Halpern-The Audience And Uncomfortable Distance

The Audience and Uncomfortable Distance What can be problematic about this collective knowledge that the narrator and audience share is that when the distance between narrator and narratee is so collapsed—and the vein of collective knowledge laid bare—some readers (and scholars) grow uncomfortable with the narrator and, as a result, Stowe’s text. For Thomas P. Joswick, this feeling originates from a collective negative experience, rather than the positive experience of identification that the narrator may assume of the audience; on Eva’s death scene, he writes, “Modern readers may agree that the scene’s luxury characterizes the most familiar and least desirable feature of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, the excess of conventional props
Halpern’s investigation of the narrative audience results in two statements she could imagine that audience articulating: “1) Stowe describes just what it feels like when a close relative dies. 2) Religion can offer solace when someone is dying; it did for me” (59). As Halpern expects, these remarks “remove the distance” between the reader and narrator, but what they seem to surprise her with is that she has “read remarks similar to these in [her] students’ papers—papers to which [she] gave low grades” (59). Aside from Joanne Dobson, Halpern finds that in her experience, no critic makes claims like these—nobody engages in the narrative audience, save for the (presumably) poorer writers in Halpern’s classes (59). What Halpern questions briefly here deserves more attention: what happens when the discomfort of the narrative distance between narrator and reader becomes so apparent that it suffuses even one’s teaching philosophy? In other words, why not accept the narrative audience-student’s responses as equally legitimate and insightful as an authorial or actual audience-student’s