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©2008 Kathryn Lenore Steele ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©2008 Kathryn Lenore Steele ALL RIGHTS RESERVED NAVIGATING INTERPRETIVE AUTHORITIES: WOMEN READERS AND READING MODELS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY by KATHRYN LENORE STEELE A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Paula J. McDowell and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January 2008 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Navigating Interpretive Authorities: Women Readers and Reading Models in the Eighteenth Century By KATHRYN LENORE STEELE Dissertation Director: Paula J. McDowell Challenging existing notions of the oppositional reader, this dissertation proposes the model of limited interpretive authority as a new way of understanding reading practices in eighteenth-century England. It examines the women readers of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as illustrations of this concept. Chapter 1, a literature review, suggests that even as methodologies become more flexible, the modern, individual, and secular reader continues to inform studies of historical reading. Arguing that the field requires a reading model describing more limited individual interpretive authority, this chapter turns to eighteenth-century instructions for reading the Bible. These texts employ a language of self-discipline and self-censorship that characterizes reading which negotiates, instead of rejecting, interpretive authority. Chapter 2 explores the historically problematic emphasis on oppositional reading in the study of women readers. A review of these methodological problems is followed by an examination of Hester Mulso Chapone’s 1773 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. This influential conduct book theorizes and recommends socially-embedded reading practices; in recuperating ii novelistic reading practices for the reading of the Bible, this text reflects a key change in reading practices. The chapter argues for extending the search for evidence of reading to the didactic texts usually believed to merely constrain readers. The final two chapters examine the implied readers and historical readers of Samuel Richardson’s 1747-48 novel Clarissa. Chapter 3 examines internal reading strategies. Clarissa’s interpretive practice changes as she moves from acting in the social world to spiritual retreat. Silences in response to her family’s coercion--representing a form of passive disobedience--are replaced by a refusal to narrate. This refusal signifies Clarissa’s removal from the interpretive conflicts of the material world. Clarissa’s self- transcendence invites us to imagine some readers’ desire for similar self-transcendence. Using both published and archival letters, Chapter 4 tests and extends the models of reading proposed by the novel itself. Anna Howe, this chapter proposes, not Clarissa, provides the model of reading most often employed by readers. Reading like Anna Howe, or reading in a mode of filial disobedience, reveals a way to navigate, without necessarily rejecting, the interpretive dictates of patriarchy. iii Acknowledgements I am fortunate to have had excellent teachers, mentors, readers, friends, and supporters as I came to this project and completed this dissertation. My dissertation committee, Paula J. McDowell, Michael McKeon, Jonathan Brody Kramnick, and Toni Bowers provided innumerable useful suggestions and comments; I owe them a special debt for muddling through the drafts in spite of my inadequate editing and proofreading capabilities. My dissertation director, Paula McDowell, was an outstanding mentor and model from the earliest stages of the process. I am grateful for her encouragement, her wonderfully practical professional advice, her patience with the many substantial changes this project underwent, and for her seemingly superhuman ability to read and respond to drafts within hours of receiving them. Her support and example allowed me to begin to see myself as scholar, and as a scholar working across the fields of literary studies, the history of reading, and the history of the book. Michael McKeon’s scholarship, teaching, and insights continue to shape my thinking about the eighteenth century. I want to thank him especially for always pushing my thinking--in seminars, conversations, and responses to my writing--to the broadest possible historical implications of the problems of reading and interpretation. I enjoyed many productive conversations with Jonathan Kramnick, especially about Richardson, Clarissa, and Eliza Haywood. I am grateful to Toni Bowers for agreeing to be on my dissertation committee at a late date, for reading and commenting on the dissertation thoroughly, and for helping make the defense a truly engaging intellectual experience. Her insight will be palpable in future revisions and versions of this project. Conversations with Ann Baynes Coiro about learning and education , well before this iv project was underway, were foundational in the direction the dissertation ultimately took. Graduate classes at the University of Colorado taught by Charlotte Sussman launched my interest in eighteenth-century British literature, and her encouragement was key to my decision to continue with graduate work. This work benefited financially from funding by Rutgers University in the form of two year-long fellowships. A fellowship awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies and the Huntington Library allowed me to perform initial archival research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The Daniel Francis Howard Travel fellowship allowed me to perform key archival work on the Richardson correspondence in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and on religious reading instructions at the British Library. Nancy Sullivan Murphy provided nearly matching funds to support travel for research, for which I am highly thankful. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded two dissertation-writing workshops: a Summer Dissertation Writing Workshop and a dissertation Seminar in Historical Interpretation. In addition to the Mellon Foundation, I wish to thank the leaders of the workshops, Meredith McGill and Michael McKeon, for creating environments of genuine scholarly exchange. The comments of the participants of these workshops proved invaluable in my revision of the Chapters 1 and 3 of the dissertation. Thanks for these comments and conversations is due to Sarah Alexander, Anannya Dasgupta, Leslie Dovale, Angela Florsheutz, Devin Griffiths, Natasha Hurley, Ellorashree Maitra, Jacob Nellickal, Alison Shonkweiler, Alexandra Socarides, Ameer Sohrawardy, Richard Squibbs, Margaret Wald, and Madhvi Zutshi. v I might have finished this dissertation, but certainly would not have finished happily or sanely were it not for the friendship, support, and continuing collegiality of Kristie Allen, Danielle Bobker, Kristin Girten, and Kathleen Lubey. I hope that this is only the first of many such acknowledgements that I am able to make to them. Finally, I want to thank my family: my father, Ralph Steele, for a love of books and reading that spilled over; my siblings, Gretchen Hollands and Christopher Steele, for helping hone my argumentative skills since childhood; and my mother, Nancy Sullivan Murphy, for bountiful emotional and material support. My daughter, Cynthia Blatherwick, has been incredibly forbearing of a parent absorbed in academic pursuits. Alex Bain patiently endures interruptions of his own work to discuss mine, insists that we eat normal things at regular hours, and keeps the house mirthful; for these, and countless other quotidian and intellectual benefits, I continue to be grateful. vi Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One Bound and Unbound: Interpretive Authority and Individual Readers…………………………………………..10 Chapter Two Reading Women in the History of Reading……………………………………………...50 Chapter Three Reading Models in Clarissa……………………………………………………………...92 Chapter Four Arguing with ‘Papa’ Richardson: Daughterly Disobedience and Readerly Disobedience………………...……………….149 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...208 Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………..215 Curriculum Vita………………………………………………………………………...227 vii 1 Introduction The images available to us of the readers in the past are limited by the ephemerality of reading act, and yet, paradoxically, many projections of readers are shaped by an imagination of the reader as an agent of unlimited and creative interpretive capabilities and possibilities. Michel de Certeau’s figure of the reader as poacher, to take a notable example, continues to inform the way observers of reading define, describe and characterize reading activity. To what extent, ask scholars in both literary studies and the history of reading, can or does the reader determine a text’s meaning? Although this question has been answered productively in numerous ways, De Certeau’s formulation of the autonomous reader, however, is inherently modern: Because the body withdraws itself from the text in order henceforth to come into contact with it only through the mobility of the eye, the geographical configuration of the text organizes the activity of the reader less and less. The autonomy of the eye suspends the body’s complicities with the text; it unmoors it from the scriptural
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