Questioning Imaginative Resistance and Resistant Reading

Abstract

It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story itself discourages readers from asking it, as is common in some forms of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. In Jean Craighead George’s (1959) novel My Side of the Mountain, fourteen-year-old Sam Gribley runs away from his home in New York City to live alone in the Catskill Mountains, where he forages, traps game, and converts a hollowed-out tree into a tiny house. Seven months pass before his father comes looking for him. His father is, mainly, impressed with the life Sam has built. He expresses no anger at Sam for leaving or sadness that Sam has been gone, and he returns to New York the next day. Sam does not see his family again for another six months.