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h Chapter 5 “The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner In the preface to her biography of her sister Susan, Anna Warner describes her initial discomfort with writing and its attendant self-exposure, but then justifies these through an appeal to religious duty:“New England blood is never ashamed of any work that ought to be done; and no believer has cause to cover his face, in any spot where his dear Lord sees fit to bid him dwell; for work, for service, or for the mere polishing attrition.”1 In the body of her work,Anna goes on to explain what she means by this latter term: “Our dear Miss Haines used to talk of ‘attrition,’—giving that name to the minor trials and sorrows which seem so small, and yet are set to do such finishing and polishing work; with fine and sharpened tools” (SW, 475). By Anna’s account, attrition (defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as“the action or process of rubbing away . . . or grinding down by friction”) is figured as a source of refinement or“polish.”2 Through small but incremental experiences of suffering, the self begins to wear away and in the process takes on a spiritual glow. The subject is thus“finished”—both completed and made fine—through her own subtraction. Anna’s choice of the word“polishing” is significant. As an operation that invokes the rituals of housekeeping, polishing is women’s work. Here, however, the object to be scoured is not the home, but the woman herself , who likewise is expected to glow through expurgation, that is, through the eradication of excess will and desire. Interestingly, in the above passage, Anna ties this concept of attrition not to sickness or to poverty but to the activity of writing.Addressing those critics who “will wonder . . . [f]irst, at our strange, exceptional life, and then that I should “The Polishing Attrition” 125 be willing to tell it so freely,” Anna counters,“I was not willing. I am by nature a terribly secretive person, and . . . our home life was so unendingly precious, that it hurts me to have it gazed at by cold and careless eyes.” After mounting this defense both of herself and of the sanctified domestic space, Anna explains that she writes only out of a sense of duty, for “a faithful chronicler must not please himself ” (SW, iii). By figuring writing not as voluntary production (“I was not willing”) but as obligation,Anna renders it entirely compatible with the disciplining logic of the polishing attrition. In this way, authorship is redefined as self-subordination, a painful but necessary means of regulating the will. Susan Warner shared with her sister this belief in literacy as a means toward attrition. In her own life and in the life of her fictional protagonist, Ellen Montgomery, Warner embraced punitive literacy practices (prolonged reading of difficult material, reading without movement, writing in the context of bodily prostration, etc.) as a way of regulating her perceived idleness. Pen and paper thus became some of the “fine and sharpened tools” through which the Warner sisters achieved self-reduction. Observations about effacement in the nineteenth-century woman are, of course, by no means new. Critics of American fiction have long been disconcerted by the religiously inflected vision of suffering and submission embraced by the antebellum woman writer and especially present in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World.3 Moreover, Richard Brodhead has linked these disciplinary themes to literacy, arguing that the private, leisured middle-class home encouraged novel reading as a means to enclose and limit subjects within predictable boundaries.4 But while Brodhead sees the disciplinary practice of novel-reading as a means of reinforcing individualism , I will argue that the attrition inspired by literacy could allow for greater incorporation of the outside world into the female subject. Her reduction, in other words, paradoxically created a sense of the self as aggregate or expansive, physically linked both to the material page and to other readers. Like Melville and Douglass, then, Warner regarded reading and authorship as privileged activities, because they facilitated an experience of intimate bodily communion. Indeed, if for Melville and Douglass, literacy practices were a means of forging illicit or extranormative connections (homoerotic in one case, interracial in the other), they functioned similarly for Warner, creating moments of imagined fusion with otherwise inaccessible objects (specifically, the familial and the dead). However, because of Warner’s position as a woman...

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