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Chapter 3 Crafting Subjectivities: Women, Reading, and Self-Imagining Mary Kelley It is only by attention that as our eyes pass over a book, we transfer its knowledge into our own minds. No book will improve you which does not make you think; which does not make your own mind work. —Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends, of Self-Training ‘‘I read constantly and find it teaching,’’ Hannah Heaton confided in a diary that spanned the last forty years of the eighteenth century. Heaton most assuredly did as she claimed, keeping a daily schedule that took this resident of rural Connecticut from the Bible to the meditations of John Bunyan to the treatises of Thomas Shepard, Solomon Stoddard, and Michael Wigglesworth. Born in 1788 and an ardent reader from an early age, Sarah Josepha Hale read with the same constancy. However, Hale devoted herself to secular literature, which she embraced with the passion that Heaton reserved for Bibles, psalm books, and devotional works. Immersing herself in Shakespeare, Hale made his plays and poems daily companions. The future essayist and editor took pleasure in Addison and Pope, the future poet in Cowper and Burns. Hale, whose career as a woman of letters began with the publication of the novel Northwood in 1827, registered the appeal of fiction in her enthusiastic response to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mystery of Udolpho, a novel that Hale recalled had instilled a determination to ‘‘promote the reputation of my own sex, and to do something for my country.’’1 In the books they selected, Heaton and Hale illustrate fundamental changes in taste and sensibility that were well under way in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Hannah Heaton would have been surprised (and almost certainly dismayed) to learn that she was the more 56 Kelley idiosyncratic of the two readers. The godly books to which Heaton remained unswervingly loyal still constituted an important share of the reading done by post-Revolutionary Americans. Now, however, these readers were equally drawn to the belles lettres that Hale embraced. At least initially, Hale and the readers with whom she kept company relied on the literature of the former mother country, which was either imported from Great Britain or reprinted in the United States. The number and the variety of reprints increased rapidly in the 1790s, the same decade in which Hale, who was already apprenticing for her career, devoted herself to secular literature. Books authored by Americans and printed in the United States entered the literary marketplace in increasing numbers during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.2 A Relish for Substantial Intellectual Food Herself a reader of many books, Maria Drayton Gibbes took care to tell readers of her book why it was important to keep a volume of commonplaces . In a passage that testified to the formation of a self-identity as a woman of reading, she explained that such a book ‘‘is not only useful, but Necessary to a man of reading, or man of letters.’’ In claiming this privileged status in the second decade of the nineteenth century, Gibbes fashioned herself as an equal partner with men, who had been the traditional custodians of literary culture. Embracing this self-representation was no small matter. Whether distinguishing between rhetorical strategies , discerning implications, or rendering judgments, women such as Gibbes were taking license to act on and to generate meaning from a broad spectrum of reading.3 That Gibbes identified herself as a woman of reading, or a woman of letters, highlights the degree to which representations of female readers intersected with gender conventions in the early Republic. Post-Revolutionary textual and visual portrayals limned a woman whose virtue was manifest in and generated by the cultivation of books. This representation stood in contrast to seventeenth-century proscriptions that had sharply limited a woman’s act of reading. The founder of Massachusetts Bay and the colony’s first governor, John Winthrop, recorded the plight of one Ann Hopkins. This young woman had ‘‘fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason,’’ as he noted in his journal in April 1645. The cause was easily discernible, at least to Winthrop— Hopkins had given ‘‘herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books.’’ Her fate would have been entirely different had she ‘‘not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger.’’ Winthrop granted that...

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