Reading Women

Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800

Heidi Brayman Hackel, Catherine E. Kelly, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Catherine E. Kelly

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205985
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power. Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.

Part I

Pleasures and Prohibitions

The prohibitions that helped define girls’ and women’s reading between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and America were nearly always founded on cultural attitudes that cast reading as powerful and potentially transformative. Sometimes, particularly in matters of religious controversy, this power was centered on the soul. Two laws enacted a century and an ocean apart reached opposite conclusions about women’s appropriate relationship to the Bible, but they depended equally on the assumption that access to the English Bible was a critical matter of the soul. The 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion under Henry VIII criminalized the reading of the Tyndale Bible by most Englishwomen, allowing only gentlewomen to read to “themselves alone” but not to anyone else in their household. Conversely, in 1642 New England law required full literacy in English, even for “children & apprentices.” More often, however, in prescriptive literature at least if not in law, prohibitions against female literacy and reading were based in the body and its many pleasures. As the essays in this section demonstrate, prescriptions do not, of course, always prevail, but they do usefully locate and describe a set of cultural anxieties and forces. Further, reading, whether it was transgressive or not, for many women constituted pleasure in many forms: sensual and erotic, surely, but also intellectual, material, social, and devotional.

Personal pleasures and cultural prohibitions intersected in the marketplace. Mary Ellen Lamb examines two opposing portraits of female readers—the frivolous consumer of romances and the pious reader of devotionals—that begin to define women’s relationships with emergent capitalism. As they link romance reading, luxury goods, and sexual gratification, John Lyly and Philip Stubbes draw the caricatures against which women would define themselves as readers and consumers in a rapidly shifting consumer economy. The heightened attention to the trope of the erotically charged gentlewoman reader, voraciously consuming books and desiring sexual pleasures, posed a marketing challenge for authors and printers, for the sexualized female reader had now to be seduced, not merely satirized. The contrasting stereotype of the pious female reader also had a place in the market of print. Perhaps 40 percent of the increase in book production around 1600 was made up of Bibles and devotional texts. Women’s self-defining through book consumption extended beyond the fashion of romances to the rewards of piety, promising the possibility of allowing women to entertain spiritual questions previously reserved for men and to elevate themselves above the commodification of gentlewomen readers at leisure.

Shakespeare may now seem an unlikely subject for anxiety about women’s reading given more modern valuations of the cultural capital of his plays and their accessibility for his contemporaries as public performances. Yet, as Sasha Roberts explains, Shakespeare’s narrative poems figure prominently in seventeenth-century articulations of the trope of women’s reading as merely—and often dangerously—recreational. The records of women’s unprecedented engagement with drama in Caroline England, however, show women disrupting these stereotypes and responding to plays much as male readers did. Conduct literature of the time therefore might best be taken, Roberts argues, as reactionary rather than formative. The targets of this prescriptive literature and of misogynist barbs in contemporary drama were often elite or otherwise privileged women. By no coincidence, these women were exercising new independence as consumers in the print marketplace, and by the 1640s printers no longer had any business overlooking women’s participation in literary culture and the formation of theatrical taste.

The role of self-fashioning through reading and the participation of women in the formation of literary taste converge in Mary Kelley’s study of women’s reading in the final years of the eighteenth century and in the early Republic. As the number of books written and printed by Americans increased in these years, a monumental change in readers’ sensibility occurred: reading shifted from a trope of eroticism and devotion to a symbol of enterprise. Whereas seventeenth-century women’s reading in early America was concentrated on Scripture, eighteenth-century elite culture modeled girls’ education on the literary training of their British peers, flooding their libraries with histories and belles lettres. Though the early modern anxieties about romances articulated by Lamb and Roberts persisted and focused on the emergent novel, young women now had regular access to a range of genres in circulating libraries, through literary societies, and at female seminaries. This generation of young women established sustaining connections to books through which they forged identities as readers and began to shape public opinion. While a father was still capable of reprimanding his daughter for reading Shakespeare on a Sunday, that daughter, Kelley shows us, was equally capable in the early Republic of appropriating such a text, playing out its scenes in her head, and fashioning herself through them long after she was sent to bed.

