Eighteenth-Century Reading Sites

When read Patrocinio Schweickart and Elizabeth Flynn's Sties: Social Difference and Reader Response was heartened to find two essays directly addressing issue of uses women make of their reading. In 'Some of Their Stories are like My Life, Guess': Working-Class Women Readers and Confessional Magazines, Jane Greer examines ways working-class women apprehend and assimilate what Margaret Atwood once ambivalently identified as True Trash. Greer argues that in our post-structuralist world, we too often discount and discredit the ways in which women identify too strongly with character and confuse fiction and fact (157). Likewise Anne Berggren, in Reading like Woman, believes that academics are too quick to trivialize and dismiss woman reader as naive and passive and argues that women readers use literature (indeed have always used literature) as primary source of enlightenment (particularly since, for hundreds of years, they were denied access to more valued, legitimate institutions of higher learning). Passed on by mothers to daughters and by authors to women's reading is, she argues, actively engaged, dialogic, and social (185). Both Berggren and Greer see women's reading practices as having long history and call for more research into emotional experiences of actual readers both contemporary and historical. With my essay would like to fill in small piece of this missing history and demonstrate that eighteenth-century women are not so different from their twentieth-or-twenty-first-century sisters. will first present short overview of eighteenth-century attitudes toward reading in general and then examine in detail reading practices of Sylvia Brathwaite, an eighteenth-century woman whose reading has much to tell us about how eighteenth-century women used discourses of their day. Rather than losing herself (or her sense of real) when she read, Sylvia used reading sites to understand and to navigate her world. What want to stress in this essay, indeed what forms basis of my argument, is that women read and wrote novels so assiduously during eighteenth century (and on into nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) because they were best means for analyzing, reflecting on, and reforming their worlds. In particular, eighteenth-century women (and men) writers used their fictions to warn women about real dangers that awaited them in the World-seductive but heartless rakes, ambivalent but desirable young men, silly coxcombs. Novels gave women readers strategies for avoiding rakes and coxcombs as well as for helping ambivalent but attractive young men make up their minds. Contrary to arguments of eighteenth-century commentators, eighteenth-century women were far from passive when they read. As resisting as twentieth-or twenty-first-century readers, they used novels and other reading sites to dissect and reform their worlds. in Eighteenth Century The eighteenth-century, as Ian Watt so famously observed, witnessed rise of novel. Not as widely known but just as important, this growth in pleasure and instruction through practice of reading was accompanied by serious concerns about effects of reading fiction, especially on minds of young women. Focusing on dangers, writers failed to acknowledge critical character of women's reading. Romances, seen as unrealistic, were often singled out as particularly dangerous. Indeed it almost seems as if novel, with its greater emphasis on contemporary mores and manners and quotidian detail, became prescribed counterweight to intoxicating flights of romance. According to Richardson, his novel Pamela avoided usual dangers of romance reading because it introduced a new species of writing: I thought story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably to simplicity of it, might possibly introduce new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people in to course of reading different from pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing improbable and marvelous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote cause of religion and virtue (Eaves & Kimpel 89). …