Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction Jennifer Phegley (bio) Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction, by Catherine J. Golden; pp. xi + 287. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003, $55.00. Catherine J. Golden'sbookexamines representations of women as readers in nineteenth- century novels and illustrations from England and the United States. The purpose of her study is to "examine concurrent competing visions of the woman reader" in order to "spark further scrutiny of the complexities of our own reading habits as well as those of the Victorians" (14). This book clearly owes much to Kate Flint's The Woman Reader, 1837– 1914 (1993). Like Flint, Golden contends that the woman reader is a "recurrent and multifaceted theme in fiction and book illustration," one that is constantly shifting and impossible to pin down (4). In expressing the need to consider the figure of the woman reader not simply for her reading practices but for her significance as a cultural phenomenon, Flint and Golden intend to move beyond the reader-response approaches of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984), Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart's Gender and Reading (1986), and Sarah Mills's Gendering the Reader (1994), all of which focus on the ways readers respond to texts rather than on the ways readers are constructed within them at a particular historical moment. Building on Flint's approach, [End Page 171] which studies representations of women in periodicals, scientific treatises, novels, and paintings, Golden seeks to provide a transatlantic context for the phenomena of the woman reader. Golden's book is divided into three parts: a historical overview of women's reading in a transatlantic context; analyses of fictional representations of women's reading, particularly women as model readers, prophetic readers, intellectual readers, and corruptible readers; and an exploration of the role book illustrations play in constructing various "types" of women readers—isolated, interrupted, social, and dutifully domestic. Golden frames her book with an overview of the intense anxiety surrounding "the reading habit," particularly for women. She rightly identifies the debate over women readers as a transatlantic phenomenon that was spurred by advances in printing technologies, the expansion of the reading public, the wider availability of educational institutions for women, and the rise of women's reading clubs and literary societies. Golden outlines a variety of arguments for and against women's reading. These include claims that women should read for educational purposes, socialization, and individual enrichment; it was also argued that biological and medical factors affecting women could lead to potentially dangerous side effects of reading, including over-consumption of fiction, addiction, immoral behavior, and increased sexual appetite. Golden claims that "The polar ideologies that fueled the reading debate form a collage of women readers. Dire images of girls consuming novels in secret and dying with diseased minds appear alongside inspiring pictures of women reading independently, in clubs, or in the family parlour, gaining confidence and valuable life lessons" (42). Golden examines such contradictory representations of women readers in fictional works including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and in illustrations for books such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1864), Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), and William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848). Golden focuses as much on the books women characters read as she does on their reading bodies and minds. Her analysis thus charts an interesting but sometimes unsatisfying genealogy of the books with which the characters are engaged. We learn, for example, about the history and resonances of Jane Eyre's idiosyncratic reading of Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds (1804), Jo March's use of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) as a touchstone, and Maggie Tulliver's interpretation of Daniel Defoe's The History of the Devil (rev. 1819...