Can the Beholder be wrong?

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," we say.  And to at least some extent, this is true.

Once the objet d'art is created and displayed, the artist certain retains little control over its reception, interpretation and perhaps most importantly, its being understood.  We all blithely concede that each person who looks upon a painting with not depart from the viewing with the same impression of the piece or with duplicate feelings and emotions stirring within them.  One onlooker views the Mona Lisa or a Picasso or Warhol or Pollack and thinks it a pleasing enough work of art.  Another finds himself overcome, tears pouring down his face.  A third, while understanding the artistic merit and historical relevance, thinks the entire thing quite ugly and shudders to think of it hanging above her sofa.  [A fourth, perhaps we can imagine, just doesn't 'get' this whole art business and silently contemplates the dullness of this entire outing.]

Now, my dilemma is this: does this apply to the written word and narrative?

Generally speaking, does not an author compose his prose with a certain thesis, theme, exploration, or conclusion in mind, however general?  Is there not always something the reader is meant to realize, do, or understand?  This can be as specific as after reading this essay or watching this documentary one should ban the Twilight series from all school reading lists and libraries, or it might be as general as, after reading this novel or viewing this film, one should be reflecting upon one's attitudes toward love--- but what is fundamental is that this "it" is always there.

Therefore, one can actually leave a work of prose or narrative with an impression or understanding of the work's meaning (purpose, theme, thesis, moral etc.) that is, in fact, wrong.

As an example, I shall recount an event that inspired me upon these reflections:

I recently watched an excellent television miniseries, a costume drama that follows the life of a upper class British family from 1870s until the 1920s.  Presupposing the work's lovely cinematography, dumbfounding,  stunning costuming and cast as a given, what is most extraordinary about this series is its delicate handling of its two central characters: a rich, profoundly repressed, and jealous young man who and the young, beautiful, artistic, poor woman who naively marries him to relieve the temporary financial burdens of her father's death.  As expected the marriage quickly turns sour, fraught the inherent unsuitability of the partners, the husband's fervent but repressed passion for his wife, her deadening depression and unhappiness, the complete inability of either to communicate with the other, complicated by the husband's obsession with viewing their relationship in terms of ownership and rights--- a view that is sanctioned by society's rules, both social and legal.  Both parties do rather horrible things, but with the cards so stacked against her, I think it is fair to say, as one character does, "I rather think she has suffered more."  Regardless, the beauty of the series is its ability to keep the viewer from completely villainizing either character.  Somehow it manages to keep an adulteress and a rapist profoundly sympathetic, and as it took such pains to do so, I assume that one of the main aims of the narrative is to reveal the complexities of a failed marriage, explore the incompatibilities of people with different understandings of love, and the devastating and destructive nature of Victorian views of marriage and wifely obligation and husbands' rights.

So, I was greatly taken with this series, considered it a triumph, a great success, and consequently suggested it to my mother.

One can imagine my astonishment when she reports back to me her complete lack of sympathy for the wife.  She found her completely unsympathetic, and generally, she brings all her suffering upon herself due to her "not trying at all to make her marriage work."  I tried to counter that she does try somewhat, and that as the early months of their marriage is skipped over we can probably assume that she probably tried more and also had to recover the the sheer shock of discovering the true jealous, repressed and misunderstanding nature of her husband, and that she does acknowledge becoming both cold and apathetic but being too depressed to rise to the occasion.  I also pointed out that her husband not only generally smothers her and misunderstands her, but is completely incapable of considering her wants more than superficially (especially as they are usually counter his own), yells at her and berates her, bars her from seeing her friends and plots behind her back to essentially hoard her to himself in a secret house in the country.  My mother's response: well he buys her all those nice things, and he only does those terrible things as a reaction to her apathy and coldness.  She doesn't even try to communicate with him or make him or herself happy.

I am, in short, flabbergasted in that my mother has watched the same miniseries as I and come away with an impression not only completely opposite my own, but completely opposite what I perceived to be the fundamental message and purpose of the narrative itself.  For example, the fact that the husband attempts to win his wife over by showing her with gifts, in my book, cannot be used in his defense because the film uses those very actions to demonstrate his inability to understand her, his inability to express himself outside of the terms of ownership, and his inability to consider her desires above his own.  The man literally rapes his wife (or as he probably understands it, demands his husbandly privileges) and then buys her a ruby necklace in the morning, and cannot understand why this does not remedy their frosty relationship.

My mother's considering the wife not only unsympathetic, but completely at fault for the failed marriage due to her frigidness and lack of wifely effort is not just in opposition to mine, but is actually the incorrect way to interpret the narrative and not what it intends the viewer to conclude.  She is wrong.

But is she?  Can one have an incorrect interpretation?  This returns me to my original concern.  Is beauty in the really eye of the beholder.  My mother and I have found different and opposing 'beauties;' can they coexist?  Or can the beholder view the thing entirely wrong? In some cases of art we seem to say, "Yes of course!  You completely misread that passage!" and other times we seem to say "No, of course not.  It is up to interpretation."  Does the answer to this question lie with the artist's intent?  If the artist intends degrees of interpretation, then interpretation cannot be wrong or incorrect, but if not, and he desperately tries to steer the beholder to see things from a certain vantage point (a practice around which filmmaking and narrative I think revolves and excels in mastery) interpretations based on an extremely distorted point of view can be wrong.  Or do we hold fast to the maxim of beauty-finding being the sole privilege of the beholder?

Or more perplexing even still, if we take a leaf from the book of Oscar Wilde, is all this disagreement really just an expression of some discordant element in the worldviews of my mother and I?  Wilde writes: "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."  So, perhaps, neither of us wrong.

Although, I can't help but feeling, as most probably do, that when it comes down to it, I am right and that the makers of the series would agree with me.