Serendipities

Earlier this year, I wrote something about the desk where I work at home. I just discovered that The Guardian has a site on writers’ rooms in their books section. I enjoyed spying into writers’ rooms, and reading about their writing habits (notebooks, typewriters, fountain pens — be sure not to miss the post-its in Will Self’s room). Here’s a picture of Hanif Kureishi’s room, who, by the way, is of the opinion that every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss in their room as an inspiration. Just so you know.

The new (RSC) Complete Works of Shakespeare, based on the First Folio and edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen comes with a companion website. The site contains a lot of interesting material: a video-clip the First Folio, a powerpoint on editing by Eric Rasmussen, a long essay which makes the case for the editors’ choice of the Folio as their base text, and a wonderful Shakespearean blog by Jonathan Bate.

The site also has a reading room, in which you may retire to acquaint yourself with the 100+ best books on Shakespeare (opt for the Modern Library site if you prefer to see the list as one page.) Read the rest of this entry »

Brett over at Sound and Fury needs our moral support. He’s been informed by a colleague that he has a reputation among students as “the guy that fails folks for using Wikipedia”, and now wonders whether he is doing the right thing.

I think Brett’s right, and hey, he should be proud of his reputation! I tell students not to use Wikipedia as a source in their essays too. I have had discussions about this in class with students who felt that it would be cheating not to acknowledge that they went to Wikipedia for inspiration first. They admit they use Wikipedia because it is accessible and easy to read. I admit I often use it, too — when I want to know what on earth fan fiction is, for example.

When I was a student and Wikipedia did not yet exist, I guess the equivalent was the encyclopedia that sat in a bookcase in my parents’ living room. I used it, sometimes, to look things up; sometimes even to serendipitously leaf through the Ce-Dr volume (I admit it — I should have had better things to do on my weekends). But I never used it as a source in my essays. An encyclopedia just isn’t an academic source. Nor does it become one when it goes online and grows into a collaborative effort.

Anyone can go onto the internet and find Wikipedia. Students should know their way around bibliographies, databases, libraries. That is one of the skills they are taught, and one of the skills that future employers will expect them to have mastered. That is what I tell my students.

In my next discussion in class, I am definitely going to cite these words of Wikipedia’s founder.

Also:

• Interestingly, Wikipedia itself has an entry that lists academic publications that use Wikipedia as a source. They claim they did not include academic studies of Wikipedia.
• Blogging the Renaissance did some random Wiki-testing last year.
• Early Modern Notes was there first, as always.

The Louis Couperus Museum in the Hague this autumn hosts an exhibition on women and reading: The Limits of Propriety: Women and Reading around 1900. I will definitely be going; watch this space for a review.

From the site:

The exhibition examines the development of the views on the limits of propriety around 1900 and the position of Couperus’ work in it. Paintings, water colours and reproductions give an interesting image of how women read in those days. A collection of ‘forbidden literature’ gives insight in the supposed dangers to which the feminine soul was exposed.

I wrote two posts on the gender of reading last year (1, 2). My parents, who revealed that they read my blog (hello mum and dad!), gave me the Dutch translation of Stefan Bollmann’s Frauen, die Lesen, sind Gefährlich (Women who read are dangerous, translated into English as Reading Women) as a present at my post-PhD defense party last June. It was accompanied by a hilarious presentation involving photos of me as a dangerous child perpetually engrossed in books, but I won’t go into that here…

The book is wonderful, and I learned a lot from it. I would just like to return to one of the paintings I included in an earlier post, because I know more about it now than I did before. This is Pieter Janssens Elinga’s Reading Woman (c. 1670):

I used it in that earlier post as one of the examples of Jolande Withuis’ theory that a woman who is reading is concentrated in an intimate personal sphere, and gains a view to another world. I think I saw this reading woman as empowered. Now, Bollmann’s book has revealed to me which world it is that this woman is absorbed in. Apparently, if you get close enough to the painting, you can just read the pages. She is reading a book called Een schoone historie van den Ridder Malegys, die het vervaarlyk paard Ros beyaard wan: en die veel wonderlyke en avontuerlyke dingen bedreef. It is a Middle Dutch chivalric romance about a knight called Malegys, who ‘did many wonderful and adventurous things’, a prose translation of a thirteenth-century French romance, Maugis d’Aigremont.

