The Victorian Woman Reader in May Sinclair's Mary Olivier: Self-Stimulation, Intellectual Freedom, and Escape

The Victorian Woman Reader in May Sinclair's Mary Olivier: Self-Stimulation, Intellectual Freedom, and Escape Cheryl A. Wilson University of Delaware IN "SPUDDING OUT," Barbara Ehrenreich argues that Americans "love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist."1 Characters on television have active lifestyles, which differ from those of television-addicted viewers. However, the same theory does not apply to reading, as novelists frequently include scenes of reading in their texts, thereby producing a doubleconsciousness in readers, who find themselves and their actions reflected in their reading. The desire to observe others reading is, to some degree, a question of identity: Who is the reader? What is she doing? Where and how is she doing it? For the external reader, understanding and identifying with fictional readers helps validate and explain her own actions as well as illuminate the position of the fictional reader within the text. Constructing a fictional reader becomes additionally complicated when the author uses the act of reading to comment on particular aspects of culture or history. May Sinclair recreates the figure of the Victorian woman reader from a twentieth-century perspective in Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), directly addressing challenges faced by the woman reader and exploring the implications of her reading. Sinclair transforms women's reading into an overtly political act and produces a specifically feminist rewriting of the Victorian woman reader that foregrounds issues of sexuality and domesticity. The Victorian reader has been the subject of numerous recent critical studies, though I am particularly interested in the amount of attention the Victorian reader received during the nineteenth century, as well as in the specific characterization of the woman reader. In The English Common Reader, Richard Al tick argues that the nineteenth century saw 365 ELT 46 : 4 2003 considerable growth and change in the reading public: "Never before in English history had so many people read so much. In the middle class, the reading circle was the most familiar and beloved of domestic institutions ."2 He attributes this to a number of factors including religion, politics , education, and technology, which made reading material more accessible.3 In addition, readership expanded because the middle classes experienced an increase in leisure time, which provided them with the opportunity to read: "to scores of thousands of families touched by the prosperity of the new age, relief from household duties provided a degree of leisure undreamed of in earlier generations."4 Reading, particularly fiction reading, was connected to Victorian discourses of power and knowledge. Kate Flint explains that the act of reading itself was "centrally bound in with questions of authority: authority which manifests itself in a capacity for judgment and opinion based on self-knowledge (so far as this may be possible, both in psychological terms and within the social framework of language); and authority to speak, to write, to define, to manage, and to change not just the institutions of literature, but those of society itself."5 Sinclair explores the function of authority for her woman reader and illustrates how reading allows for the creation of private and personal interior spaces that exist outside the control of patriarchal institutions. For women, reading was often the only means of escape from an otherwise unsatisfying existence, though the pleasures of reading were undercut by restrictions and negative stereotypes. Ina Ferris characterizes the nineteenth-century "trope" of female reading: "The trope typically figured a passive, languorous body displaying itself on a sofa and neglecting domestic duties as it 'devoured' the texts that fed its romantic and sexual fantasies."6 This image suggests that woman readers could not fill the idealized role of "Angel in the House" because they ignored domestic responsibilities and flaunted their monstrous sexuality. Thus, the association of this figure with woman readers devalued women's reading and discouraged their literary pursuits. Reading was also thought to have a strong affective influence on the reader and much popular fiction was condemned because it could traumatize delicate feminine sensibilities and make women ill.7 Of course, this was merely the Victorian patriarchy's interpretation of reading's ability to stimulate independent thought and creativity. A feminized image was also projected onto...