Writing, Reading and the Imagined Reader / Lover

Choice Reviews Online, 2010

This richly-illustrated and detailed book is about the role of women, via their "pens" and "needles," in the creation of the multi-textual, multimedia world of early modern England-that is, the ubiquitous layering of texts, images, and symbols found in households at all levels of society, not only in books and manuscripts but in samplers, tapestries, walls, ceilings, beams, and buildings as a whole. Susan Frye skillfully debunks any lingering assumptions that pens, associated with intellect, were for men and needles, associated with drudgery, were for women, arguing that this binary opposition, which proved so useful in the work of second-wave feminists, does a disservice to the instability and nuances of gender distinctions throughout history. Frye interprets "pens" and "needles" quite broadly to encompass a wide range of female engagements with the visual and textual landscape. Thus, writing is anything from "embroidered alphabets to the 590,000 words of Mary Sidney Wroth' s Urania" (12), including inscriptions on textiles and paintings, pictorial depictions of classical and biblical women and narratives, portraiture (in the period, pens and pencils could refer to paintbrushes, and paintings commissioned by women could be thought of as semi-autobiographical), women' s building activities (a form of lifewriting in space and time), and textile activities ranging from skilled needlework to laundering, mending, and sewing. This broad scope perhaps accurately represents the nature of women' s education in the period: in a late sixteenth-century letter at the Folger, Anne Higginson writes to Lady Ferrers about a school in Windsor for young ladies that teaches them "to worke [sew], reading, writing, and dancing" (Folger MS L.e.644). The book consists of an introduction and five chapters. In the introduction, Frye includes a marvelous reading of the 1557 portrait of Alice Barnham, depicting her in the act of writing the words "That we all shall receive," while standing between two of her sons, one of whom holds open a book labeled "The Proverbs of Solomon," and usefully explicates a poem by Anne Bradstreet and dedications by Margaret Cavendish that

The Seventeenth Century, 2020

This article explores the links between witchcraft and deformity in early modern English literature. Although historians of witchcraft have not examined the concept of deformity or stigma within witchcraft publications, literary scholars have used a sociological theory of disability to shed light on early modern plays and their characters. This article will utilise the methodology developed by literary historians and will apply it to early modern publications (pamphlets, ballads, plays, poems) pertaining to witchcraft. It will argue that the concept of deformity played a role in witchcraft texts and accusations, for it distinguished individuals as evil based on their physical appearance. Operating alongside and interacting with other motifs, it functioned as a literary device which further demonised characters and signified their otherness. This article helps to demonstrate how the figure of the witch and familiar spirits functioned as ciphers for numerous early modern cultural concerns.

