privacy of the novel, The

In upscale hotels now, the tags that you put on your door to keep the maid from bothering you no longer read "Do Not Disturb." They say, "Privacy Please." Condensing the force of a negative imperative into a single powerful noun that needs no verb, the new phrase suggests repudiation, rejection of other people, a Greta Garbo stance: I want to be alone.

Privacy resists impingement. It shuts people out, on purpose. Horatian poems of retirement from classic times, widely imitated in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, typically included visions of dining simply with a welcome guest. Privacy needs no guests. Etymologically, the word derives from a Latin root meaning deprived: specifically, deprived of public office; cut off from a man's full and appropriate functioning. What originally designated a state of deprivation, however, has come, in the Western middle-class world, more often to refer to a privileged condition of freedom and control, a condition alleged by some in the United States to be a constitutional right.

Yet enormous contradictions attend current attitudes toward privacy. Encouraged by the media, we worry lest Internet circulation of data damage our privacy. We reject past customs of housing extended families under a single roof in favor of nuclear families, detached dwellings, and a separate bedroom for every child. The richer we are, the more likely to seek walled enclaves for our homes and secluded Caribbean beaches for our vacations. But we watch Oprah and Geraldo, we share intimate sexual problems with pop psychologists on the radio, we consider a television appearance on Good Morning America a mark of success.

That we, of course, is slippery. Neither I nor most of the people I know watch Oprah. I've never set foot on a Caribbean beach, and I find walled enclaves distasteful. But if we can designate the culture at large, my sketch suggests a set of contradictions that we all inhabit in one way or another. Social class probably makes a difference in specific attitudes, and so do the differing values of families and communities-which is to say we all have our own assemblages of contradictions. Each of us establishes individual boundaries of privacy, each of us may willingly, even happily, abandon privacy in different specific contexts. The idea of privacy, in other words, carries in modern Western culture no fixed assignment of value. Sometimes we want the state it designates, sometimes we don't.

Probably, though, we at least believe that we can recognize privacy when we experience it, and we're likely to feel confident that we know when it's a good thing. A frequently invoked locus of privacy-and for most who acknowledge it an unambiguously positive one-is the cocooned pleasure of reading novels. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many people find in novel reading a zone of privacy. Women surveyed about their enthusiasm for popular romances, for instance, consistently mention that such reading provides them with valued time of separation from the encroachments of their families. It puts them, they say, into their own space. More intellectually respectable kinds of novel-reading achieve the same end.

The special privacy of the novel is the delicious privacy it generates for its readers. Such a formulation may suggest, in the late twentieth century, an innocent reader, a reader of novels but not of NOVEL, one primarily concerned with pleasure rather than exegesis. But even readers of NOVEL have their innocent moments: moments of direct textual experience, unmediated by theoretical urgencies, that underwrite professional commitment to literary study. To historicize, at least speculatively, the nature of that experience is my present undertaking.

Fiction, in one's immediate enjoyment of it, not only establishes an alternate reality but stimulates us in such ways that pre-existent forms of reality-a cluttered room, irritating colleagues-assume new meanings, reveal new possibilities. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we understand new aspects and possibilities in ourselves as a result of reading novels, and the new forms of self-imagining immediately affect our perceptions of the world outside ourselves. We pay attention to new things, in new ways. I associate such imaginative transformations with privacy because they are unique to each individual who experiences them, unknowable to others unless the possessor decides to communicate them, and quite possibly at odds with communal assumptions. They belong to the realm of self-enclosure and of potential resistance that we connect with privacy. Moreover, to absorb oneself in a book creates privacy simply because it necessarily shuts out the world. Privacy expresses the "general right of the individual to be let alone," as Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis put it in a famous Harvard Law Review article in 1890 (205). Reading novels enforces that right.

Why novels, as opposed to other literary genres? A rather klutzy but useful definition of privacy, by the anthropologist Morton H. Levine, goes like this: privacy "is the maintenance of a personal life-space within which the individual has a chance to be an individual, to exercise and experience his own uniqueness" (11). One might add discover to Levine's pair of verbs: to exercise and experience and discover his, or her, uniqueness. Reading novels permits and facilitates all these activities, at the level of fantasy. Through imaginative processes of identification and differentiation in relation to fictional characters, fictional actions, one learns to be more grandly oneself.

