Imagining women readers, 1789–1820

Well-regulated minds

Richard Ritter

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526102140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Imagining women readers reassesses the cultural significance of women's reading in the period 1789–1820. From the turbulent years following the French Revolution to the fiction of Jane Austen, this book charts the rise of a self-regulating reader, who possesses both moral and cultural authority. Rather than an unproductive leisure activity, for the writers discussed in this study the act of reading is crucial to imagining forms of female participation in national life. The book thus offers a unique perspective on the relationship between reading, education and the construction of femininity, shedding new light on the work of some of the most celebrated women writers of the period. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in the history and representation of reading, and in women's writing of this period more generally.

1

‘Like a sheet of white paper’: books, bodies and the sensuous materials of the mind

Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished?

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding¹

John Locke’s formulation of the mind as a tabula rasa provides an enduring image of identity formation, influential during the eighteenth century and beyond.² It is, as Alan Richardson astutely points out, a ‘contagious metaphor’ that spread throughout the eighteenth century and into Romantic representations of education.³ This chapter examines the lasting impression that Locke’s work left upon accounts of women’s reading, over a century after the publication of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). It suggests that Lockean theory and rhetoric established a foundation from which discussions of women’s reading could articulate ideas of identity, consumerism and self-possession. In particular, it focuses on how the materialist, and significantly bibliographic, image of the mind as ‘white paper’ implies that the reader and book are in some way interchangeable: a suggestion that gives rise to questions of intellectual property, social circulation and the possibilities of self-development. To begin, I offer a brief overview of the relationship between education and psychological development in Locke’s work.

Aligning the process of cognition with the technology of print, the analogy of the tabula rasa depicts the acquisition of knowledge in strikingly materialist terms.⁴ Locke presents an essential similarity between individuals and books, with both moving from a state of blankness to one imprinted with character(s).⁵ As Deidre Lynch points out, the Lockean tabula rasa ‘links the getting of ideas, the techniques of typography, and the process of individuation – the process of developing a self that will be . . . separable and distinguishable from other selves’.⁶ Through the acquisition of knowledge, readers of Locke’s Essay are ‘invited to personalise the blank spaces of their consciousnesses in the same way that they might use transcribed quotations to personalize the blank pages of their commonplace books’.⁷ The formation of one’s personality is thus identifiable with the early eighteenth-century practice of assembling collections of objects and curios – an undertaking which, with its emphasis on ‘buying, selling, exchanging, or stealing’, is ‘congruent with the activity that was defining the modernizing marketplace’.⁸ In conjunction with this public metaphor, grounded in the circulation of knowledge as goods, we find the private, inward-looking image of recording one’s reading in a commonplace book.⁹ Reading thus functions as an underlying, organising metaphor of Locke’s theory of identity formation, mediating between public and private scenes of acquisition.

However, conceptualising reading in this manner gives rise to the problematic idea that one moves towards subjecthood by inhabiting, and consuming, a world of objects. The relationship between identity-formation and acts of consumerism is underlined in Locke’s Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), when he states that ‘Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours’.¹⁰ The self that Locke describes is at once an aggregation of objects and the product of the labour of their acquisition. Underlying the potentially alienating possibility of a mind merely ‘furnished’ with the ‘materials of knowledge’ is the seventeenth-century concept of what C. B. Macpherson labels ‘possessive individualism’. Macpherson notes that the central difficulty of this idea ‘lay in its possessive quality’, which ‘is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities . . . The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise.’¹¹ As Macpherson suggests, such a model of identity is perpetually threatened by a division between the ‘proprietary’ self and the selfhood that it owns and appears to precede. The implications of this problematic conception are played out in Locke’s account of reading. If readers actively engage with the text before them ‘examining the reach, force, and coherence of what is said’, it will become their ‘own’, an integrated element of one’s identity.¹² Should no such ‘examination’ occur, that which is read fails to become assimilated and remains distinct – what Locke describes as ‘so much loose matter floating in our brain’.¹³ This alienated aspect of the self remains in a state of suspension, existing somewhere between the status of privately ‘owned’ property and a circulating, public commodity.

This tension is evident in the work of many eighteenth-century theorists of reading who feared that female readers, in particular, would fail to undertake the labour of active thought as they read. This possibility was accompanied by a tendency to construe the tabula rasa as exhibiting a dangerous passivity: an image of the self as haphazardly formed by external impressions rather than regulated self-development. One subscriber to these opinions was Thomas Gisborne who, in his An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), noted that the human mind

has been compared, and in some respects justly compared, to a blank sheet of paper. In one material point, however, this comparison fails. The sheet of paper, deposited on a shelf, or locked up in a drawer, continues a blank; it acquires no impression or characters until they are purposefully imprinted by the hand of the writer. Is that the case with the youthful mind? If you forbear to impress it with ideas and sentiments, can you prevent it from receiving impressions from the persons and the objects with which it is daily conversant?¹⁴

