Maria Edgeworth and the Construction of Gentlemanly Reading: Forester, Robinson Crusoe, and Benjamin Franklin

Abstract

MARIA EDGEWORTH AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENTLEMANLY READING: FORESTER, ROBINSON CRUSOE, AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN HEATHER MACFADYEN University o f Ottawa I THE woman reader plays a paradoxically central and marginal role in the history of the novel. Her centrality is evident in the frequency with which literary historians cite the increasing numbers of women readers as a causal factor in the emergence of the novel and its movement into cultural and literary prominence. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt suggests that middle-class women’s leisure led to a demand for suitable or rather “lighter reading” material and that this demand spurred the production of novels (171). Watt’s woman reader may be crucial to the development of the novel, but she is also held responsible for its inadequacies: “the domi­ nance of women readers” leads to the “characteristic kind of weakness and unreality to which the form is liable— its tendency to restrict the field on which its psychological and intellectual discriminations operate to a small and arbitrary selection of human situations” (340). In a rhetorical turn found in many histories of the novel, Watt transforms the woman reader into the female reader.1 The reading woman’s desires no longer encourage the emergence of the genre, but pollute it. In conflating the woman reader with her ideologically laden representation, the female reader, Watt draws upon a cultural trope that dominated the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries’ understanding of the genre.2The trope of female reading appears in many discourses, and the female reader is censured in novels, plays, poems, reviews, sermons, essays, caricatures, memoirs, and conduct manuals. The trope assumes that women’s read­ ing is an act of the body, not the mind, and that the novel is an agent of sexual corruption. Thus women’s responses to literature are frequently rep­ resented as forms of gluttony, intoxication, or sexual arousal.3 Confronted with the troubling associations of women, sexual irregularity, and novel­ reading, Maria Edgeworth constructed an alternate and opposing trope in which properly conducted reading becomes a sign of domestic sociability and stability.4 While this motif can be found in many of Edgeworth’s novels, one 395 of the most striking instances can be seen in Belinda (1801). Belinda, Lady Delacour, and Virginia St. Pierre are all characterized by reference to their reading habits. While Belinda is an exemplary domestic reader, Virginia is a female reader, and her unsupervised novel-reading disturbs her sexual imag­ ination and complicates her relationship to men. Similarly, Lady Delacour’s imagination and her marriage are disturbed by her responses to a variety of texts. Both women are re-integrated into their domestic circles once their reading habits are disciplined.8 Edgeworth, however, did not limit herself to a consideration of the problem the reading woman posed to an orderly society. Instead, she expanded her consideration of the cultural significance of reading by introducing and addressing the problem posed when men’s reading becomes socially disruptive. Edgeworth argues that the reading man is as prone to illegitimate modes of reading as the much more frequently condemned reading woman. Through­ out her work, she suggests that proper and desirable masculinity (like proper fem ininity ) is instilled by and manifested in certain kinds of reading. The importance of reading in the construction of a properly desirable and socially useful man is especially evident in “Forester,” a novella written for adoles­ cents and published in Moral Tales in 1801.® “Forester” is a minor text in Edgeworth’s canon, but in its depiction of its hero’s coming of age, the tale provides a clear and relatively uncomplicated demonstration of the role that reading plays in Edgeworth’s construction of masculinity.7 The action of “Forester” begins with the arrival of its eponymous hero at the home of his guardian, Dr. Campbell. Following the death of his father, Forester travels north to Edinburgh by carrier, refusing upon political principle to travel by the coach appropriate to his station. Arriving late, he forces his way into the house and bursts upon the assembled company “with dirty shoes, a threadbare coat, and hair that looked as if it never had been...