Abstract
Reading is a private experience inevitably structured by social relations. This friction between collective and personal charges act of reading with its peculiar power to engage reader in social discourse. Gender is one aspect of this complex response to reading that, although still too little understood, has gained increasing critical attention in past decade, especially since publication of Flynn and Schweickart's collection of essays, Gender and Reading (1986). Jean Wyatt's Reconstructing Desire: The Role of Unconscious in Women's Reading and Writing (1990) examines revolutionary and transformational potential of preoedipal in novels by women (2) and the interactions between fantasy structures of literature and unconscious fantasy structures of readers (24).1 Wyatt attempts to explain women's persistent attraction to certain books and kinds of fiction, such as Jane Eyre and Little Women, that they read repeatedly as children and often return to as adults.
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