Chapter 1

Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly’s Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbes

MARY ELLEN LAMB

This essay uses two contrasting stereotypes of the woman reader-consumer to explore the intermingling of appetites for romances, for sexual gratification, and for the consumption of luxury goods as described in the late sixteenth century. At opposite extremes as consumers, John Lyly’s “gentlewoman reader” and Philip Stubbes’s pious Katherine make visible a volatile mixture of cultural prohibitions and personal pleasures gendered as female yet also incorporating issues beyond those of gender. Within the ideologies of emergent capitalism, the reading of romances by women implied not only leisure time and culpable idleness but also the economic wherewithal to buy books of no practical value. Lyly portrays the desires of his gentlewoman reader as participating in her transgressive appetite for other useless luxury goods, such as decorative feathers, spoiled lapdogs, and sweet junkets. No less exaggerated was Stubbes’s representation of his wife Katherine, whose devotional reading for the cultivation of her soul represented an implicit critique of bourgeois woman consumers who offered her a world of goods—fine food, prideful apparel, and plays. “Katherine Stubbes’s” reading was as subject to her husband’s control as was her consumption; and this much-published ideal of the devotional reader also represented a response to the anxieties and exhilarations attending the profusion of goods circulating within a consumerist economy.¹ Through the frivolous woman reader of romance and the sober reader of devout texts, respectively, both Lyly and Stubbes invent women’s relationships with emergent capitalism. Displacing early modern anxieties over the increased circulation of goods onto women, both writers represent the dangerous freedom of self-definition possible to women through their reading as a metonym for the similarly dangerous freedom possible through their production of meanings from their modes of consumption. Through and against such stereotypes and the dilemmas they expose within an emergent capitalism, actual women readers would invent their own modes of consumption, of books as well as of goods.

The economist-historian Craig Muldrew has identified the last half of the sixteenth century in England as “the most intensely concentrated period of growth before the late eighteenth century”; in fact, “this process of change…was much more intense and problematic than in the eighteenth century.”² As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, the rise in the accessibility of goods occurred rapidly enough to register a dramatic change within lived experience. This growth of a consumer economy had accelerated to full gear by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.³ Aristocrats depleted ancestral wealth to embark on a frenzy of extravagant building projects during this period, and they freely adapted the international style of “paintings, sculpture, fountains, gardens, and triumphal arches” that were, as noted by Linda Levy Peck, so much a part of the “performance of royal and aristocratic power” in Europe.⁴ The middling sort also accumulated material possessions within homes of a size and comfort far beyond the financial capacity of their parents.⁵ As a contrasting response to this profusion of goods, those who followed Calvinist exhortations to moderate personal luxuries practiced an equally distinctive pattern of consumption as this easy access to goods elevated abstention, whether entirely voluntary or not, from the giddy indulgence in material things to a moral high ground.⁶ Thus, for all but the poor this expanding quantity of goods offered, or seemed to offer, unprecedented opportunities for choice: to select not only which goods to consume but, more broadly, also a pattern of consumption. In this way emergent capitalism promised new ways, and a larger choice of ways, for early moderns to form themselves as subjects through the consumption as well as the production of goods.

On every social level, goods—clothing, food, and books—became part of an increasingly complex and inventive language of the self. As T. H. Breen has observed, for colonial America, consumer goods were “woven into a complex cultural conversation about the structure of colonial society” to become “the stuff of claims and counter-claims, of self-representation among people who understood the language of Holland shirts and neat nightcaps.”⁷ With the power to purchase came, in theory, the power to shape new identities. Breen states that “to make choices from among contending possibilities…to rely upon their own reason in making decisions, is in a word, to reconceptualize the entire social order.”⁸ It is no wonder, then, that conservative contemporaries condemned “sartorial anarchy” as threatening hierarchy, as English persons who chose to dress as “free-floating individuals” disturbed—or even rocked—early modern understandings of clothing ably described by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass as investing a subject into a system of stable social relations.⁹ The destabilizing effects of this power did not go unnoticed. From Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses to the Augustans described by Joyce Appleby, the goods displayed in “haberdashery shops and food stalls” became “dangerous signs of corruption and…social disintegration.”¹⁰