2013

In the Victorian period, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence and anxiety than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters and plots. Simultaneously, no assumption about women's reading seemed to be more axiomatic. Conservatives and radicals, feminists and anti-feminists, artists and scientists, and novelists and critics throughout the long nineteenth century believed implicitly in women's essential tendency to internalize textual perspectives to their detriment. My dissertation rethinks the discourse of "crisis" over women's literary identification in opposition to increasing representation of what I call "wayward reading," in which women approached identification as a flexible capacity instead of an emotional compulsion. I argue that the constant anxiety expressed by Victorian writers about women's absorption in literature helped to reify irrational and involuntary identification as the feminine norm, even while accounts of women's elective reading response defied this narrative. This study analyzes and contextualizes three major types of deliberately wayward reading in the Victorian era, which challenge the premises of gendered identification that often obtain in criticism and pedagogy today. The first chapter explores the imaginative license granted to women readers, as opposed to women writers, to identify with male subjects. While such literary identification with men was believed to bolster women's marital and relational sympathies, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh depicts an artistic form of masculine identification that, unlike marriage, preserves the integrity of female subjectivity. The second chapter examines the multiple crises prompted by the sensation genre about the representation of female characters, which mirror contemporary concerns about the representation of women sought by the burgeoning women's suffrage movement. I contend that the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon do not exploit the reader's "feminine" nerves, but rather facilitate morally conscious, elective identification. By the fin de siècle, a new crisis emerged over the possibility of women's under-identification with literature as a result of their increased access to higher education and professionalization. George Gissing's New Grub Street and The Odd Women, as well as the New Woman novels of Charlotte Riddell, Mary Cholmondeley, and George Paston, all engage with the concept of female literary detachment as a kind of morbid pathology: a trope that demonstrates how necessary emotional identification was and is for defining femininity. The greatest share of my gratitude belongs to Ian Duncan, the chair of my dissertation committee, who shepherded this project at every stage with extraordinary encouragement and advice on all matters great and small. I was also extremely fortunate to benefit from the trenchant insights and suggestions of Catherine Gallagher and Carla Hesse, the other members of the committee. Kent Puckett planted the germ of the first chapter by assigning Aurora Leigh in his graduate seminar, and continued to give me crucial and generous guidance throughout this project. Randall Smith, Ruth Baldwin, Catherine Cronquist Browning, Slavica Naumovska, and Sangina Patnaik all graciously read early drafts of my chapters and offered brilliant feedback and just criticism. Matthew Knox and Samira Franklin tirelessly discussed the dissertation with me, helped clarify my ideas, and cheered me onward with their support. All of these mentors, friends, and family kept me from straying too far into the "Valley of the Shadow of Books" and helped me move forward with my writing. For that, I am ever thankful. A Very Brief History of Modern Identification Identification with literature famously became a pathology in the early seventeenth century with Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, the first part of which spawned a counterfeit sequel as well as less brazen imitations like Charles Sorel's Le Berger extravagant. Joseph Harris notes that Don Quixote and Le Berger's Lysis, and, I would add, Arabella, the eponymous Female Quixote of the eighteenth century, are all eventually able to emerge from their insane or merely misguided literary identifications, whereas "the fate of Emma Bovary two centuries later reflects rather less optimism about the possibility of delineating an untrammelled 'true self' from the precedents set by fictional intertexts." 12 Harris charts the "prehistory" of identification in the early Modern period, particularly as theorized in the writings of Pierre Corneille about audience "intérêt." 13 Corneille begins to consider pity instead of fear (Aristotle's Poetics described the latter, not the former, as the feeling for "someone like us") as a source of identification. This represents a shift from the "classical" model of identification described by Alain Ménil as a process of rational, self-interested analogy (e.g., "the character is afraid in this situation; how would I avoid this outcome if I were in the same situation?") toward emotional involvement on the character's behalf through the vehicle of pity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau originated the psychological, self-reflexive usage of the word "identification" in his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" in 1754. 14 Rousseau uses "s'identifier" to denote a spontaneous mental activity that produces pity: "En effet, le commiseration sera d'autant plus energique que l'animal spectateur s'identifiera plus intimement avec l'animal souffrant. Or il est évident que cette identification a dû être infiniment plus étroite dans l'état de Nature que dans l'état de raisonnement." 15 Identification as conceptualized by Rousseau is a natural capacity that is mitigated, not cultivated, by the reason, which engenders "l'amour-propre" that he opposes to identificatory sympathy. Rousseau thus defines identification as a primal impulse suppressed by philosophers and their ilk but still alive among Donna Quixote and Gendered Overidentification From Plato onward, emotionalism, overabsorption, passivity, and narcissism had been feared as the effects of literary identification. But beginning in the eighteenth century and established in the nineteenth century, these disparate effects were consolidated under the label of "feminine" reading. Robert Uphaus traces concerns about women's vulnerability to identification with literature back to the seventeenth century, when Anglican minister Richard Allestree's 1675 The Ladies Calling observed that "reading Romances, which seems now to be thought the peculiar and only becoming study of young Ladies," exposes them to "amorous Passions" that are "apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary Readers, and by an unhappy inversion, a coppy shall produce an Original." 30 In the eighteenth century, the naïve woman seduced by literature-first romances, then novels-becomes, as Ina Ferris notes, a "trope" and a cliché. Ferris argues that the young female reader "came to function metonymically" for all new readers trying to access a new "culture of literacy." 31 The heroine of The Female Quixote follows her namesake of La Mancha in mistaking romances for reality, although Clara Reeve's account of the book in The Progress of Romance as well as Henry Fielding's contemporary review observe that romances were already passé reading material. 32 But in spite of the generic anachronism, Fielding finds The Female Quixote to possess greater verisimilitude than Don Quixote in its female subject: …as we are to grant in both Performances, that the Head of a very sensible Person is entirely subverted by reading Romances, this Concession seems to me more easy to be granted in the Case of a young Lady than of an old Gentleman .... To say Truth, I make no Doubt but that most young Women. .. in the same Situation, and with the same Studies, would be able to make a large Progress in the same Follies. Fielding interprets the book as specifically directed at women by Lennox, "to expose all those Vices and Follies in her Sex which are chiefly predominant in Our Days." Although seemingly "there was hardly any crime, sin, or personalized catastrophe that injudicious reading was not held to cause directly or indirectly," the focus of cultural anxiety had begun to shift from the more general perils of reading to its most likely victims: women. 33 In the constant association of women with misreading, delusive identification with fiction became less an amusing aberration than a vice or folly endemic to femininity. The ubiquity of this assumption is reflected in the ominous claim of Maria and Richard Edgeworth in Practical Education: "We know, from common experience, the effects which are produced upon the female mind by immoderate novel reading." 34 The indictment of women's identification rested on essentialist ideas of feminine emotionalism. Hume expressed great faith in women's perspicuity in reading, except for "books of gallantry and devotion," because, "as the fair sex have a great share of the tender and amorous disposition, it perverts their judgment on this occasion, and makes them be easily affected, even by what has no propriety in the expression or nature in the sentiment." 35 Female emotions were characterized as especially liable to aestheticization, or enjoyment of feeling for feeling's sake. The Edgeworths condemned "sentimental stories and books of mere entertainment" that cultivated this feminine preference for fictional over real objects: …the species of reading to which we object, has an effect directly opposite to what it is intended to produce. It diminishes, instead of increasing, the sensibility of the heart; a combination of romantic imagery, is requisite to act upon the associations of sentimental people, and they are virtuous only when virtue is in

