Divine Secrets of the Cultural Studies Sisterhood: Women Reading Rebecca Wells

The innocence of reading is a pretty myth, but our time grows very belated and such innocence is revealed as only another insipidity.

Harold Bloom, The Breaking of Form

In February 1998, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood stole onto the New York Times best-seller list, where it would luxuriate for 68 consecutive weeks. Rebecca Wells's first novel tells the story of Vivi and Sidda Walker, a charismatic alcoholic mother and her overachieving but love-starved daughter, chronicling their lives in Thornton, the small Louisiana town in which Vivi and her friends, the wise and wacky Ya-Yas, rule the social order. Characterized by its jacket blurbs as "a big, blowzy romp through... rainbow eccentricities" and "the sweet and sad and goofy monkey-dance of life," Divine Secrets proved to be an enormous hit. Hoping to capitalize on its success, in September HarperPerennial released a new edition of the "prequel," Wells's 1992 short story collection Little Altars Everywhere. As she welcomed fans of Divine Secrets "back" to the first incarnation of Thornton, Wells simultaneously acknowledged her fantastic commercial achievements and denied their importance. The bulk of the introduction rhapsodizes on the "intimacy that exists between us, writer and reader" (vii), which Wells credits with her success. It is only when "you, the reader, encounter the words on the page," she explains, that "the alphabet has meaning. So 'my' work becomes 'yours'" (vii).

Wells goes on to tell how Little Altars was promoted by loving friends and family, enthusiastic booksellers and librarians, and how readers' letters testifying to the book's importance in their lives compensated her for the book's minimal financial success. The talismanic potential of books sparks this human community, Wells tells us: "All creativity is a gift. All life is a gift. And what a fetching ecosystem it is. I am given a gift. I am helped to hand it on to you, reader, in the form of a book. As you read, you keep the gift moving, and then hand a new gift back to me—the gift of having been met, of having been seen, of having been listened to" (Little Altars x). This "fetching ecosystem" of print culture is a radical paean to the role that readers play in the life of a literary work; readers here do not merely respond to fiction but complete it. And the communications circuit of author, publisher, and readers that Wells describes is animated not merely by shared economic and intellectual concerns but by inspiration, imagination, and love.

Her "Note to the Reader," then, suggests that the Wells phenomenon delivers on the utopian promise of women's reading groups that feminist cultural studies scholars charted in the 1980s. In addition, it suggests that a community of independent book lovers thrives out in the impersonal modern landscape—another utopian image in an era increasingly concerned with the contraction and corporatization of the book industry. If the picture that Wells paints of her success is true, there is indeed cause for rejoicing in the many scholarly communities that take an interest in women, in reading, and especially in women reading in groups.

Flying in the face of that rejoicing, this essay does the somewhat less than "fetching" work of looking more closely at the popularity of Wells and her books. Rather than validating these joyous images of contemporary reading culture, Wells's popularity suggests that they are seriously compromised. True, women are buying Wells's books and telling their friends and families about them. They are coming together to read and discuss them in person and over the Internet. They are using the books, and the communities that form around them, to register dissatisfaction with their lives, to exercise their imaginations, and to bond with one another across the impersonal vastness of the modern American landscape. Butwhether or not these activities are progressive, whether they meaningfully—practically—critique the late...