How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price Page A

suppressed disapprobation.” Even the husband’s reading, however, is quickly unmasked as a front: “The paper he set before him, and pretended to be deeply absorbed in its contents . . . When he had done yawning over his paper . . . he spent the remainder of the morningand the whole of the afternoon in fidgeting about . . . sometimes lounging on the sofa with a book that he could not force himself to read.” Finally, more surprisingly, the narrator turns that accusation in upon herself. After the husband throws a book at his favorite dog, “I went on reading, or pretending to read, at least—I cannot say there was much communication between my eyes and my brain.” By the time she confesses that “what the book was, that lay on the table before me, I cannot tell, for I never looked at it,” the heroine becomes as indistinguishable from her husband as from his hypocritical lover who “employed herself in turning over the pages of the book, and, really or apparently, perusing its contents” (A. Brontë 164–69, 201, 43). 9 The dichotomy reappears in Sarah Grand’s
The
Heavenly
Twins
(1893), where another sensualist husband tries to prevent his wife from reading, but her own “eye would traverse page after page without transferring a single record to her brain” (52). Even if we begin by associating mental acts with wives and eye service with husbands, the latter end up infecting the former: no stable ground from which to distinguish true reading from false.
    How to explain the contradiction between these two tropes—one in which the most passionate and disinterested reading is attributed to women (a subset of the more general Victorian celebration of reading as a weapon of the weak, described in the next chapter), and another in which women are reduced either to blocking figures for men’s reading or to philistines who value a book for its material properties—whether matching its binding to their dress and decor in the upper ranks, or disbinding its pages for dress patterns and pie wrapping in the lower? One hypothesis might be that women are associated with whichever activity is morally inferior—whether solipsistic overengagement with the text or social display of the book—and that the first, Bovaryesque scenario is reproduced even by feminist celebrations of women’s authentic, individualistic reading. The culture’s oscillation between feminizing the book and the text might also suggest, however, that women are imagined not as inferior to men but rather as higher variance. In relation to printed matter as much as to sex, that is, women gravitate toward either extreme: either the epitome of textual authenticity or the exemplar of bookish superficiality, either Madonna or whore.
    Those value judgments may in turn reflect a socio-historical turning point in women’s relation to reading. For most of British history, men’s literacy rate outstripped women’s; in the nineteenth century, however, the latter began to climb more steeply than the former, until around 1900 literacy was actually more diffused among women (Vincent
The
Rise
of
Mass
Literacy
12–13; McKitterick,
The
Cambridge
History
of
the
Book
in
Britain
43; Colclough and Vincent 293–94). The feminization of literacy did not just depart sharply from historical precedent. It also madeBritain an anomaly on the international scene, since outside of a few rich countries, men were far more literate than women, as remains the case in developing countries today (Griswold 40). That pattern makes economic sense: investment in boys’ education promises payoff in the form of high wages, while teaching girls to read withdraws their labor in the present. It’s harder to explain either why this demographics changed in late nineteenth-century Britain, much less why cultural perceptions of reading anticipated that reversal by more than a century. Once Cervantes’s hero reappeared in drag in
The
Female
Quixote
, women became associated less with