructed within ideologically undesirable formulations.
Such fears underlie Stephens’s analysis (1992) and the work of Christian-Smith and her
co-contributors (1993).
The polysemous textRoland Barthes (1974) alerted us to the notion that texts operated a plurality of codes
that left them open to a plurality of readings, and Umberto Eco (1981) offers the most
extensive analysis of that plurality. Specifically, with regard to ideology, Eco agrees that
all texts carry ideological assumptions, whether overt or covert. But readers, he argues,
have three options: they can assume the ideology of the text and subsume it into their
own reading; they can miss or ignore the ideology of the text and import their own, thus
producing ‘aberrant’ readings—‘where “aberrant” means only different from the ones
envisaged by the sender’ (22); or they can question the text in order to reveal the
underlying ideology. This third option is, of course, the project that ideological critique
undertakes. When real readers, other than critics, are questioned about their readings,
it is clear that the second option is often taken up, and that ‘aberrant’ readings abound
(Sarland 1991; ChristianSmith 1993a), though consensual readings also clearly occur.
Texts, it seems, are contradictory, and so evidently are readings.
Contradictory readingsMacherey (1977, 1978) and Eagleton (1976), both assume that the world is riven with
ideological conflict. To expect texts to resolve that conflict is mistaken, and the
ideological contradictions that inform the world will also be found to inform the fictional
texts that are part of that world. Some texts, Eagleton argues, are particularly good at
revealing ideological conflict, in that they sit athwart the dominant ideology of the times
in which they were written. Eagleton looks to examples from the traditional adult canon
to make his point.
IDEOLOGY 49