“Reader, You Married Him: Male Writers, Female Readers, and the Marriage Plot,” an essay by faculty member Alix Ohlin, appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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IN ANTOINE WIERTZ’S 1853 painting The Reader of Novels, a naked woman lies on her back, comfortably secluded in her boudoir, holding a copy of The Three Musketeers to her face. The sheets beneath her are in slight disarray. She looks like she’s having a good time. The painting, reproduced in Belinda Jack’s lively, engaging history The Woman Reader, shows a figure crouching in the shadows next to the woman, pushing yet another book onto her bed. If you look closely, you can just make out that the figure has horns; it’s the devil.
Wiertz was hardly a major painter, but his image of the female reader — sexualized, autonomous, perhaps in league with Satan — says a lot about historical anxieties regarding that figure. As Jack points out, representations of women reading are historically more numerous and more fraught than those of men. The female reader is associated with a dizzying myriad of contradictory qualities, from piety and maternal virtue to frivolity and eros. And nowhere is her role more contested than when it comes to the novel — a disquiet that continues even today.
