Reading for Health: Bibliotherapy and the Medicalized Humanities in the United States, 1930-1965
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Reading for Health: Bibliotherapy and the Medicalized Humanities in the United States, 1930-1965 Monique S. Dufour Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Science and Technology Studies Matthew Wisnioski, chair Kathleen W. Jones Mark V. Barrow, Jr. Ann F. LaBerge August 18, 2014 Blacksburg, Virginia Keywords: history, reading, literature, science and technology studies, medical humanities. © Monique S. Dufour 2014 Reading for Health: Bibliotherapy and the Medicalized Humanities in the United States, 1930-1965 Monique S. Dufour Abstract In this dissertation, I tell the story of midcentury attempts to establish, develop, and study bibliotherapy in the US. I follow three groups–hospital librarians, psychologists and psychiatrists, and language arts educators–from the 1930s to the 1960s, when each in its own ways expressed belief in the therapeutic power of reading and set out to enact that belief as a legitimate practice in the evolving contexts of its profession and in the broader culture. These professionals tried to learn what happened within people during and after reading, and they attempted to use what they learned to apply reading toward healthy ends. Today, therapeutic reading has become commonplace to the extent that it seems natural. In this dissertation, I aim to recover and explore the midcentury processes by which therapeutic reading came to seem at once natural, medical, and scientific. I argue that midcentury bibliotherapy functioned in concert with an evolving cultural narrative that I call “reading for health.” The reading for health narrative gathers up into a coherent story various and deep beliefs and commonplaces about the power of books over our minds and our bodies. In midcentury bibliotherapy, reading for health was reinvigorated as a story about the marriage of science and culture, a unity narrative that claimed the iconic book–capable of swaying minds and societies alike, and burnished with all that western civilization signified–for the professions that applied reading toward their healthy ends. As I demonstrate, however, these narratives were not confined to discrete professions, but functioned as a part of a larger cultural movement set upon the shifting fault lines of the humanities and science. Each of the groups I follow took an avid interest in what I have called the embodied reader. Rather than viewing reading as an act of a disembodied mind, they understood the practice as a psychosomatic experience in which mind and body could not be disconnected. Moreover, they believed that reading could capitalize on the embodied nature of thought and affect, and engender healthy effects. In this way, the embodied reader was constructed as a new, modern locus of both the literary experience and the therapeutic ethos. By valuing above all else how reading could be used to achieve health, advocates of bibliotherapy fashioned a form of applied humanities, one that defined the meaning and judged the value of books in terms of their utility and efficacy. In so doing, they contributed to the development of a form of the medicalized humanities that now resonates in three contemporary sites: (1.) the study and use of bibliotherapy in clinical psychology; (2.) the dominant and naturalized approach to books known as therapeutic reading; and (3.) the medical humanities. iii “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.” —Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” (1960) iv Acknowledgements On one of the first episodes of “The French Chef,” Julia Child demonstrated how to cook a potato pancake in a skillet. As she was about to flip it, she explained that “when you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions.” You may know this story–it’s the one where the pancake shattered on the stovetop, and she scooped it back into the pan as she reminded the viewer that you’re alone in the kitchen, and who is going to know, anyway? But it’s also the episode in which Child offered this remarkable insight about how we learn to do anything: “The only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them.” My chair Dr. Matthew Wisnioski told me (among the countless helpful things that he told me along the way): “Just treat this dissertation like you are making something.” He taught me to have the courage of my convictions, and to go ahead and flip the thing. Thank you, Matt, for sharing your intelligence and creativity as a thinker, writer, reader, and mentor. Thank you to the department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech, and to department chair Dr. Skip Furhman for his confidence and support. I am grateful for the STS staff and for my fellow students and colleagues, who make our department a warm and exciting place to work. Thanks especially to Dr. Richard Hirsh, Dr. Gary Downey, and Dr. Sonja Schmid. I am very grateful to committee members. Dr. Kathleen Jones encouraged this project from the start, and she has helped me to persevere and to improve it far beyond what I ever could have accomplished without her incisive commentary and v encouragement in equal measures. Dr. Ann LaBerge has been an insightful guide to the history of medicine. Thank you to Dr. Mark Barrow, who has welcomed me as a teacher and colleague in History, and to whose example as a writer and colleague I aspire. To my students: When I returned to school in order to complete my PhD, I got to remember what it is to feel vulnerable and to open myself to feedback and to not- knowing as only a student does. As I continue to teach, I promise to remember this experience, and to read my students’ work in a constructive spirit of understanding and an appreciation for the pleasures and struggles of forming and expressing ideas in words and sentences and paragraphs. Thank you to my colleagues and for the meaningful, formative work at CEUT at Virginia Tech, at the University Writing Program at Duke University, and in the English Departments and the University Writing Programs at Syracuse University and the University of Rhode Island. I am grateful for my friends in writing and life (too many to mention by name, I am so lucky to say). Marian Mollin, Jennifer Ahern Dodson, Ashley Shew Heflin, Paul Maliszewski, Tracy Proctor, and Lisa Leslie: we did it. Thank you to my parents for their support, acceptance, and love. Thank you to Nicole Dufour DiCarlo, for her deep and irreplaceable friendship. This dissertation is for my husband, Jim Collier: before, during, after, always. vi Reading for Health: Bibliotherapy and the Medicalized Humanities in the United States, 1930-1965 -Table of Contents- Introduction: The Embodied Reader 1 1. Healing through Reading: The Medical and Scientific Aspirations of the Patients’ Library Movement 23 2. Reading The Human Mind: Bibliotherapy in the Psychiatric Clinic and in the World 58 3. “What is Reading Doing to Johnny?”: The Education of the Healthy Personality in Language Arts Instruction and Research 94 4. The Embodied Reader, Reimagined: Sadie Peterson Delaney and the “Library as Laboratory” 122 Conclusion: The End(s) of the Humanities 140 Bibliography 148 vii Illustrations 1. American Library Association, “Hospital Library Service,” c. 1925, 29 poster, 26 in. x 29 in. Used with permission of the American Library Association Archives, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 2. Vic Herman, “Bibliotherapy or the Bibliopractic Defensive,” 64 c. 1944, New York Times Book Review. Alice I. Bryan saved this annotated clipping of the cartoon in her personal files. Used under fair use, 2014. 3. “Psychiatrist William Menninger,” Time Magazine cover, October 82 25, 1948. Beside Menninger is a locked brain, to which he holds the key, embellished with a question mark on the handle. Used under fair use, 2014. 4. “Books as Bridges.” 1946, Poster, US Children’s Book Week. 116 “Books as Bridges” was a common and telling theme throughout the 1940s. It demonstrated how the internal, psychological experience of reading was believed to function as a real, concrete way of making connections between and among people in the material world. Moreover, these connections forged through books and reading were thought to have progressive and healthening effects on individuals and on society, effects as tangible and real as the bridges built by the engineers and “technicians” in the midcentury US. Used under fair use, 2014. 5. Meta Warrick Fuller, “Ethiopia-Awakening,” c. 1921. 127 <http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=1-2-227>. Public domain. viii Abbreviations ALA American Library Association DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders HBG Hospital Book Guide LWS Library War Service PEA Progressive Education Association PLM Patients’ Library Movement STS Science and Technology Studies US United States VA Veterans’ Administration ix -Introduction- The Embodied Reader In 1932, American Legion Monthly reporter Fairfax Downey visited a Veterans’ Bureau Hospital in Kentucky to cover a promising new remedy: reading. His article “Dose: Books as Needed” featured a photo of a smiling patient in pajamas holding an open book in a tidy white hospital bed, and a stocked rolling library cart beside him.