Liberated Woman or Woman Trapped??

In looking at a simple painting, a group of people who belong to the same cultural background may see similar characteristics and attribute similar meanings to it. Regardless of individual interpretations, the fact is that cultural background plays a vital role in shaping what each person places significance in and to what degree. However, what if that simple painting was viewed by someone who was from a completely different background as the person who originally created it? Jonathan Culler argues in his Structuralist Poetics that “The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules: rules which do not regulate behavior so much as create the possibility of particular forms of behavior” (Rivkin 56). Keeping that in mind, let us now take a second look at the painting for which I previously wrote a poem.

As a westerner woman, when I first looked at this painting I thought of a liberated woman rising above trials and tribulations in order to confront a world full of challenges. I drew this interpretation based on my basic knowledge of symbolism attached to the colors black and white, which are the two major colors in this painting. To me, the black background symbolizes hardships and the evils of the world where as the white in which the woman is painted depicts her true purity despite living in a tainted world. However, when I showed the same painting to a man from a completely different background, a Chinese man, to be specific, he drew a completely different meaning from it. When he looked at this same painting, he said that he thought it was about a woman trying to break away from a place of solitude. When I asked him what it was about the painting that brought about that interpretation, he said that there is a Chinese story about a lonely woman who lives on the moon and is very sad that she cannot come down; the black circle being the moon, the white swirls being the clouds, and the brown and gray lines behind the circle representing the inside of a “box” in which the sad woman on the moon (Chang’e) is trapped.

In looking at a simple painting of a feminine silhouette on a black background, the interpretations between people of differing cultures may be tremendous. Culler proposes that this is because meaning is constructed by the individual based on the true knowledge of each culture’s system of symbols. It is very obvious to me that the main player in the difference in interpretations made by me, a Mexican-American woman (West), and that of a Chinese man (East) was simply our difference in cultural backgrounds. We both saw a woman rising, but from there on, our takes on her story went in completely opposite directions. I derived a somewhat feminist meaning from it and he derived a more tragic meaning based on his knowledge of Chinese legends. Maybe those of us who care to know more about the way that people derive meaning from literature should pay closer attention to Jonathan Culler. Maybe he knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

** Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. 1975. Ed. Rivkin, Julie. Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Edition. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. Print.