Academic Writing Sample - My Dissertation Conclusion

 

In literature, the female reader is no longer separable from the appearance of reading, although the relationship between the act and the appearance of the act has been varied and stretched at different literary moments. Outside of books, women express anxiety that their reading (whether for pleasure, or only because they seem to be enjoying themselves) appears idle, or even transgressive, to an observer.

Jane Austen, whose popularity remains strong in the twenty-first century, wrote images of reading girls and women that today have become shorthand for the performance of a certain kind of femininity, and a middle-class, educated leisure. And yet, her most popular heroine among mainstream audiences, Elizabeth Bennet, insists honestly that she is “not a great reader.” As the scene unfolds in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is attending to her ill sister, and enters the drawing-room where the rest of the guests are. She finds them playing cards (26), but declines the invitation to join them because she “suspected them to be playing high” (26) and instead opts to entertain herself with a book. Elizabeth cannot say aloud that she doesn’t have the pocket change to play for guinea stakes, or whatever the amount was, but the reader is given this information by the omniscient narrator reading her silent thoughts.

Mr. Hurst then remarks that it is “singular” to prefer reading to cards, to which his sister-in-law replies (famously), “Miss Eliza Bennet [. . .] despises cards. She is a great reader and has no pleasure in anything else” (26). Elizabeth immediately disagrees, although when she says “I deserve neither such praise nor such censure,” everyone involved understands that being “a great reader” is praise. And yet, as the conversation passes on to libraries and other social status signals, “Elizabeth was so much caught by what passed, as to leave her very little attention for her book; and soon laying it wholly aside, she drew near the card-table, and stationed herself between Mr. Bingley and his eldest sister, to observe the game” (26-27). Elizabeth is an extrovert, more interested in people and conversation than in the books that her financial situation forces her to choose instead of cards.

Despite Elizabeth’s honest protests, as film adaptations and interpretations progress, reading becomes a more prominent part of Elizabeth’s character until in the 2006 adaptation Kiera Knightly as Elizabeth opens the film in close-up, walking silently absorbed in a thick volume, her face towards the camera. The background music is light, expressive, Romantic-era piano – somewhere between Liszt and Debussy. The camera abruptly shifts, and suddenly we are looking over her shoulder to the pages of her book. The words are not legible, and the subject matter is equally obscured, but the filmmakers mean only to identify Elizabeth as a reader, and to make that intimate connection with the viewer who has read Pride and Prejudice, and perhaps more than once (as Joe Fox [Tom Hanks] teases Kathleen Kelly [Meg Ryan] in You’ve Got Mail [1998]) . Elizabeth ends the scene by closing the leather-bound volume, and caressing the cover. Before the camera cuts, moving to a more objective distance, the spectator has just a few moments to admire the spectacle – the delicate shoulders and embossed spine of the book. These few moments are meant to evoke “reader” as an identity. The scene contains several details which gesture to Elizabeth’s affection for books, but do not carry them through with precision. Her bookmark, for instance, does not mark the place she stops reading, and the only diegetic sound (other than geese) is a contented sigh as Elizabeth brushes her hand over the cover. This is a deep affection for the object of the book (empty like Rousseau’s Sophie?), not the anger/disappointment of an absorbed reader who has been interrupted by reality, as Burnett describes through Sara.

An earlier (very loose) adaptation, the Bollywood-esque Bride and Prejudice (2004) also emphasizes reading as appearance and identity. As Kiran (“Miss Bingley”) and Lalita (“Elizabeth”) sit poolside by Darcy, Lalita pulls out a heavy book. Kiran expresses scorn that Lalita bothered to drag such a large volume on vacation, and Lalita sarcastically remarks that Kiran would only regret that it wouldn’t leave room for her makeup. Although the script means to take the “substance” side of the appearance vs. substance debate, both women are strikingly beautiful in their swimwear. Indira Varma (Kiran) is one of Britain’s leading actresses, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, also a leading actress, was crowned Miss World in 1994. Lest she be mistaken for vapid, Kiran brings Darcy into the conversation by alluding to their time at Oxford. But in both women’s arguments exists the need for the look of reading – the appearance of it, whether it is the large hardback volume lugged to the side of the pool, or name-dropping the world’s oldest university.

In 2015 Dawn S. Opel described a social-media phenomenon she calls “the reader selfie” to describe photographs or constructed images of women reading, especially in old-fashioned dress. She argues that “the reader selfie offers a site to first display how female literary fans choose to construct their appearance in the private act of their fandom (that is, reading)” (1.3). These readers, women reading for pleasure specifically, construct their identity through the appearance of the act of reading. They portray themselves in images of a body in which the mind is absorbed or absent. While attending high school, I had a similar experience. My professional senior photos included props and costumes that were to encapsulate my teenage identity. I chose to bring a large book (Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, I think, chosen from my father’s bookshelf because it looked appropriately old), and like Marilyn Monroe, opened it to read while the photographer changed his film. He liked the pose, and asked me to stay still while he framed it. The image he created from that moment was of my own absorption. Like Fried’s absorptive paintings, it was deliberately composed to give an impression that I had forgotten the camera, when I could not possibly have done so.

Opel observes that these women who take reading selfies represent themselves as leisure readers, while they are still “so conflicted about taking time to read when work both outside and inside the home looms” (1.4). This identity, constructed through the appearance of reading in its connection to the broader, social meaning of the act of reading (education, introversion, etc.), is also insignificantly connected to the literature and style of the eras my study has touched on: attitudes toward reading influenced especially by Rousseau and female writers’ reactions to his stance on female education and literacy.

Girls are still being trained by the books they read to see reading as a visual act, as a way of performing this particular kind of postfeminist (as Opel calls it throughout her work) femininity, though J. K. Rowling carefully subverts this image in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. When Potter meets Hermione Granger, Rowling’s bookish heroine, she is neither reading nor looking wistfully out a train window while holding a book. She comes around helping a fellow eleven-year-old find his lost toad. She recognizes Harry’s name, and remarks, “I know all about you, of course – I got a few extra books for background reading, and you’re in Modern Magical History and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century” (106). Hermione knows the contents of the books, and they are neither novels, nor “pleasure reading” as the phrase is commonly used. Hermione’s pleasure is in knowledge gained from reading, not in the romance of the act itself. Hermione is also not described to Rowling’s readers as particularly idyllic, either in appearance or personality. “She had a bossy sort of voice, lots of bushy brown hair, and rather large front teeth” (105). The impression we get from these two illustrative passages is of someone in complete control of her mind, but who, by some necessity, does not keep such tight reins on her appearance as Rousseau would have counseled. This “natural” impression also has precedence in nineteenth-century painting.

In any of depiction of a reader, the observer gives meaning to the act of reading, whether that observer is an artist, a writer, the reader herself, or perhaps even a sociologist or historian. Observers are readers, and reading isn’t just the processing of words on the page; if so, a photocopier could be said to read. Reading is interpretive and creative, and as these long nineteenth-century writers and painters read the body of a reader, they multiply its meanings. It may be an expression of beauty and grace, the loss of innocence, luxury, idleness, desperate escapism, hubris, self-expression, pedagogy, moral instruction, privacy, defiance, compliance, or a performance of gender. It could be more than these, and more than one at once. Only with this understanding would one be able to properly conduct a more thorough historical study of these images than I have attempted. In doing so, we would not only gain insight into the changes occurring among the meanings of the act of reading, but into the relationship between audience and expression or self-expression through images of reading.