How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (10 page)

No matter, since what Crosbie needs is less to take his mind off Alexandrina than to get
her
eye off him. Crosbie’s conventionally agreed-upon signal for what Erving Goffman calls “civil inattention” is ratified in turn by the novel’s refusal to tell us what exactly is in the newspaper going unread. “He could not fix his mind upon the politics of the day”; neither can the narrator, who proceeds without transition to detail the thoughts that crowd out the news: “Had he not made a terrible mistake? Of what use to him in life would be that thing of a woman that sat opposite him?”
and so on, for the space of a paragraph (Anthony Trollope,
The
Small
House
at
Allington
498). We can read (or at least read about) Crosbie’s mind more than we can read over his shoulder. His newspaper might as well be one of the fake broadsheets sold by the California-based Earl Hays Press for use as props on film sets throughout most of the twentieth century, the periodical equivalent of a dummy spine. And the symmetry of this scene extends the paper’s emptiness to the genre that frames it: the novel shows as little interest in the content of Crosbie’s newspaper as Alexandrina feels in the content of her novel. Literalization again: what the newspaper “covers” isn’t current events, but a character’s body.

That absence can best be measured against the nineteenth century’s most canonical variation on the quixotic theme. In
Madame
Bovary
, physical gestures (“she turned the pages,” “Emma greased her hands on the dust of reading-rooms,” “delicately handling their fine satin bindings”) serve to introduce the content of the books being read.

So, when she was fifteen, Emma spent six months breathing the dust of old lending libraries. Later, with Walter Scott, she became enthralled by things historical and would dream of oaken chests, guardrooms, and minstrels. (Flaubert 34; the remainder of the paragraph describes the plot and characters of a historical novel)

The girls used to read [gift books] in the dormitory. Handling their handsome satin bindings with great care, Emma . . . shivered as she blew the tissue paper off each engraving; it would lift up half folded, then gently fall back against the opposite page. There, beside the balustrade of a balcony, a young man in a short cloak would be clasping in his arms a young girl wearing a white dress . . . (35)

She would even bring her book to the table and turn over the pages while Charles ate and talked to her . . . Paris, vaster than the ocean, shimmered before Emma’s eyes in a rosy haze . . . The world of high diplomacy moved about on gleaming parquet floors, in drawing rooms paneled with mirrors, round oval tables covered by gold-fringed velvet cloths. (52)

Like virtual speech tags, these descriptions of books warn the reader that what follows should be attributed to another text. In Trollope, on the contrary, no paraphrase of textual content motivates or even follows the description of the hand or eye of the person holding the book.

We have a special word for persons when they’re represented in fiction (“character”), but none for represented books. Yet both raise analogous questions. Is it legitimate to imagine an offstage life for either (for example, should we picture what news items Crosbie’s newspaper contains)?
What’s the relation between the use we make of the represented object and the use that we would make of its real-life referent? The fruit painted in a still life can’t be eaten, but painted spines can sometimes be read. I say “sometimes” because, like any other object, books can be represented at varying degrees of resolution—not just in visual art, where, as Garrett Stewart has shown, print is conventionally recognizable but illegible, but also in words (G. Stewart, “The Mind’s Sigh”; Butor 41–43).

If Flaubertian pastiche forms one extreme, the other end of the spectrum is anchored by Henry James’s habit of withholding author and title but providing something like a descriptive bibliography: the color of the cover, the number of volumes, the size of the print. His references to “a small volume in blue paper” or “three books, one yellow and two pink,” make the book as empty as a patent pill (
The
Awkward
Age
934;
What
Maisie
Knew
636).
⁵
Like Woolf describing Rachel Vinrace “stirring the red and yellow volumes contemptuously,” James uses the visual to crowd out the verbal: a chromatic metonymy such as “yellowback” shares the dismissive form of a commercial term such as “penny dreadful” (Woolf,
The
Voyage
Out
304). The narrator of “Greville Fane,” too, brackets the content of his friend’s writing when he measures her rate of production by the fact that “every few months, at my club, I saw three volumes, in a green, in crimson, in blue” (H. James, “Greville Fane” 233).

When the protagonist of
In
the
Cage
pulls out a novel “very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks,” the repetition of a single word in two opposed senses opens a gap between bibliographic form and mimetic content (H. James,
In
the
Cage
119). The contrast between cheap typographical characters and rich fictional characters reverses the equally doubled logic of James’s large-leaded volume about the petty bourgeoisie. Trollope goes even further, contenting himself sometimes with generic markers (“her novel”), sometimes with even more purely physical descriptions (“books and paper,” “a paper or book”). These are phrases that an illiterate could have come up with.