The value of reading's privacy, however, has not always been apparent. When Jane Eyre huddles in her window seat, her feet drawn up, behind red curtains, for the delicious indulgence of reading, she creates a memorable image for reading's self-enclosure (although she is in fact looking at pictures and making up her own stories). But it is a particularly nineteenth-century image. Bronte's novel, published in 1847, draws on and helps to solidify the metaphors of Romanticism. If it had been published a century before, Jane would not have inhabited the same setting or have thought of reading in the same way. If she read for the sake of imaginative stimulation, in 1750 or thereabouts, her creator would have introduced even into a fictional text some warning about the danger of such stimulation. The kind of anxiety that now attends, at least in some circles, consideration of images of violence on television or pornography on the Internet-how might they affect children?-once belonged to the idea of novel-reading, specifically because of its privacy and the space for fantasy privacy creates. As Thomas Gisborne puts it, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, from the devouring of novels "with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity ... the mind is secretly corrupted" (217). Earlier in the century, John Gregory worried about the dangers of reading for women: "When I reflect how easy it is to warm a girl's imagination, and how difficult deeply and permanently to affect her heart; how readily she enters into every refinement of sentiment, and how easily she can sacrifice them to vanity or convenience"-when he reflects on such matters, he apparently fears that reading of any kind may have sinister effects (22). The anxiety of such moralists stems from the impossibility of policing the inner life. The privacy of novel-reading is inviolable: one cannot penetrate the reader's consciousness. Especially given the "warm imaginations" attributed to women, it is conceivable that female readers in particular, stimulated by novel-reading, may indulge in vile fantasies.

A series of complicated psychological and social processes allowed Western thinkers to move from Gregory's attitude toward private reading to Jane Eyre's. The movement appears to have been neither altogether straightforward nor strictly chronological. By the nineteenth century, one can discern in literary texts conflicting assumptions about what goes on in the mind of someone reading a novel. Sir Walter Scott hints a positive alternative to the private reading that aroused Gregory's fears by envisioning communitarian possibilities. Jane Austen shifts emphasis from the self-indulgence of subjective reading to its discipline, without abandoning a communal ideal. By the time George Eliot writes The Mill on the Floss, she evidently understands the potential conflict between reading as a member of a community and reading to support a personal agenda. She also registers her awareness of the multiplicity of possible communities. To contemplate a trio of nineteenth-century British novels by these writers may suggest that twentieth-century readers have lost something by assuming the preciousness and the pleasure of reading's privacy.

Roughly thirty years before Jane Eyre, Sir Walter Scott, the most popular writer of his time, published The Heart of Mid-Lothian, perhaps the century's most spectacular best-seller. Immediately accepted as a nationalistic celebration of Scottish virtue and heroism, its story of a country girl too committed to an ideal of honesty to tell a minor lie in order to save her sister's life creates a memorable heroine. The novel dwells on-indeed, largely derives from-Jeanie Deans's internal struggles, her experience of moral quandaries. Its focus on her rarely wavers, once the plot gets under way. But it is striking to notice how seldom Jeanie spends time alone: an occasional moment in her bedroom, two or three brief unaccompanied trips. The long journey to London, however, is full of other people, many of them vague figures who blur into one another. Privacy is not an issue in this narrative, and certainly not a goal for its characters. Even the minister's outlaw son assumes that life takes place, always, in the immediate context of community.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian offers occasional hints about reading, likewise different from what a twentieth-century reader might expect. Scott's narrator resembles Fielding's authoritative guide-within-the-text more than, for instance, Bronte's confiding storyteller ("Reader, I married him"), despite his greater closeness in time to the later writer. But his authority is more precarious, his tone often strained, his anxiety apparent. Still, the references to the reader at least hint at a set of authorial expectations. Two named characters intervene between Scott and the reader. An introductory address "To the Best of Patrons, A Pleased and Indulgent Reader" allegedly issues from the pen of Jedediah Cleishbotham, who claims authorship of the novel as a whole, but acknowledges following the manuscript of Peter Pattieson, schoolmaster, who figures both as voice and as character in the book's opening chapters. A sense of Pattieson's individual presence and personality soon vanishes, but the narrator's voice still intervenes from time to time. Cleishbotham's opening appeal to his readers, like his concluding "Envoy," insists on the financial nature of the transaction between writer and reader. Scott's frequent financial trouble and the historical moment in which he wrote, soon after the end of the patronage system, perhaps sufficiently account for the emphasis on the writing and reading of books as participating in a commercial arrangement. But this emphasis also depersonalizes or generalizes reading (to say nothing of writing) as an activity. Jedediah elucidates what Roland Barthes would call "the pleasure of the text" as preordained responses to a set of stimuli introduced for reasons of profit. If the reader chuckles or feels pleasure at what he finds on the page, what Jedediah has put on the page, Jedediah, he says, "simper[s]," and he claims his "delectation" at being enabled to add a second story to his house or to buy a new coat (9). Such equivalences effectively remove significance from the individual emotional responses of readers, assumed to matter only inasmuch as they stimulate profits for writers.