As the possession of ‘the writer’, paper can be sequestered from the social sphere of persons and objects and is altered only by deliberate and methodical imprinting. The youthful mind, on the other hand, is subjected to the uncontrolled impressions of social circulation. Among the ‘objects’ with which one may be ‘daily conversant’ are novels and romances, some of which Gisborne deems ‘unfit’ even to be ‘presented to the reader’.¹⁵ Such statements demonstrate Gisborne’s lack of faith in readerly agency. Gone is the Lockean ideal of a self actively constructed, or personalised, in the way of a commonplace book. Instead, Gisborne denies ‘youthful minds’ the agency required to impel ‘purposeful’ self- development. Dror Wahrman describes how the eighteenth-century notion of sympathy, which had its roots in a Lockean insistence on the primacy of external stimuli over innate ideas, operated through an ability to share in the sentiments and feelings of others. Based on ‘what people shared, not what distinguished them from each other’, the concept of sympathy thus emphasised ‘the generic – the similar and the contiguous – over the particular’.¹⁶ In the same way, for Gisborne the tabula rasa renders identity a mutable surface, which can be rewritten in an infinite variety of ways. Emphasising the generic over the individual, the tabula rasa comes to represent an undermining of the stability and permanence of character, far removed from the Lockean model which, as Deidre Lynch notes, focused upon the formation of a self ‘separable and distinguishable from other selves’.¹⁷

This impressionable self, formed through its interactions with persons and objects, proves powerfully resonant when considered in relation to the rise of the circulating library. By 1808, Edward Mangin could be found lamenting that ‘[t]here is scarcely a street of the metropolis, or a village in the country, in which a circulating library may not be found’.¹⁸ While the exact number of libraries in existence in this period remains a subject of debate, there is little doubt that they grew in number over the course of the eighteenth century.¹⁹ Such establishments provided their patrons with the opportunity to become ‘daily conversant’ with an increased range of objects and persons, both fictional and non-fictional. The contemporary attacks upon such institutions and their wares have been widely documented.²⁰ Most commonly, these denunciations consisted of warnings against the ability of library novels to negatively influence their readers. Typically, one writer claimed, women will have their heads filled

with ridiculous chimeras, with romantic schemes of gallantry, with an admiration of young rakes of spirit; with dreams of conquests, amorous interviews, and matrimonial excursions; with a detestation of all prudential advice, impatience of controul, love of imaginary liberty, and an abjuration of all parental authority.²¹

These visions of unregulated sexuality, romantic choice and disrespect for authority evoke a scene of social disorder, posited as the consequence of women’s indiscriminate access to the contents of the circulating library. But just as these books were thought to leave their mark upon their readers, the inverse was believed to be equally true. Through their circulation, books came to bear the traces of their having been read, drawing attention to the physical dimension of reading. In her unfinished autobiography, the Victorian children’s writer Charlotte Yonge recalls the shabby condition of the books borrowed by her family in the early nineteenth century: not only were they ‘very dirty’ and ‘very smoky’, they bore ‘remarks plentifully pencilled on the margins’.²² Such reciprocal acts of inscription caused critics of circulating libraries to identify ‘the book, the library and the female body’ with one another.²³ The circulating book, the (female) body and the mind imagined as a blank sheet were thus conflated by the potential legibility of their surfaces. As such, they were defined in opposition to an emerging ethic that placed value in depths, whether those of an individual or a work of literature.²⁴ As a result, the market implications of the identity proposed by Locke came to be distorted – flattened out into what became an aberrant femininity, defined by its habits of consumption. It is within accounts of reading that we witness an attempt to reconcile such a model of identity with ideas of inner development and personal depth – qualities associated with the ‘domestic woman’.

Surfaces, depths and forms of value: the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Hints on Reading’

Almost a century after Locke’s Essay, the Lady’s Magazine published an article entitled ‘Hints on Reading’. While it does not explicitly refer to Locke, these ‘Hints’ share his concern with formulating a model of identity within a context of social circulation. Occupied with how, and in what circumstances, books are read, ‘Hints’ offers an insight into the metonymic ability of reading practices to stand for competing modes of femininity. It begins by celebrating the period of its publication as an ‘age of mental cultivation’ in which ‘all ladies are readers’.²⁵ While labelling this apparent leap in female literacy a ‘happy revolution’, the article seeks to function as a guide to the more unwary of these readers, who must negotiate the ‘multitudes’ of books that are ‘heaped upon the world’ (p. 79). To the unadvised, this proliferation of print threatens to spiral into the unknowable excesses of the sublime, as the author acknowledges when he or she asserts that ‘the larger our libraries are the greater the impossibility of knowing what they consist of’ (p. 79).²⁶ The article presents a crisis of value, caused by an inability to distinguish the worthy from the worthless. This anxiety might be seen as a manifestation of what Rolf Engelsing terms the ‘reading revolution’ (‘leserrevolution’) that he asserts took place in the mid-eighteenth century.²⁷ According to Engelsing, before 1750 acts of reading were of an ‘intensive’ nature. With only a limited selection of (predomina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Like a sheet of white paper’: books, bodies and the sensuous materials of the mind
• 2 ‘Wholesome labour’: the work of reading
• 3 ‘The enlightened energy of parental affection’: post-revolutionary schemes of education
• 4 ‘Leisure to be wise’: female education and the possibilities of domesticity
• 5 Making the novel-readers of a country: pleasure and the practised reader
• Bibliography
• Index