Books figured prominently among the goods proliferating over the sixteenth century. Nigel Wheale computes 3,850 titles printed between 1558 and 1578; between 1580 and 1603 the number rose to 7,430. Bibles and other devout literature made up 40 percent of this increase, followed by literature, especially prose fiction and plays published in inexpensive quarto editions.¹¹ This flood of goods opened up the possibility that persons, including literate women, could be defined and define themselves not only by what they owned but also by what they read. Whether or not a market of women readers was already firmly in place by the late sixteenth century—and Jacqueline Pearson finds little hard evidence for significant recreational reading by women at that time—the book industry vigorously stepped up its appeals to women readers.¹² According to Suzanne Hull, books addressed to women readers reached a peak between 1570 and 1640, when 85 percent of the 163 books in 500 editions addressed to women were published.¹³ The profound implications of this change for subject formation is at least as true in the early modern period as for the eighteenth century, as described by Joyce Appleby: “The study of consumption gives us a window on the elaboration of personal identity. This is as true of reading materials as clothes and furnishings—purchasing and enjoying artifacts of material culture involves a constant expression of self.”¹⁴ Whether only to herself or also to others, a woman defined herself by what she read—a sermon, a classical translation, or a prose romance—at least as much as by how she dressed, what she ate, or how she furnished her house.

As with other forms of consumption, this apparent freedom of self-definition evoked its own constraints. Even those who stood to profit, such as authors and workers in the print trade, often expressed deep ambivalence through the stereotypes they disseminated for the women reader-consumers of their wares. To address women as active readers was to imagine their ability to respond to texts, to produce interpretations of their reading, and to criticize the texts they read. Like the women playgoers described by Jean Howard, women readers became “licensed to look—and in a larger sense to judge what they saw and to exercise autonomy—in ways that problematised women’s status as object within patriarchy.”¹⁵ As Helen Hackett notes, the woman reader-consumer also served as a screen for the light or supposedly degraded appetites of male readers.¹⁶ Discourses of consumption categorized males who enjoyed the pleasures of nonpurposive reading as woman-like, or effeminate.¹⁷ Thus, for men as for women, portrayals of the woman reader circulating within the early modern culture became a vehicle for linking discourses of gender to the anxieties—and the pleasures—of consumption.

While the erotic gentlewoman reader was not an early modern invention, she rose to special prominence in the book trade, where her pleasures were imagined as simultaneously sexual and commercial. The emerging genre of fiction in fact required the eroticized gentlewoman reader as a precondition for its writing.¹⁸ Romances collected or written by William Painter, George Pettie, Robert Greene, and Sir Philip Sidney were explicitly dedicated to women, and some of these included direct and often flirtatious addresses to women readers within their texts.¹⁹ Within the book trade anxious projections of unregulated desire onto women became the stuff fiscal dreams were made on. The intoxicating fantasy of the independently wealthy woman consumer, with her (almost) unregulated compulsion to buy the most trivial of goods, became translated into the gentlewoman reader of romance. Serving as a celebrity advertisement, her aristocratic status also offered a flattering subject position for readers of lower ranks. Her fantasized freedom from masculine control of her consumption easily flowed into a fantasy of free sexuality conforming to bourgeois misconceptions of the looser sexual mores of aristocrats. The eroticized gentlewoman reader became a blood relation to the unchaste reader of illicit texts condemned in conduct books. Denouncing chivalric romances, tales of Boccaccio and especially of Ovid, as threats to women’s chastity, such texts as Luis Vives’ much-published Instruction of a Christen Woman offered authors and publishers a thorough education in the promiscuous sexuality of women’s textual pleasures.²⁰ Through the production of romances as a profitable commodity, the prohibitions of conduct books inhabited—took up permanent residence—within the pleasures of prose fiction. All that had changed was their use.

The stereotype of the eroticized gentlewoman reader drew from and also contributed to what Wendy Wall has termed a general “erotics of the commodified book” representing the printed text as a woman’s body displayed like a harlot before the eyes of many male voyeur-readers.²¹ The widescale displacement of the transgression of social boundaries as a transgression of sexual boundaries becomes even more comprehensible within a capitalist economy that consistently conflates the sexual and the social in the projection of its anxieties and pleasures on the woman consumer. This conflation of consumer and sexual desires, together gendered as female, adapted older classical and Christian discourses ascribing unregulated appetites for sex and for luxury goods as characteristic of those, namely wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I. Pleasures and Prohibitions
• Part II. Practices and Accomplishment
• Part III. Translation and Authorship
• Part IV. Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments