from her tirade: “Why, what have you got there, Mr Caudle ? A book? What! If you ar’n’t allowed to sleep you’ll read? Well, now it is come to something! If that isn’t insulting a wife to bring a book to bed, I don’t know what wedlock is. But you sha’n’t read, Caudle; no you sha’n’t; not while I’ve strength to get up and put out a candle” (Jerrold and Keene 147). To the extent that it asserts the reader’s separateness, “bringing a book to bed” insults the married state.
Symmetry in content, then, but hardly in tone. You’ve probably noticed that these scenes of women blocking their husbands’ reading are played for laughs, while the reverse tends to be cast in a darker light—and not only because the former draw on a tradition of jokes about shrewish wives, the latter from gothic representations of male violence. The heroic narrative in which texts allow women to wrest their selfhood from male bullies finds its match in a more satirical tradition that sees the text as a shield from the demands of women who (as we’ll see in chapter 7) destroy books to line pie plates or cut out dress patterns. Whethera wife or servant hardly matters: in stories like Ella D’Arcy’s “Irremediable” or Gissing’s “The Prize Lodger,” the mutual avoidance of couples within a single social class gives way to an educated man’s mésalliance with a vulgar girl who “hated books, and were he ever so ill-advised as to open one in her presence, immediately began to talk,” or an ex-landlady who storms away when her husband opens a newspaper at the breakfast table (D’Arcy 114; Gissing, “The Prize Lodger” 152). Elias Canetti would update the theme with a housekeeper’s (later wife’s) hatred for her husband’s library—a library that she sees, quite rightly, as a drain on the fortune that should be spent on her (Canetti).
Like televised sports in the twentieth century, newspapers (for the masses) and books (for the elite) provided men with a refuge from their wives. In
Vanity
Fair
, the “study sacred to the master of the house” is focalized from the perspective of the wife outside its door: “George as a boy had been horsewhipped in this room many times; his mother sitting sick on the stair listening to cuts of the whip” (231). In Oliphant’s
Kirsteen
, too, the paterfamilias “roused himself quickly with sharp impatience; though the doze was habitual he was full of resentment at any suspicion of it. He was reading in his room; this was the version of the matter which he expected to be recognized in the family . . . But he was not reading, though he pretended still to be buried in the paper” (40, 83). 8
Books could stake out a claim not only to space within the household, but also to time and money. When Charles Darwin drew up a balance sheet to help him decide whether to marry, one of the entries in the “no” column concerned time and money for reading: “
Loss
of
time
—cannot read in the evenings—fatness and idleness—anxiety and responsibility—less money for books.” At a time when the celibacy of Oxbridge fellows made the choice between reading and marrying quite concrete, women could be imagined at once as a drain on the time and money that could otherwise be spent on books, and also as a decorative item analogous to them: in the “marry” column, we find “Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.—Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music” (Darwin).
Anne Brontë’s
The
Tenant
of
Wildfell
Hall
begins by pairing a husband’s insistence on reading newspapers with his refusal to let his wife read novels: “he never reads anything but newspapers and sporting magazines; and when he sees me occupied with a book he won’t let me rest till I close it . . . When he came in and found me quietly occupied with my book, too busy to lift my head on his entrance, he merely muttered an expression of
Symmetry in content, then, but hardly in tone. You’ve probably noticed that these scenes of women blocking their husbands’ reading are played for laughs, while the reverse tends to be cast in a darker light—and not only because the former draw on a tradition of jokes about shrewish wives, the latter from gothic representations of male violence. The heroic narrative in which texts allow women to wrest their selfhood from male bullies finds its match in a more satirical tradition that sees the text as a shield from the demands of women who (as we’ll see in chapter 7) destroy books to line pie plates or cut out dress patterns. Whethera wife or servant hardly matters: in stories like Ella D’Arcy’s “Irremediable” or Gissing’s “The Prize Lodger,” the mutual avoidance of couples within a single social class gives way to an educated man’s mésalliance with a vulgar girl who “hated books, and were he ever so ill-advised as to open one in her presence, immediately began to talk,” or an ex-landlady who storms away when her husband opens a newspaper at the breakfast table (D’Arcy 114; Gissing, “The Prize Lodger” 152). Elias Canetti would update the theme with a housekeeper’s (later wife’s) hatred for her husband’s library—a library that she sees, quite rightly, as a drain on the fortune that should be spent on her (Canetti).
Like televised sports in the twentieth century, newspapers (for the masses) and books (for the elite) provided men with a refuge from their wives. In
Vanity
Fair
, the “study sacred to the master of the house” is focalized from the perspective of the wife outside its door: “George as a boy had been horsewhipped in this room many times; his mother sitting sick on the stair listening to cuts of the whip” (231). In Oliphant’s
Kirsteen
, too, the paterfamilias “roused himself quickly with sharp impatience; though the doze was habitual he was full of resentment at any suspicion of it. He was reading in his room; this was the version of the matter which he expected to be recognized in the family . . . But he was not reading, though he pretended still to be buried in the paper” (40, 83). 8
Books could stake out a claim not only to space within the household, but also to time and money. When Charles Darwin drew up a balance sheet to help him decide whether to marry, one of the entries in the “no” column concerned time and money for reading: “
Loss
of
time
—cannot read in the evenings—fatness and idleness—anxiety and responsibility—less money for books.” At a time when the celibacy of Oxbridge fellows made the choice between reading and marrying quite concrete, women could be imagined at once as a drain on the time and money that could otherwise be spent on books, and also as a decorative item analogous to them: in the “marry” column, we find “Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.—Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music” (Darwin).
Anne Brontë’s
The
Tenant
of
Wildfell
Hall
begins by pairing a husband’s insistence on reading newspapers with his refusal to let his wife read novels: “he never reads anything but newspapers and sporting magazines; and when he sees me occupied with a book he won’t let me rest till I close it . . . When he came in and found me quietly occupied with my book, too busy to lift my head on his entrance, he merely muttered an expression of
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