The reading woman in this picture is a maid. She should probably be cleaning the room she is in. Her mistress’ luxurious red shoes are still standing where she left them the evening before. Instead, this maid makes use of the penetrating sunlight to indulge in the adventures of knight Malegys. Romances, of course, were often associated with a female readership in the early modern period. Helen Hackett in her Women and Romance fiction in the Seventeenth Century describes a stereotypical example:

A chambermaid in the 1615 edition of Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters ‘reads Greenes workes over and over [Robert Greene was one of the well-read romance authors in the period] but is so carried away with the Myrrour of Knighthood, she is many times resolv’d to run out of her selfe, and become a Ladie Errant.’

It was not unusual for Dutch maids to be able to read, although they could not write. Literacy in The Netherlands apparently was the highest in Europe in the early modern period, due to the influence of Protestantism. The book might belong to her mistress; perhaps the maid saw it lying about when she came in with the bowl of fruit that is now dangerously perched on the chair’s leather cushion.

Whereas I first saw this reading woman as empowered, because concentrated in her own world, I now read the painting differently. The historical context, and the clue in the pages of the book she is reading, point to a disapproval of the reading maid, who is wasting her time in fantasy, whereas she should be working. The two views are two sides of the same coin, however.

In an interesting article titled ‘Men Reading Women Reading: Interpreting Images of Women Readers,’ James Conlon argues that any reading woman poses a threat to patriarchal culture. ‘The book takes her out of the conventional world of male dominance and places her in a textual world where pleasure and wisdom are, literally, in her own hands.’ (40) Therefore, he argues, a male painter portraying such a reading woman will always want to assert his presence, to affirm his dominion. The painter controls the sight of the female subject he portrays. Elinga’s painting could be read in this light as well: the woman is sitting with her back to us: she is unaware of us, or the painter, watching her read. Moreover, by hinting at her sloth (the shoes and the fruit), the painter controls the female lust for reading by imposing a moral judgement on it. Is it so, then, that female reading is empowering, and that this is precisely what causes the urge to control it?

Another interesting article, Stephan Schindler’s ‘Male Fantasies of Female Reading in Eighteenth-Century Germany’ agrees with this idea that a reading woman was historically perceived a threat to patriarchy. He describes how in eighteenth-century Germany, literary critics, philosophers, pedagogues and doctors were obsessed with the regulation of female reading. Central in their obsession was the notion that women’s experience of reading might be sexual in nature. Schindler provides a fascinating quotation from the Hannoverisches Magazin (1789). It illustrates how female enjoyment of the text was feared to be as ‘real’ as sexual enjoyment:

Through the powers of her imagination she creates an image with which she goes to bed at night and with which she wakes up in the morning. Is this self-produced image not as dangerous and not as harmful as the secret lover himself?

His article shows how all kinds of professionals sought to pathologize this female reading mania (Lesewut or Lesesucht in German), in order to cure these women and to eliminate the threat posed by female desire. Pierre-Antoine Baudouin’s painting (1760) printed in Frauen die Lesen shows a woman who suffers from such Lesesucht: she has fallen into an ecstatic swoon while reading a novel (Boll even suggests that her other hand might be under her skirt).

Interestingly, James Conlon in his article also discusses paintings which in his view do not seek to control or dominate the reading woman depicted. Examples are Edward Hopper’s Interior (Model Reading) and the paintings of women reading by Mary Cassatt (one of whom reads Le Figaro rather than a novel). These paintings, in his view, do not play to male fantasies, but depict reading women as subjects in their own right.

Read more? Here are some tips: