The Blue Tortoise Tattoo: The Quixotic Reader in Jacob Have I Loved

Abstract

The Blue Tortoise Tattoo: The Quixotic Reader in Jacob Have I Loved Midway through Katherine Peterson's Jacob Have I Loved ( 1980) , the novel's protagonist, Louise Bradshaw, describes how reading novels helped her escape from her "miserable" existence as a minor character in her sister's life story. In a passage similar to one in Dickens' David Copperfield, whose young narrator also finds comfort in books, Louise explains how she retreated into fiction, casting herself as a character in the stories she read. ' She explains: As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We didn't have many. I know that now. I have been to libraries on the mainland, and I know that between my home and the school there was very little. But I had all of Shakespeare and Walter Scott and Dickens and Fenimore Cooper. Every night I pulled the black air raid curtains to and read on and on, huddled close to our bedroom lamp. Can you imagine the effect of The Last of the Mohicans on a girl like me? It was not the selfless Cora, but Uncas and Uncas alone whom I adored. Uncas, standing ready to die before the Delaware, when an enemy warrior tears off his hunting shirt revealing the bright blue tortoise tattooed onUncas's breast. Oh, to have a bright blue tortoise-something that proclaimed my uniqueness to all the world. But I was not the last of the Mohicans or the only of anything. I was Caroline Bradshaw's twin sister. ( 162-63) In these paragraphs, Louise discusses the extent to which reading has fed her imagination, while acknowledging that her book-induced fantasies differ sharply from reality. This is just one of many times when Louise bases her conception of the world on books and stories, becoming what I call a quixotic reader. Invariably, quixotic readers wish the world were more like fiction and cast themselves and others in real-life narratives based on their reading. While quixotic readers appear in all kinds of literature, they most frequently inhabit novels, which are by nature concerned with the distinction between real and imaginary worlds. Lennard Davis describes novels as "framed works" which are "about reality and at the same time not about reality; the novel is a factual fiction and factitious. It is a report on the world and an invention that parodies that report" (212). The quixotic reader certainly supports Davis' notion that novels are self-conscious, that they constantly remind the reader that they are fiction and yet try to present themselves as fact. Besides illustrating the affective power of fiction, quixotic readers are often arguments for the value of the kind of fiction In which they appear and models for that fiction's readers, who must also determine the relation of their reading to reality. In this respect, they are similar to Naomi Schor's "interprétants , " characters who interpret the world "based on conceived notions or signifiers . . ." 100 (168). Schor discusses such characters in works by James, Proust, and Kafka to show that the process of reading and interpretation is often personified by fictional characters who thus show the reader how to decode literature. 2 While interprétants may base their views of the world on non-literary texts, they mirror the reader's confusions and triumphs in interpreting literature. Certainly, this kind of character is not new; Don Quixote Is an obvious forerunner and model, as are characters in a number of eighteenth-century British imitations, such as Joseph Andrews (1742), The Female Quixote (1752), The Spiritual Quixote (1773).. The Philosophical Quixote (1782). The Amicable Quixote (1788), and the Infernal Quixote (1800). Later works, such as Scott's Waverlev ( 1814) and Dickens' David Copperfield (1850), books by two of the authors Louise Bradshaw reads, also contain characters who are strongly influenced by their reading.3 Since a part of childhood generally involves the acquisition of literacy, children's novels, too, often contain quixotic readers, both in fantasies like Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). E. Nesbit's Five Children and It (1902), and Edward Eager's Knight's Castle (1956), where children wish...