by Price, Leah
It is from them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms of love,—though I fancy few young men will think so little of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right in saying so. (Trollope, An Autobiography 220)
There are countries in which it has been in accordance with the manners of the upper classes that the girl should be brought to marry the man . . . out of the convent—without having enjoyed any of that freedom of thought which the reading of novels will certainly produce; but we do not know that the marriages so made have been thought to be happier than our own. (Trollope, “Novel-Reading” 42)
But if Trollope’s essays cast the novel as the genre of courtship, his own novels are more interested in what comes after. And a corollary to that shift from romance to realism is that his fiction upstages the texts that help their readers to reach marriage by the books that help their holders to bear it.
In that sense, the deployment of reading to mark a loveless marriage neatly inverts the age-old trope that makes dropping the book a preamble to courtship. (For Paolo and Francesca, the erotic charge comes not from reading, but from stopping.) That time line may help explain why the honeymoon forms such a crucial moment in Trollope’s novels. If they define novel reading (or at least novel holding) as a postmarital activity, this isn’t because of novels’ sexual content (as in those other countries where girls can read fiction only once marriage has released them from the convent), or closer to home, as in yet another Punch cartoon, captioned “Emancipation.” Trollope cares neither about what the choice of reading material suggests about a character’s morals or tastes (as in, for example, in Eliot’s contrast between Dorothea’s high-minded appreciation of Pascal and Rosamond’s middlebrow admiration for simpering verse), nor about the mimetic logic in which a character’s reading of a novel about love either causes, echoes, or foreshadows her falling in love herself, nor even about some intertextual correspondence created by his placing in the hands of his characters a text named and known to his own readers.
When Emma reads opposite Charles at the table, Flaubert names names: the titles of periodicals and the authors of novels. For the space of two more pages, in fact, the narrator reproduces in free indirect discourse the content of the texts in front of her (52–53). In retrospect, the description of the breakfast table at which Emma is reading seems at best a lead-in to, at worst a pretext for, this uneasy mixture of pastiche and parody.
What interests Trollope, in contrast, isn’t the relation between a person and a text so much as the relation, or lack thereof, that two persons can establish only in the presence of a printed third party. (Emma hates her husband because she reads romances, but Glencora reads romances because she hates her husband.) We usually think of the text as providing a connection to a writer who is both personally unknown to the reader and physically absent—even, in many cases, dead. In Trollope’s inversion of that logic, the book offers disconnection from a known person, one who’s all too physically present and all too intimately known.
In that sense, he one-ups the novel that set out to “adapt” Madame Bovary for English audiences, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife, published in the same year as The Small House at Allington. During her honeymoon, Braddon’s heroine shows less resemblance to Emma than to Alexandrina Crosbie. Where Emma reads without even registering Charles’s proximity, Isabel (as befits a more straitlaced English bride) hesitates to read in her new husband’s presence: “There were no books in the sitting-room of the family hotel; and even if there had been, the honeymoon week seemed to Isabel a ceremonial period. She felt as if she were on a visit, and was not free to read.”12 Like Alexandrina, Isabel wants to get out a book; like Alexandrina, she recognizes that desire as disrespectful to her husband. But there the similarity ends. Where Braddon makes the presence of another human being an impediment to reading, Trollope makes it the reason to read. Where Braddon contrasts self-indulgent reading with ceremonial visiting, Trollope parses reading itself as a ceremony.
Figure 2.5. “Emancipation,” Punch, 5 December 1891, 270.
That model fits neither with conduct-book homilies about reading aloud nor with novelistic celebrations of solitary reading: here, reading becomes most social when it’s least sociable. Maud Churton Braby’s 1909 conduct book Modern Marriage and How to Bear It decrees that when a man is at his club, “the wife can have a picnic dinner—always a joy to a woman—with a book propped up before her, can let herself go.” In choosing a book as the marker of freedom from the husband’s gaze, Modern Marriage sanitizes the fictional convention that made reading a symptom of marital breakdown. Yet its reasoning bears an equally uncanny resemblance to the 1857 conduct book advising women traveling alone that “civilities should be politely acknowledged; but as a general rule, a book is the safest resource for ‘an unprotected female’ “(quoted in K. Flint, The Woman Reader 100, 105). The oppressively intimate home mimics the excessively public railway carriage: in both cases, the opposite sex is what the book makes bearable.
Farther from home, Bill Bell’s study of ships bound for Australia shows reading serving both as a social cement and as a guarantor of privacy. Sociable, because passengers read aloud, exchanged books, and produced and circulated manuscript newspapers; but also antisocial, as when Elizabeth Monaghan welcomed a storm because without the possibility of going on deck “I can be so much more alone, get a book and shut myself up in my cabin quite cosy.” The book can be used to mark territory even in its owner’s absence: as a newsletter for passengers instructs, “When the cushions at the after part of the saloon are arranged in a particular inviting manner and a book or glove is placed thereon, it may be surmised that the occupant of the couch is absent temporarily and that if another were to take possession it would be an intrusion” (136).
