The Woman Reader

As you may have deduced from my recent posts, I've been slowly working my way through Belinda Jack's The Woman Reader, which

tells a story never told before: the complete history of women readers and the controversies their reading has inspired since the beginning of the written word. The book travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring how and what women have read through the ages and across cultures and civilizations.

Belinda Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy and to censor their reading. She also recounts the counterefforts of remarkable women – and some men – who have fought back and battled for the educational enfranchisement of girls. (Yale Books)

You can read more about the book here, there's an excerpt here, and reviews at The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The Independent, The Irish Times, The Sydney Morning Herald,  The Telegraph, The Times Higher Education and The Times Literary Supplement. Given the existence of all that commentary, I don't think I need to state my own opinion in any detail. My overall impression of The Woman Reader is rather similar to the one I have when watching the video which compresses "500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art" into 2:53 minutes: I know that in order to cover so much ground in a short space of time one has to be concise, but moving so speedily from one woman and topic to the next means I have only a blurred recollection of any of them.

Noah Berlatsky at The Atlantic takes issue with Jack's statement that "Women have always resisted reading material they have not wanted to read, and have withstood being persuaded by it" (11). This, he writes,

seems an awfully sweeping contention, and one which also perhaps misses the point. As Modleski and Benedikt suggest, it's often the things we want to read—the romance novels, the baby books (or for men the superhero comics)—that most persuade us. And that persuasion is not necessarily subversive or freeing. (The Atlantic)

I take Berlatsky's point because at times I have been persuaded by novels (emotionally, even if not intellectually) of things which are neither subversive nor freeing.  Some romances, for example, have left me with a residual feeling that to be a success as a woman, a wife, and a mother, I should have many children and joyfully and frequently bake cookies for them (preferably while living with them and my husband in a house which it is my responsibility and delight to make into a "home").

I'm not sure, however, that Jack was trying to argue that all women "have always resisted reading material they have not wanted to read" or that all of us, at all times, "have withstood being persuaded by it." She certainly mentions Cornelia, daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Maior, famous above all for his victory over Hannibal" (36), who can be considered

an exemplary case of the acceptance of a woman reader in ancient Rome. Her reading is presented as having formed her moral training (her commitment to her husband and then her sons), shaped her approach to her maternal duties (as the carer and teacher of her children, particularly her sons), and as providing evidence of her social status. Nowhere is it suggested that her reading did anything other than to encourage her to be the kind of woman advocated by male-dominated Roman society. (37)

Jack may, then, just have wanted to make the point that, at all times in the history of women readers, there have been some women who have gone against the grain of their society by resisting "reading material they have not wanted to read, and have withstood being persuaded by it."

Secondly, earlier in the article Berlatsky asked

isn't it possible that in certain times and at certain places reading might actually serve to control women rather than to free them? Tania Modleski, in her classic 1982 study Loving With a Vengeance, argued, for example, that Harlequin romances, Gothic romances, and soap operas addressed women's anxieties and concerns—not in the interest of freedom, but rather in the interest of reconciling them to their lot in patriarchy. "In Harlequin Romances," Modleski concludes, "the need of women to find meaning and pleasure in activities which are not wholly male-centered...is generally scoffed at."

Given that Berlatsky does not question this assessment of "Harlequin Romances," I suspect he is thinking of the popular romance novel as a type of literature which, while admittedly enticing to some women, is not "subversive or freeing." If that's the case then Berlatsky would himself be making a "sweeping contention" about the contents of romance novels and suggesting that there is only one way in which they can be read. That, in turn, brings me back to something that Jack states in her introduction, and which is as true of "the woman reader" in general as it is of "the romance reader" in particular:

The woman reader is not a single type but distinguished by her individual experience, her social and economic position, and so much more. [...] But the woman reader is not only a reality. She is also a striking invention of the male imagination, a crucial aspect of men's desire to worship or condemn the mysteries of the 'opposite sex'.  (12)

Part of what has made

women's literacy and access to written material so controversial [...] has to do with the ultimate secrecy of reading: no-one outside the reader can know what is going on in the reader's mind, or indeed body, and no-one can know what difference the reading experience may make to his or her thoughts or behaviour. [...]

Nor can one really force someone to read in a particular way. One cannot ensure that someone, simply by reading, will take seriously material in which they do not believe or do not want to believe. This makes the history of reading a complex one and distinct from other related areas such as the histories of the book, libraries, printing and publishing, education, and so on. (6-7)

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Berlatsky, Noah. "Does Reading Really Set Women Free?" The Atlantic. 12 June 2012.

Jack, Belinda. The Woman Reader. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012.