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

In the introduction to their insightful collection of essays about shifting notions of female readership and changing depictions of women readers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and America, Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley note many contemporary female readers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for calendars, notecards, and journals adorned with images of reading women (particularly romanticized images of white, middle-class readers, depicted in luxurious surroundings). With its diverse and intriguing assortment of essays, Reading Women enters into ongoing discussions about the cultural and political significance of such images, in both artistic and literary texts, over the course of the last two hundred years.

Badia and Phegley’s introductory essay articulates the central concerns and themes of the articles that follow. The essays in Reading Women, Badia and Phegley affirm, “collectively argue that women readers—and our assumptions about them—have been instrumental in the development of literary aesthetics, gender roles, and the very foundations of our current cultural and literary establishments” (15). Each essay in the collection examines the complex ways representations of reading women have helped to shape notions of women’s intellectual abilities, public authority, and proper roles as both creators and consumers of literary culture.

The essays in Reading Women consider representations of female readers from a variety of different perspectives, drawing upon a diverse assortment of British and American texts. In her essay on Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, Tuire Valkeakari examines Hurston’s presentation of herself as a skilled reader of both white written and African American oral forms of communication. Michele Crescenzo’s essay on Ann Petry’s The Street vividly demonstrates the dangers that await women who misread texts, detailing how the novel’s heroine consistently meets with tragedy because of her misguided embrace of values embedded within white, male-dominated print culture. Sarah A. Wadsworth’s essay analyzes the complicated class politics of female readership in Louisa May Alcott’s “May Flowers,” and Elizabeth Fekete Trubey’s article on Uncle Tom’s Cabin reveals the wide gap between Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ambitions of inspiring female readers to engage in political activism and female readers’ insistence on viewing the novel not as a political call to arms, but as a source of private emotion and pleasure. Focusing on the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Antonia Losano examines nineteenth-century representations of women as both readers and viewers of art, and the radical differences between these two discourses, while Suzanne M. Ashworth’s essay discusses how the titular heroine of Augusta Jane Evans’s novel Beulah becomes the subject of intense visual scrutiny, as the text obsessively monitors the way reading affects Beulah’s body and appearance. The perceived connections between women’s reading practices and mental illness are thoughtfully explored in essays by Janet Badia, who considers the pathologization of female readers of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and Barbara Hochman, who analyzes how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” critiques women’s addictive reading behavior.

Several of the collection’s essays delve into debates about women’s reading practices, which took place within the cultural institutions and popular media of their eras. Jennifer Phegley discusses how two Victorian literary magazines sought to disprove dominant cultural notions of women as undiscriminating, dangerously suggestible readers. Ruth Hoberman examines debates about women’s controversial presence as readers in the British Museum’s Reading Room during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mary R. Lamb argues that Oprah Winfrey’s popular book club, while generating new interest in reading in American society, nonetheless offers women readers an essentially conservative model of how to respond to literary texts. The volume concludes with an essay by Kate Flint, which revisits her groundbreaking monograph, The Woman Reader 1837–1914, and suggests some potential new directions for scholarship on women and reading.

Reading Women...