Of course, Jedediah is a joke of a sort, a joke at the expense of disingenuous writers who pretend to exist in a realm quite apart from that of commerce. Yet the joke also registers uneasiness at the reader's possible distaste for literature as commercial activity. At least subterranean consciousness of that reader's conceivable insurgency may underlie the narrator's implicit insistence on the generalizability of reactions. The reader is in effect a spectator of the action, as the narrator explicitly says, but also, more importantly, a judge. The tone of the narrator's direct references to his reader varies from sober to mildly facetious, but in their substance his remarks suggest the same hopeful assumptions: the reader will be a person of the middling classes, at least moderately wise in the ways of the world, sharing with others of the same class a set of clear moral standards. He-and I tend to think of this normative figure as a "he," although of course women read Scott in the past and read him in the present-may possess considerable emotional responsiveness, but he reacts to what he reads by virtue of judgment as well as feeling. His greatest pleasure in reading will come from the coincidence of judgment and feeling in his elicited responses.

The narratorial statements that reveal most about Scott's attitudes toward his readers do not necessarily allude directly to the reader's existence, yet they assume a great deal. Here is a characteristic comment about Jeanie's conflict over whether she should lie for her sister. After a conversation on the subject with her pious and rigid father, she mistakenly believes him to have encouraged her toward the lie. Trying to grasp the justification he might have in mind, she contemplates the possibility that the ninth commandment prohibits false witness against one's neighbor but not in favor of someone. Then the narrator observes, "But her clear and unsophisticated power of discriminating between good and evil, instantly rejected an interpretation so limited, and so unworthy of the Author of the law" !218). The adjectives carrying assignments of value in this sentence-clear, un:sophisticated, limited, unworthy-convey much of the novel's moral scheme. Moral clarity is Jeanie's crowning virtue. It attends her lack of sophistication, a word that would carry negative weight, suggesting the confusion created by excessive knowledge of the world's ways. Ignorant by conventional standards, Jeanie writes only with difficulty and lacks book knowledge. But true limitation, Scott's language indicates, belongs not to this woman of sparse education but to those more sophisticated (that is, more corrupted), possessed of linguistic skill but perhaps lacking the capacity to think in ways worthy of their obligation to God.

The reader to whom the statement about Jeanie's power of discrimination is designed to appeal will probably not value reading for the privacy it provides. At any rate, Scott does not try to reach him by virtue of the imaginative expansion or enclosure fiction can offer. On the contrary, the story-teller invokes moral tradition and community: what readers share rather than what makes them unique. To read The Heart of Mid-Lothian is to be reminded of a complex, demanding set of principles to which many Westerners have long paid lip service. The novel explores the possibilities, costs, and rewards of actually living by such principles. Such exploration, relying on fictional embodiments and fictional actions, invites imaginative and emotional response as well as rational assent, but, making separation from the community a prescription for misery (through the outlaw character, George Staunton, and through Jeanie's sister, Effie, also a lawbreaker, who marries him), it insists that happiness, even comfort, depends on rejecting "sophistication" and the principle of specialness, in favor of various forms of sharing.

