Saturday, May 1, 2021

Freedom to Read ... or Not?

What did it mean to be a female reader during the Regency Era?

    The late 18th century was a time of patriarchal views which led to many regulations surrounding the issues of female education and reading. Around the time of the 1790’s, several texts were produced that analyzed female reading practices of the time. According to Erica Oliver, a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University, “Many of these texts depicted women whose reading caused either quixotism or milder misperceptions of the world,” and they lead to more control of what was considered to be “potentially dangerous literary information … so that women could mimic feminine accomplishment without being changed by their reading,” (Oliver). The desired outcome of this control was an ‘accomplished’ woman who was also soft, domestic, and feminine. Miss Bingley described the desired accomplishments of a woman in Pride and Prejudice, saying, “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages … and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions,” (Austen 253). Based on various conversations throughout Pride and Prejudice, there seemed to be an assumption that a lady who is not skilled in each area listed above was to be seen as unaccomplished and poorly educated. As seen in a later encounter between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine seemed to be astonished by the fact that Elizabeth and her sisters were not educated in each of the above skills. 

    In many ways, there seems to have been a fine line between a poorly educated young lady, a well educated young lady, and one who was too educated. Kathryn Hughes, Professor of of Life Writing and Convenor of the Masters of Arts at the University of East Anglia provided the term ‘blue-stocking,’ an 18th century label for the too educated women saying, “Blue-stockings were considered unfeminine and off-putting in the way that they attempted to usurp men’s ‘natural’ intellectual superiority,” (Hughes). In today’s society, a statement like this would most likely cause outrage; however, around the time of the Regency Era, this was the natural way of thinking for many people, particularly the male population in control of the patriarchal society. 

    Despite this rather bleak outlook on the position of the female reader during the Regency Era, not all was lost. Briefly returning to the words of Deborah Aschkenes, the 19th century and the Regency Era saw an, “expansion of literacy and print culture in England,” (Aschkenes). This expansion, among other things, provided more accessible and affordable reading material for all readers, including women. This general increase in literacy situated female readers in an interesting position which Erica Oliver describes saying, “‘the reading woman’ was forced into a liminal space, at once a signal of progress and symbol of corruption,” (Oliver). Female readers were trapped in a period of transition in which, by reading more and expanding their intellectual horizons, they symbolized the corruption of the rigid system in which they had lived for so long, yet the slowly increasing freedom to read also signaled progress in the advancement of female independence as well as the decline of the male-centric ideology which their society had adhered to for so long. Therefore, though entrenched in a patriarchal society that feared the educated woman, female readers inhabited a position of progress and defiance of the system, leading to some very interesting debates and reactions that arose in women's writing in response to their position.


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