My Book House as Bildung Nancy Huse (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution This illustration is from the 1897 issue of St. Nicholas. "My Book House as Bildung" is an interpretation of my childhood reading as one explanation for the identity as feminist critic which shapes my reading, writing, and teaching. The term Bildung aligns my family, and me, with the work of Olive Beaupré Miller and the women who taught her, including her discovery of the work of Mary Baker Eddy. Pervasive throughout the paper is the notion of "woman as knower" (Gallop 17) in the sense that women, even across class and color lines, speak—when they speak—from a common fund of experience, their socialization as daughters. As Nancy Chodorow argues, socialization as daughters in this culture involves development through and stress on "particularistic and affective relationships to others" (176). A girl's task is to overcome her primary identification with her mother, yet build a secondary one (177). In terms of women's liberation, mother-daughter relationships have been seen as sources both of oppression and of strength, ways of incorporating daughters into the sex-gender system while providing chances for affirmation and expressive outlets that enable women to break culturally imposed silences and to resist loss of memory. As feminists have developed a critique of institutions, relationality learned as daughters has often become a norm for, rather than a deterrent of, women's intellectual life. Despite the dangers of veiling women's subordination inherent in such a stance, it is one that many feminists use as a means of analysis, and it is the one that informs this study of My Book House as a source of my critical interests. But by reflecting on issues of class identity as well as gender, and by describing the various responses my siblings have made to our birth family and reading experience, I avoid overgeneralizing the mother-daughter issues despite their central focus in my text. In terms of my own discoveries in writing this paper, the simple fact of my birth order (youngest child, youngest daughter, born to older parents) also becomes a compelling paradigm in trying to decipher the meaning of my childhood and its reading. Miller, a 1904 graduate of Smith College, collected stories, poems, and biographies from world literature into a set of children's books my mother, a daughter of German immigrants, purchased with her "house money" early in the Depression. Although she bought them for the children she already had—my sister and two brothers—the books became stunningly formative for the youngest child in the family, born in 1938. Like Miller, the affluent and educated woman who turned to the creation of children's books to atone for the guilt she felt over forgetting the existence of her daughter during an afternoon's work on the novel she would never finish, my mother altered her childrearing practices and possibly her world view to rear me. As my brothers have commented, "Mom protected you." Or, as a friend remarked, "You were your mother's last chance." Like many children born to older parents, I was encouraged in reflectiveness. Unlike many such children, however, I may have received a more overt set of guidelines for my future. An important part of my childhood, the Book House volumes (six of them, with embossed green covers), were kept in a cedar chest in my parents' bedroom. The first volume, In the Nursery, had been read to me by my father, whose lap was a kind of theater for the play of voices he liked to assume in reading [End Page 115] "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," "Shingebiss," "The Turtle Who Could Not Stop Talking," "The Twin Lambs," and any number of nonsense verses and poems. In his late fifties, my father evidently found reading aloud the best way to spend time with his youngest child. From his lap, I engaged in my first critical "misreading" of a text, deducing that the characters in "Uncle Wiggly" stories in the Newark Evening News, in particular one Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, corresponded precisely to those depicted in the "Terry and the Pirates" comic strip opposite the...