illiteracy than with excessive reading—even if terms like “illiteracy” could be turned into metaphors to stigmatize the reading of the wrong books by the wrong persons. Today, women across Europe buy and borrow books more often than men, just as the very young and the very old read more than the middle-aged. Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.
Once the feminization of reading in the present-day West is recognized as an anomaly in both time and space, it becomes harder to explain by essentialist assumptions about women’s greater capacity for empathy or imagination. Instead, the dependent variable seems to be status: associated with men when it’s rare and therefore prestigious, literacy is feminized in societies (like ours) where ubiquity breeds contempt. Outside the West, reading is associated with mobility—both social and geographical; in modern societies, however, it becomes the refuge of those trapped in interior spaces: prisoners, children, housewives. As Charlotte Yonge observed in 1869, “There are so many hours of a girl’s life when she must sit still, that a book is her natural resource” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 454).
M UTE C HAPERONES
A workplace as much as a leisure pastime, reading could also be used to define the relation
between
those two spheres, whether by filling the commute that separates them (you read on the subway to unwind before you get home) or by marking the telegraph girl’s private time and space (official papers on the desk, lunchtime reading in the drawer). Among the “infinité de ces petites usages de convention” that one French contemporary credited the English with developing “pour se dispenser de parler,” books moved fluidly across public and private spheres (Bulwer-Lytton,
England
and
the
English
23). The same objects that shield husbands from wives can screen commuters from strangers, parents from crying children, children from demanding parents, clubmen from one another—or even masters from servants, as when a conduct book warns servants not to take a master’s “appearance” of reading at face value:
Figure 2.4. “An Appeal Case. House of Lords,” Punch, 14 February 1891, 82.
I know many ladies who have repented having spoken familiarly to their servants, finding that the girls have misunderstood their kindness, and sometimes have gone so far as to begin talking about their own affairs in the drawing-room. One lady who was thus annoyed, told me that she always took up a book and appeared to read, before she rang the bell, hoping thus to keep the girl from stopping to talk when she came up. (Motherly 16)
Yet even if marriage is not the only bond that books can buffer, its privileged status nonetheless makes it an especially effective test case: the strongest tie requires the sharpest solvent. A 2008
New
York
Times
article describing two Buddhist monks who replace “sexual touching” by synchronized breathing and synchronized reading gains its shock value from the traditional assumption that the book provides the last refuge for bodies that are otherwise fused. 10 A fortiori, at the moment when separateness has very recently been disavowed—that is, the honeymoon—the book’s power springs into clearest relief. Mary Gladstone writes that her mother “used to tell us, long afterwards, that it was something of a shock to both sisters when, after marriage, any little waiting time, as the railway station, which during their engagement would have been spent in love-making, was now spent in reading—both husbands carrying the inevitable little classics in their pockets. Out it would come and quickly engross the owner” (Windscheffel 56). (In fairness to Gladstone, it should be added that he read aloud to his wife not only during their courtship and honeymoon, but also during their marriage [Windscheffel 65].) Alexandrina’s hunch about the meaning of newlyweds’ reading is
Once the feminization of reading in the present-day West is recognized as an anomaly in both time and space, it becomes harder to explain by essentialist assumptions about women’s greater capacity for empathy or imagination. Instead, the dependent variable seems to be status: associated with men when it’s rare and therefore prestigious, literacy is feminized in societies (like ours) where ubiquity breeds contempt. Outside the West, reading is associated with mobility—both social and geographical; in modern societies, however, it becomes the refuge of those trapped in interior spaces: prisoners, children, housewives. As Charlotte Yonge observed in 1869, “There are so many hours of a girl’s life when she must sit still, that a book is her natural resource” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 454).
M UTE C HAPERONES
A workplace as much as a leisure pastime, reading could also be used to define the relation
between
those two spheres, whether by filling the commute that separates them (you read on the subway to unwind before you get home) or by marking the telegraph girl’s private time and space (official papers on the desk, lunchtime reading in the drawer). Among the “infinité de ces petites usages de convention” that one French contemporary credited the English with developing “pour se dispenser de parler,” books moved fluidly across public and private spheres (Bulwer-Lytton,
England
and
the
English
23). The same objects that shield husbands from wives can screen commuters from strangers, parents from crying children, children from demanding parents, clubmen from one another—or even masters from servants, as when a conduct book warns servants not to take a master’s “appearance” of reading at face value:
Figure 2.4. “An Appeal Case. House of Lords,” Punch, 14 February 1891, 82.
I know many ladies who have repented having spoken familiarly to their servants, finding that the girls have misunderstood their kindness, and sometimes have gone so far as to begin talking about their own affairs in the drawing-room. One lady who was thus annoyed, told me that she always took up a book and appeared to read, before she rang the bell, hoping thus to keep the girl from stopping to talk when she came up. (Motherly 16)
Yet even if marriage is not the only bond that books can buffer, its privileged status nonetheless makes it an especially effective test case: the strongest tie requires the sharpest solvent. A 2008
New
York
Times
article describing two Buddhist monks who replace “sexual touching” by synchronized breathing and synchronized reading gains its shock value from the traditional assumption that the book provides the last refuge for bodies that are otherwise fused. 10 A fortiori, at the moment when separateness has very recently been disavowed—that is, the honeymoon—the book’s power springs into clearest relief. Mary Gladstone writes that her mother “used to tell us, long afterwards, that it was something of a shock to both sisters when, after marriage, any little waiting time, as the railway station, which during their engagement would have been spent in love-making, was now spent in reading—both husbands carrying the inevitable little classics in their pockets. Out it would come and quickly engross the owner” (Windscheffel 56). (In fairness to Gladstone, it should be added that he read aloud to his wife not only during their courtship and honeymoon, but also during their marriage [Windscheffel 65].) Alexandrina’s hunch about the meaning of newlyweds’ reading is
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