Maria Edgeworth and the trope of domestic reading.

During the period in which Maria Edgeworth wrote novels, novel-reading was a disreputable activity, and it was generally thought that women in particular enjoyed an illicit sexual excitement through their novel-reading. This widespread view among reviewers, parents, clergymen, and so forth generated a trope of female reading, which represented women's responses to literature as forms of gluttony, intoxication, or sexual arousal. Confronted with this cluster of troubling associations, Edgeworth constructed an alternate and opposing trope of domestic reading. She displaced the erotic associations of women and reading by situating reading within the domestic sphere. The resulting trope of domestic reading became the foundation of her presentation of the proper lady and the proper gentleman, of the domestic circle, which balances reason and emotion, and, ultimately, of rationally ordered civil society. Chapter One outlines the trope of female reading and its relationship to domestic ideology. Chapter Two establishes the parameters of domestic reading by examining Edgeworth's earliest published work, Letters for Literary Ladies. The domestic readers of this early work regulate their own passions and the passions of others, and they are thus able to draw men away from the disruptive competition of the public sphere into a domestic literary salon. Chapter Three examines Edgeworth's construction of a trope of fashionable reading in her account of the transformation of Belinda's Lady Delacour into a domestic woman. While the female reader indulges in solitary excess, the fashionable reader indulges in highly public and highly theatrical demonstrations of her literary skill. Chapters Four and Five turn to the problems that men who are unable to read domestically pose to civil society. Chapter Four traces the reformation of the hero of "Forester," who refuses to abide by the conventions of gentlemanly behaviour. Forester's ungentlemanliness is encouraged by his reading of Robinson Crusoe, and his reformation is marked by his adoption of a more suitable model for the man in civil society, Franklin's Autobiography. Chapter Five examines Ormond, where the hero's reading of Tom Jones leads to sexual transgression and where his reformation is initiated by the reading of Sir Charles Grandison. Through his association with an exemplary domestic family, Ormond learns to conform to the Grandisonian model, and he adopts the patterns of rational masculinity informing Edgeworth's concept of the landowner. Chapter Six turns to Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, in which the power of domestic reading is both reasserted and questioned. Although the heroine is able to use her skills as a domestic reader to distinguish between the merits of two suitors, domestic reading fails when she becomes associated with a transgressive female writing. While Edgeworth's earlier novels suggest that the threat to domestic order resides in female reading, Helen suggests that female writing (an active, illicit, and ultimately public articulation of sexual desire) is a far more pressing threat to the individual and to society