Public spaces like the ship and railway dramatize problems of privacy about whose domestic equivalents the novel has more to say than the conduct book. In fact, the tension between domestic and public reading etiquettes becomes one of the central themes of the professional press that springs up in the wake of the Public Libraries Act of 1850. The growing opposition between books marketed for collective reading at home and for individual use in public—on the one hand, the “Railway Libraries” founded in the 1840s and the Tauchnitz series of English-language books marketed to travelers on the Continent; on the other, series with names like “Parlour Library” and magazines called Household Words or Family Paper—simplified a reality in which members of the same family might read different books side by side in the parlor, while the same newspapers that commuters used to carve out privacy were sold by the cries of newsboys, read aloud, and passed around from hand to hand (Davies 49).
Even if the mid-Victorian novel exchanged guilt about solipsistic reading for cynicism about rhetorical reading, therefore, the presence of parallel scenes in conduct books makes clear that this isn’t the only genre or the only moment where cultural consumption looks like an avoidance tactic, any more than reading constitutes the only way to achieve that effect. On the one hand, the scene of a man fending off his wife with a paper would be cyclically redeployed in other genres and even other media. By the end of the century, the conjugal newspaper had figured so regularly in Punch that even a political cartoon could allude to the device in the confidence that readers would recognize it at a second remove. In the twentieth century, pre-Code Hollywood learned to cut between the husband unfurling his newspaper at breakfast to ward off his chattering wife and the wife, abandoned, staring blankly at a book in her solitary bed (as, for example, in Clarence Brown’s 1936 Wife vs. Secretary). In the twenty-first, the railway novels that represented commuters hiding behind newspapers have given way to in-flight catalogs depicting husbands cocooned in an audiovisual equivalent to Anderson’s “lair of the skull” (Anderson 35).13
Figure 2.6. “Married for
Money—The Honeymoon,” Punch, 1 January 1859.
On the other hand, reading is not the only way for novelistic characters to carve out private space: Jeff Nunokawa argues, in the opposite direction, that George Eliot deploys “the sexual as the primal scene of social withdrawal” (“Eros and Isolation” 839). Needlework can be rhymed with book holding as easily as newspaper reading with novel reading: in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, “Lord Fawn took up a book. Lady Fawn busied herself in her knitting” (66). Like a book, a piece of needlework can be looked down to or up from; both can connote either obliviousness to others or awareness of others from whom one needs to hide. The mother in another novel enjoins her daughter not “to get into a habit of thinking, musing, and meditating, . . . sitting in a listless way with a book upon your knees which you are not reading, or a piece of embroidery between your fingers, which is continually being pulled out to correct false stitches” (Millington 395). Elsewhere, Trollope makes aggressive reading interchangeable with conspicuous sleeping: in He Knew He Was Right, for example, Colonel Osborne hides from his fellow traveler on the train by alternately “burying himself behind a newspaper” and pretending to sleep (219). When a Brontë character sleeps, she dreams; when a Trollope character sleeps, he shams.
In alternately flirting with and swerving from the question of what exactly it is that characters are reading, these fictions extend the traditional understanding of the novel itself as a placeholder or a blank. The reading in novels borrows its emptiness from the reading of novels. Put differently, novels project onto the newspaper their own task of reconciling what Coleridge called “indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy” (1:48–49).14 Trollope himself (again, in a lecture rather than a work of fiction) complained of novel-readers’ “listless, vague, half-sleepy interest over the doings of these unreal personages” (Anthony Trollope, “The Higher Education of Women” 85). Yet reading differs from sleeping or sex—to state the obvious—in that it’s also the activity on which those representations depend.
Figure 2.7. “The Honeymoon,” Punch, 17 May 1884, 230.
Figure 2.8. “A Perfect Wretch,” Punch, 1 January 1851, 42.
This isn’t to say that the novels which embed reader-unresponse necessarily imagine provoking it themselves. At one extreme, Thackeray’s descriptions of nonreading derive much of their shock value from breaking frame: thus a clubman “lies asleep upon one of the sofas. What is he reading? Hah! ‘Pendennis,’ No. VII.—hum, let us pass on” (Sketches and Travels in London 43). The narrator of The Newcomes instructs us to picture the page in front of us being read first by a woman in her husband’s presence and then by a man trapped in a compartment with his wife:
Figure 2.9. “The Waning of the Honeymoon,” Punch, 1 August 1896, 54.
I think of a lovely reader laying down the page and looking over at her unconscious husband, asleep, perhaps, after dinner. Yes, Madam, a closet he hath; and you, who pry into everything, shall never have the key of it. I think of some honest Othello pausing over this very sentence in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing at Desdemona opposite to him, innocently administering sandwiches to their little boy—I am trying to turn off the sentence with a joke, you see. (151)
Such passages are as self-referential as any in Don Quixote or its imitators—with the difference that the commonality between character and addressee depends not on their shared reading (as it does in the passages I quoted earlier from Madame Bovary), but on the contrary in their shared failure to read. At the opposite extreme, Trollope avoids the second person in his descriptions of nonreading—an absence all the more striking given that his descriptions of marital unhappiness are elsewhere in The Small House punctuated by a refrain of “Who does not know . . . ” His point is less that we must be paying as little attention to the description of Crosbie’s marital battles as Crosbie is paying to the battles reported in the Times, than on the contrary that the dullness of the newspaper provides a foil to the interest of the novel.15
SELF DENIALS
Since Don Quixote at least, writers and critics alike have assumed that one defining feature of the novel lies in its investment in the act of reading. No other genre, this story goes, so inventively represents the act on which its own realization depends; none so ambivalently explores the pleasures and dangers of the absorption, the virtuality, and the selfhood (alias selfishness) that reading in general and fiction reading in particular exemplify. What, then, to make of novelistic representations of unread books—or, conversely, of the breakdown of narration at moments where we expect reading to happen?