2008

The growth and spread of literacy, both in Latin and, still more decisively, in the various vernaculars, offers one of the most distinctive features of the later Middle Ages. The process began in Late Antiquity. As Peter Brown has insisted, in the "spätere Spätantike," we witness "the increased participation in the culture of the élites of hitherto excluded, non-literate masses." 1 The transformation textual culture in turn had an impact on visual culture; "images," Brown writes, "are pulled into the gravitational field of a sacred text, in order to save them from acting as the objects of strong and still dubious emotions." 2 The emotions in question all revolve around idolatry. Taking up the familiar formula of the Gregorian dictum, namely, that images served as the bible of the illiterate, Brown insists that Gregory's concern was less the wall than the worshipper, less how images were read than how, or whether, they were adored. In Brown's words, "the chaste act of reading, just because it was an eminently intellectual exercise, guided by the mind, as the eyes scanned the pictures at a safe distance, to puzzle out their meaning and their spiritual relevance, was to replace the heavy body-language associated with adoratio -the bowing, the close contact of the kiss, the worshipful 'counter-presence' of a flickering oil-lamp, even the tell-tale wisps of incense." 3 With this "shift in sentiment" in the late sixth century, states Brown, "lectio and pictura came to be placed on a 184 Jeffrey F. Hamburger 09_Hamburger.doc Seite 184 31.12.2008 16:04:38 more equal footing." 4 Far from subjecting images to the discipline of reading conceived as a process of rational reflection, the shift, as Brown describes it, entailed the endowing of the written word with what he calls an "iconic charge," an invitation to vision. 5 Today, when literacy is taken too easily for granted, we speak casually of "reading images." Brown, however, reminds us that there is nothing less natural than reading representation. Like reading itself, it is a skill that needs to be taught and that has its own history. 6 Moreover, as Ivan Illich has articulated, the ways in which the book as an object shapes and structures the text (what he, in order to insist on the importance of the medium, calls the "bookish text") play a decisive role in the history of reading. 7 In a culture in which literacy was limited, it was the speaking voice, inhabiting a charismatic body, that created the illusion of presence and carried the power of persuasion. Stephen Jaeger has described the shift from the "charismatic body" to the "charismatic text" as a recurring phenomenon in western culture, one located in the High Middle Ages as well as Antiquity, in which "prior to the stage where representation becomes a cult, there is a mode of art, poetry, learning, whose effect is tied to the charisma of personal presence, not to the allure of the artifact." 8 With the transition to a textualized culture, works of art "appropriate the representing force that had resided in bodies; the aura of the gods fades; the aura of the work of art intensifies." 9 In this essay, my concern is less what happens when pictures become the subject of reading, in short, a highly schooled form of perception and cogitation, than what happens when lectio itself becomes the subject of pictura. 10 We can observe the representation of reading (as well as writing) in innumerable illuminated manuscripts in which authors, scribes and readers are depicted in self-referential manner engaged in the process of composing, copying, illuminating or perusing objects like that the reader 4 Ibid., p. 30. 5 Ibid., p. 28.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2008

Renaissance Quarterly, 2006

“I consider that women who are authors, lawyers and politicians are monsters.” – Pierre-Auguste Renoir In A.S. Byatt's Possession, fictitious Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte refers to herself as an "old witch in a turret" (543). LaMotte struggles with her repressed writer-ly identity, often depicting herself and her female characters -- namely Melusina in LaMotte's attempt at an epic poem, Melusine, based on a French fairy tale -- as being monsters. Women in the novel appear in congruence with serpent imagery and magic-infused figures, such as a witch. Byatt's 20th century perspective is not unique. It echoes numerous male and female predecessors, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Charlotte Bronte, from Bram Stoker to Edith Wharton. As this essay establishes, there is a historical literary pattern that has physically, mentally, and emotionally villainized socially-deviated women. Unable and/or unwilling to conform to rigid societal ideologies results in women being not just marginalized but mystified as pseudo-demonic entities capable of misleading both men and supposedly "chaste" women. This ultimately leads to oppressed self-concepts that usually hinder the creative process. This oppressive force is not exclusive to Victorian writers. Women writers in the 21st century are still struggling to let their voices be heard; when those voices are strong, however, women writers risk becoming the monstrous female, the deviant, the witch in a turret. Whether or not they choose to -- and whether or not they should have to -- acquiesce to this identity needs to be discussed among contemporary scholars.