"The Polishing Attrition": Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner

Abstract

In preface to her biography of her sister Susan, Anna Warner describes her initial discomfort with writing and self-exposure but then justifies these through an appeal to religious duty: New England blood is never ashamed of any work that ought to be done; and no believer has cause to cover his face, in any spot where his dear Lord sees fit to bid him dwell; for work, for service, or for mere attrition. (1) Later, Anna explains what she means by this latter term: Our dear Miss Haines used to talk of attrition,--giving that name to minor trials and sorrows which seem so small, and yet are set to do such finishing and work; with and sharpened tools. (SW, 475) By Anna's account, attrition (defined in OED as the action or process of rubbing away ... or grinding down by friction) is figured as source of refinement or polish. (2) Through small but incremental experiences of suffering, self begins to wear away and in process takes on spiritual glow. The subject is thus finished--both completed and made fine--through her own subtraction. Anna's choice of word polishing is significant. As an operation that invokes rituals of housekeeping, is women's work. Here, how ever, object to be scoured is not home, but woman herself, who likewise is expected to glow through expurgation, that is, through eradication of excess and desire. Interestingly, Anna ties this concept of attrition not to sickness or to poverty but to activity of writing. Addressing those critics who will wonder ... first, at our strange, exceptional life, and then that should be willing to tell it so freely, Anna counters, I was not willing. am by nature terribly secretive person, and ... our home life was so unendingly precious, that it hurts me to have it gazed at by cold and careless eyes. After mounting this defense both of herself and of sanctified domestic space, Anna explains that she writes only out of sense of duty, for a faithful chronicler must not please himself' (SW, iii). By figuring writing not as voluntary production (I was not willing) but as obligation, Anna renders it entirely compatible with disciplining logic of attrition. In this way, authorship--the consummate act of creativity and expression--becomes figured as self subordination, painful but necessary means of regulating will. Susan Warner shared with her sister this belief in literacy as means towards attrition and expressed it both in her journal entries and in many of her best-selling novels of antebellum period. For both women, activities of reading and writing constituted some of fine and sharpened tools through which subjects achieved self-reduction. Observations about effacement in nineteenth-century woman are, of course, by no means new. Critics of American fiction have long been disconcerted by religiously inflected vision of suffering and submission embraced by antebellum woman writer and especially present in Susan Warner's The Wilde, Wide World. (3) Moreover, Richard Brodhead has linked these disciplinary themes to literacy, arguing that private, leisured middle class home encouraged novel reading as means to enclose and limit subjects within clear and predictable boundaries. (4) But while Brodhead sees disciplinary practice of book-reading as another means of reinforcing patriarchy, be arguing that regulatory effects of reading were crucial to affective needs and experiences of nineteenth century woman. This is because attrition inspired by literacy could in turn make possible new and invigorated relationship to written word--a heightened sense of intimacy first with text itself and then with other imagined readers. This essay explores this nexus of literacy, intimacy, and attrition as it unfolds in work of Susan Warner. …