The Stockholder Syndrome: Reading and Investment in A Summer of Faulkner

Abstract

MATTHEW SUTTON Independent Scholar The Stockholder Syndrome: Reading and Investment in A Summer of Faulkner IN SEPTEMBER 2006, PLAINTIFFS IN A CLASS-ACTION SUIT REACHED AN agreement with Random House Publishing to receive refunds for the purchase price of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces after the supposed memoir, which had become a runaway bestseller after an endorsement by Oprah Winfrey, was exposed as a work of fiction (“James Frey”). Settled the following year, the case was a rare instance in the United States of a book being subject to consumer-fraud charges, with the work essentially.alleged.to.be.a.product.sold.through.intentional misrepresentation. For all of its commercial success and favorable publicity,Oprah’s BookClubhadweatheredauthor-centeredcontroversy before. In 2001, Winfrey withdrew her support of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections after the author expressed misgivings that his multilayered, prolix work would be categorized primarily as an “Oprah book,” by then understood to be a subgenre of realist fiction marked by resourceful female protagonists, linear narratives, and plots that, many critics alleged, often bordered on the melodramatic and moralistic. These two disputes involving Winfrey, her vast audience, and an outlying author bookended a less publicized, but no less fascinating, episode. During the summer of 2005, three challenging William Faulkner novels chosen as selections for Oprah’s Book Club generated a different kind of reader dissension, though it never rose to the level of a federal case. Though most accounts at the time dwelt on the disconnect between popular and academic readerships, the mixed reception of the Faulkner novels among Winfrey’s reading community reveals much about the entrenched mode of consumerism at the foundation of Oprah’s Book Club. Typically, studies of cultural resistance analyze the methods by which the relatively powerless adapt, incorporate, or reject wholesale the products of the dominant culture. Yet the dissatisfaction of many in Oprah’s BookClubwiththeFaulknernovelspresentsa different schema, where individuals possessing leisure time, buying power, and, collectively, a sizable cultural influence largely questioned the value of 436 Matthew Sutton the works and their attendant set of disciplinary reading procedures on their own terms. Viewed in a historical context, Oprah’s Book Club and its therapeutic orientation are part of a long lineage of American efforts at selfimprovement through collective reading. Beginning in the 1820s, African Americans in the North organized literary societies, in large part to counter pernicious racial stereotypes. Among groups like the National Association of Colored Women, book discussions were a component of alargersocial-justiceprogramthatprotestedlynchings(Lofton172).The Chautauqua movement, the “social gospel” movement affiliated with the Methodist Church, popularized the notion that self-improvement, and by extension widespread moral reform, could be achieved through a disciplined program of domestic reading and contemplation. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC) was founded in 1878 to promote literacy and moral education in the home through a curriculum that took four years of study to complete, encompassing standardized textbooks, discussion groups, and a final comprehensive exam (Rieser 104). Chautauqua leaders hoped women would follow this course partly to eradicate “sources of unrest and discontent at home ..... making one’s own house the centre of the whole world of science, literature, art, and society” (165). To supplement this already ambitious program, women enrolled in the CLSC widely read and promoted novels consistent with the Chautauqua message of cultivation and social reform (185–89). The notion of “profitable” reading by women in groups goes back at least to the 1880s (Gere 184). Dedicated book clubs and women’s clubs, with their appeals to respectability and order, countered the deeply ingrained patriarchal notion that women’s reading was idle, improper, and even immoral. In addition, many book clubs became spaces for women to forge interpersonal bonds only tangentially related to reading (Long47–50).Thoughstrictlysegregated,blackandwhitewomen’sclubs each incorporated reading into their programs of social engagement. As Elizabeth McHenry has argued, black women’s clubs read and discussed canonical English and American literature with a critical eye, both to assert their discipline and proficiency as readers and to exercise their powers as consumers of culture (224–28). Book selections by women’s book clubs in the 1880s and 1890s were frequently a reaction against the proliferation...