Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (review)

The introduction to Reading Women opens with three epigraphs, all of which describe a line of products—postcards, notecards, and calendars featuring reproductions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paintings of reading women—marketed by Pomegranate Communications. The Pomegranate products testify to the enduring appeal, particularly to educated and professional women, of images of reading women. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley's introduction thus establishes the iconic status of the reading woman and sets the stage for eleven essays that "argue that women readers—and our assumptions about them—have been instrumental in the development of literary aesthetics, gender roles, and the very foundation of the current cultural and literary establishments" (15). Eight of the essays explore constructions of reading women in literature, in nineteenth-century paintings, and in Victorian literary magazines; one analyzes depictions of women in the British Museum Reading Room in architectural plans, newspapers, magazines, novels, and journals; and one discusses the television phenomenon of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. Kate Flint's afterword draws lessons from her own reading history and serves as a graceful coda to the volume. Collectively, the essays trace the evolution of representations of women readers over the last two centuries. Their goal, according to Badia and Phegley, is to fill the gaps left by reader-response studies that focus on what readers do to the exclusion of the "visual and rhetorical construction of readers within their socio-historical contexts" (13), as well as by studies with limited historical range that do not trace the figure of the woman reader to the present day.

Three themes are salient in the essays. First, women like to read for a variety of reasons—for entertainment, as temporary respite from daily routine, for intellectual and emotional stimulation, to acquire information about various topics, as a means for self-understanding and transformation. Today, women are the primary consumers of books and magazines and comprise the overwhelming majority of book club members.

Second, the woman reader has long been the focus of moral and cultural anxiety. In the nineteenth century, the increasing literacy of women and the widespread availability of books and periodicals gave rise to calls for regulation of the quantity and the content of women's reading, lest they become infected with unsavory ideas and attitudes that undermine their capacity to be good wives and mothers. The woman reader is often eroticized. Reading is coded as seduction: she is seduced by a book, and so susceptible to sexual seduction; she is seductive as a sexual object to men, but more dangerously, as a counter-normative role model for women. Badia's study of the pathological Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton reader and Barbara Hochman's examination of the "addictive reader" in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1899) carry the theme of unhealthy reading practices forward to the present day. The main danger today, however, is said to be the tendency of women readers to be insufficiently critical. Michele Crescenzo and Tuire Valkeakari explore how African American readers can be damaged by the ideology of white supremacy encoded in the dominant cultural texts. Mary R. Lamb praises Winfrey's Book Club for promoting literacy but faults it for not encouraging "the critical skills necessary for engaging texts fully" (273).

The third theme runs counter to the second. The reading woman is an icon of women's assertion of intellectual and moral autonomy, their demand for equal access to intellectual and professional opportunities, and their struggle for social and political empowerment. Phegley's chapter gives an account of two Victorian magazines, Cornhill and Belgravia, that actively encouraged women to pursue their intellectual ambitions. Ruth Hoberman's study of the changing representations of women in the British Museum Reading Room shows the conflict between women's struggle for equal access to learning, and the recognition early in the twentieth century...