One answer might be that such moments add up to an antiquixotic paradigm: a strand of realism that shares classic quixotism’s obsession with the book, but that values bibliographic or social surfaces over linguistic or psychological depths. Where the novel from its beginnings has tended to imagine reading as heroically antisocial, Trollope makes it reductively other-directed. As pseudoreading replaces overreading, the old fear that fiction might prompt solipsism—as in a 1795 article in the Sylph that pictures mothers “crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread”16—finds its obverse in Trollope’s understanding of silent reading as an interpersonal act. The Sylph assumes that novels bring readers closer to the consciousness of imagined characters or virtual authors only at the price of distancing them from others in their own world. But where that zero-sum logic imagines engagement as a limited resource—the more feeling we give textually mediated characters, the less is left over for our immediate surroundings—Trollope assumes the problem to be a shortage of excuses for disattending. When Diderot described Clarissa as “a gospel brought onto earth to sunder husband from wife, father from son, brother from sister,” he measured the novel’s power against the strength of the social ties that it could override.17 Trollope merely substitutes means for end.
Silent reading asserts not just one’s own selfhood—as when Sarah Ellis warns that “the habit of silent and solitary reading has the inevitable effect, in a family, of opening different trains of thought and feelings, which tend rather to separate than to unite” (252)—but also, more aggressively, its right to be respected by others. Yet the more widely a book is “recognized” (and in Kirsteen Oliphant seems to mean both senses of that word) as a bid for what Goffman would later call “civil inattention,” the ruder reading becomes. The impropriety of reading in the presence of one’s spouse brings home the more general etiquette under which (as one guide rules in 1893) “a gentleman or lady may look over a book of engravings or a collection of photographs with propriety, but it is impolite to read in company” (Woodburn 219). In Elizabeth Sewell’s Tractarian novel Gertrude, a girl asked to help her mother with some sewing immediately picks up a novel: “‘Well, I will see about it presently,’ replied Jane; and she went to fetch her book, and then, seating herself by the drawing-room window, forgot her mother’s wishes” (7). (The mother who reads Miss Braddon instead of washing the supper dishes finds her match in a daughter who engages in leisure activities instead of contributing to the domestic economy.) Any Brontë reader will recognize the name and the window seat: the only difference lies in the value attached to solipsism by a didactic bildungsroman or an “antichristian composition.”
What the bildungsroman codes as selfhood, didactic texts parse as selfishness. An 1894 conduct book trying to illustrate consideration for others can find no clearer example than that of a girl refraining from reading. “You are sitting, let us suppose, by a sleeping invalid, the third volume of your novel with its thrilling dénouement is on the mantel-piece just out of your reach. Your boots creak, or your dress rustles, you dare not stir; there you have to sit, perhaps in growing dusk, and you dare not light a candle. These are the kinds of little self-denials that really touch us” (quoted in K. Flint, The Woman Reader 93). Where we think of absorption as a virtue—to check Facebook is to succumb to laziness, to read a novel cover to cover is to find a stable self—Victorian conduct literatur
e, and fiction, valued the willingness to be distracted. Another Elizabeth Sewell novel praises its heroine for “fetching her work directly she knew that it ought to be had; preparing for a walk as soon as the proper time arrived; giving up an interesting book whenever a superior duty claimed her attention”; the measure of her moral improvement is that “Margaret put aside her novel, though she had reached the most interesting part of the third volume” (Margaret Percival 1:240, 52; my emphasis).
In the midcentury tract Susan Osgood’s Prize (of which my own copy is inscribed as a Sunday-school reward), the heroine’s fascination with a copy of Edgeworth’s Simple Susan given to her as a school prize instills two irreconcilable desires: to find herself in her namesake and to lose herself in the book. When her sister asks her to fill the kettle, “Susan was still busy over the picture, and was wondering which part of the story it described; she did not move at first. ‘Now, Susan, dear,’ said her grandmother, kindly, ‘be brisk, I see you are not a “Simple Susan” yet.’” The desire to read exemplifies the desire to ignore others: Susan “had been put out when her father called her from her book, to weed his flower beds.” Conversely, we know that the lessons of Simple Susan have been absorbed once Susan Osgood refrains from reading it: “The little book looked tempting on the table by Grannie, but Susan could not get to it yet. There was ‘washing up’ to be done” (Prosser 20, 29, 22). The logic is mechanical but irrefutable: if reading makes you a bad wife or mother or daughter (or, as we’ll see in chapters 4 and 6, an even worse servant), then not reading must make you a good one.