If Trollope’s narrator denies us access to the content being read, Thackeray’s more often projects the invisibility of the inscribed text onto its own fictional readers. Thus at the Newcomes’ breakfast table:

“How interested you are in your papers,” resumes the sprightly Rosey. “What can you find in those hard politics?” Both gentlemen are looking at their papers with all their might, and no doubt cannot see one single word which those brilliant and witty leading articles contain. (853)

By juxtaposing a husband’s and father-in-law’s concentration on “papers” with their insensibility to “words,” the narrator changes the former from a metonymy for “newspapers” (and thus, transitively, for “news”)
to something more purely material: pieces of paper, regardless of the linguistic information that they “contain.”

The newspaper takes on a different meaning in the home from what it bears in the public sphere that Benedict Anderson names under the metonymy of “the subway [and the] barbershop”—the very spaces where men can escape squabbles with their wives. The national community that he imagines depends on each reader’s knowledge that distant strangers are reading different copies of the same newspaper—but also (although Anderson feels no need to spell this out) on the power of gender to provide a common denominator among readers who will never meet each other. Anderson’s logic thus reverses Trollope’s on every count: in one, not reading drives a wedge between opposite-sex intimates stuck in the same physical space; in the other, reading builds a bridge among physically distant same-sex strangers.
⁶

The trope of the husband hiding behind the paper might appear to complement the strand of literary-critical feminism (not to mention feminist fiction) that sees reading as a peculiarly feminine source of interiority, individuality, or authenticity—a means, as we learned in the 1960s, to “find oneself.” Barbara Sicherman’s observation that in the nineteenth-century United States “reading provided space—physical, temporal, and psychological—that permitted women to exempt themselves from traditional gender expectations, whether imposed by formal society or by family obligation,” is echoed a century later by Jan Radway’s contrast between the patriarchal content of contemporary romance novels and the feminist force of the act of reading or even holding them. In the Cold War–era households that Radway describes, books mark women’s personal time whether or not they’re being read (Sicherman 202; Radway,
Reading
the
Romance
213).

Books can screen mothers from children as easily as wives from husbands. The
Punch
cartoon entitled “How to Make a Chatelaine a Real Blessing to Mothers” finds its echo in a collection of librarians’ anecdotes reporting that “at the library at Hull a young girl was heard to whisper to her sister: ‘Don’t get one of Miss Braddon’s books. Ma will want to read it, and we shall have to wash up the supper things’” (Coutts 142). Sartre’s memory of his mother vanishing into the pages of a book repeats Arthur Clennam’s impression of his mother sitting “all day behind a bible—bound like her own construction of it in the hardest, barest, straightest boards”; Garrett Stewart recasts this trope in a psychoanalytic register, calling reading “the return of the repressed moment when your mother’s voice first went silent to you” (Sartre 34; G. Stewart, “Painted Readers, Narrative Regress” 141; see also G. Stewart,
The
Look
of
Reading
105). If reading can distract from children, children can distract from reading. In an 1850
Father’s and Mother’s Manual and Youth’s Instructor
a story portrays a mother forgetting her novel as she “imprints upon [her child’s] lips the kiss of love,” but then returning to it until, even when her sick child cries out her name, “her ear caught the sound, but it made no impression upon her mind till it had several times been repeated . . . She was absorbed in a book; her very being seemed bound up in it.” At one moment, the printed child takes the place of a book; at another, the “bound” mother becomes as deaf to the child’s voice as an inanimate pile of paper (Park 141).

Figure 2.1. “How to Make a Chatelaine a Real Blessing to Mothers,”
Punch
, 24 February 1849, 78.

Even as the woman’s book stands opposite the man’s newspaper, the trope remains constant across media: a woman’s sheet music can be counterposed to a man’s newspaper as easily as can a codex, and complaints about mothers engrossed in their smartphones update for the twenty-first century a complaint that stretches back at least to the eighteenth.
⁷

Figure 2.2. James Gillray, “Matrimonial Harmonics,” 25 October 1805. Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, March 2007, British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress, 27 May 2011.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007677406/.

If the overinvested reader is prototypically female, the explanation may be (paradoxically enough) that the demand for women to be especially attuned to those around them creates an especially strong demand for escape. Yet the symmetrical structure of
The
Small
House
at
Allington
suggests that two can play at this game. The husbands of New Woman fiction who beat their wives for reading invert an older (but hardly dead) tradition that counterposes an intellectual husband to a shrewish wife. Women’s hostility to books continues to be ridiculed in a mock-epic register as late as one
Macmillan’s
contributor’s lament that

It is the custom of some ladies to make use of our works as weapons of offence in certain hostile emergencies, with which the peaceful arts should have nothing to do. A lady, who has differed in opinion with her lord and master, will not uncommonly retire behind a book and erect it into a sort of literary rampart. There is no making complaint of her want of attention to the matter under perusal
then
. . . Never was anything like her fixedness of attention. (C. A. Collins 162)