| Description |
I examine literary descriptions and visual images of girls and women reading in the Romantic tradition and the long nineteenth century, borrowing theory and vocabulary from the analysis of paintings in order to better understand the visual aspects of written texts. I argue that looking at readers changed the meaning of the act of reading in different ways throughout the centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Joyce, for instance, as male writers, write over the images of the female readers Sophie and Gerty MacDowell, respectively, in order to comment on female education and culture more broadly. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women writers reappropriate the image of the reading girl, which had previously (and still is) often used as a symbol or tool of communication between men. Looking at Sophie from Rousseau's Emile, scenes of domestic reading in Mary Martha Sherwood's History of the Fairchild Family, and the relationship between Sara Crewe in A Little Princess and her writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, I observe that the image of the reading girl collected different meanings throughout the nineteenth century, and which point toward the twenty-first century cliché of the bookish heroine. The most important of these meanings included a contrast in subjectivity in children's literature between a didactic adult-child orientation and a mode in which the author more closely identifies with the child under scrutiny. These writers use literary devices, especially allusion, to rewrite themselves as reading girls and bridge that experiential gap between themselves and their young reading audience. |
