Nouseled in books: Women's stories of reading.

Abstract

This study of women who are passionate readers of novels is based on my own experiences and on interviews with nine women. In addition to the ethnographic study of real readers, I look at past constructions of the woman reader that influence our stories. Women and fiction have a long history together. As soon as fiction began to take its present form, women became, by some accounts, its principal readers and authors. They continued reading despite early critics' fears that, on the one hand, a woman might become so nouseled in amorous bookes, vaines stories and fonde trifeling fancies, that shee smelleth of naughtiness even all hir lyfe after (Edward Hake, 1574) or, on the other hand, Literature, until then a male province, would be destroyed by readers who have no design in reading but for pleasure (Richard Steele, 1713). The women I interviewed told stories of their earliest memories of books, their school experiences, what they read, how they used reading as children, why and what they read as adults, and when their reading intersected with life. One speaks of having a sense of self and identity ... like a permeable membrance, so that I spill over into the book and the book spills over into me. Another, a psychotherapist, believes she learned skills for her job through reading. A third realized, as a result of this study, that Reading has really organized my life, and I just thought of it as something that I did. I never saw it as a driving force. Since these white, middle-class, highly educated women did not see school reading as particularly relevant to their reading lives, I raise questions about the continuing male-centeredness of fiction in the curriculum, the use of literature to teach writing or to teach about literature, and the privileging of academic approaches to reading novels that ignore women's practices. I also show how these particular women have been able through reading novels both to strengthen their identification as female and resist cultural restraints with which women must contend.