The experience of reading The Heart of Mid-Lothian remains, of course, in some necessary sense private. In the twentieth century, one usually reads alone and does not necessarily communicate to anyone the effect or the nature of the psychic event that has taken place. But Scott's novel can also call to mind another aspect of novel-reading, one that we're likely, in the late twentieth century, to forget. If novels appeal to and reinforce our desire to be left alone, to escape the burdens of everyday existence, to live for a time within the private imagination, stimulated by the imagination of another, if novels respond to this kind of desire, they also speak to quite different impulses. All novels, like other forms of writing, partake of, participate in, literary tradition. They invite their readers into relationship not only with an imagined author but also with a community of books and of other readers. The tone and the substance of Scott's novel emphasize various kinds of inevitable human connection. Even the novelist's characteristic involvement in questions of historical authenticity speaks to his unfailing concern for human interdependence as it survives through time. If he depicts Jeanie Deans as rarely alone and as unconcerned with privacy as an issue, he suggests that his readers, ideally approaching the character's moral integrity, should likewise care less about privacy than about community and its obligations.

A more economical way of putting this last point would be to say that Scott is a didactic novelist. J. Paul Hunter has called attention to the fact that we in the twentieth century have lost our forebears' capacity to take pleasure in the didactic. We assume, rather, that the didactic belongs to quite another realm from that of pleasure. But an adequate reading of The Heart of Mid-Lothian must acknowledge that the claim to provide instruction inheres in the fundamental imagining of the text. Both the structural pattern and the emotional weight of the novel depend heavily on Jeanie's meaning as moral exemplar. One can slide over that fact, dwelling, rather, on the heroine's manifest limitations, or interesting oneself in plot rather than implicit teaching. But to ignore the importance of the lesson Scott attempts to teach, to reject the perplexities of Jeanie's moral significance, will leave our minds and imaginations with less to work on than the novel actually contains. If we assume the paramount importance of our privacy as readers, we will miss the point.

Let me shift attention now to Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, five years before Scott's novel. Its famous opening sentence inaugurates a narrative that will grapple with the problem of reading, literal and metaphorical, and grapple with it specifically in relation to issues of privacy and community. The truth that a rich man must want a wife is "universally acknowledged" (3). What comprises the relevant universe, and does it really have the authority to determine "truth"? If not, how can one discover where truth lies?

Although the Bennet sisters inhabit a much higher social stratum than does Jeanie Deans, they are granted little more physical privacy. Like Jeanie, they have their bedrooms (it's not clear how many of them share rooms). But they also have their social obligations. The only time we see Elizabeth Bennet reading a book, she does so in a drawing room full of other people, one of whom soon interrupts her to demand her engagement in another kind of activity. Elizabeth's propensity for long solitary walks partly reflects her need to find space for private reflection. She understands, though, that privacy does not altogether depend on physical situation (a truth more fully elaborated in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park), and her private internal commentary on what she sees and feels continues unabated in company.

In a novel so self-evidently concerned with problems of interpretation, reading might be expected to play an important part. Austen does not, however, after Northanger Abbey (written early, though published late) indulge in direct addresses to her own readers. Instead, she makes her characters readers. Books appear from time to time, mainly as props of one kind and another. Mr. Collins reads aloud to the Bennet sisters, Mary Bennet proclaims her preference for books over people, Miss Bingley praises Darcy's family library, Mr. Bennet occupies himself with reading while the rest of the family attends a ball. But it is the reading of personal letters that best locates, complicates, and eventually clarifies the dilemma of interpretation. Darcy's letter of self-explanation after his botched proposal provides the richest example, but others have preceded it: notably Miss Bingley's letter from London, explaining their sudden departure, which Jane reads as having one meaning and Elizabeth as having a completely different one. In the case of Darcy's letter, Elizabeth must play the part of both readers, the one willing to believe the best about the writer and the suspicious one. And she must confront the undependability of public opinion, as well as of her own.

"Everybody" has decided Darcy's nature from the time of his first appearance. By the end of the ball at which he declines dancing with Elizabeth, "His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again" (11). Indeed, long before the time of the crucial letter it has become a truth universally acknowledged that Wickham epitomizes male attractiveness and that Darcy has no regard for other people.

The process by which Elizabeth comes to reverse these judgments, through successive readings of Darcy's letter, demonstrates the arduousness of interpretation. In her first reading, controlled by her rage over his insulting proposal and over the harm he has done to her beloved sister, she finds his explanations unpersuasive. But she acknowledges her own "prejudice." She tries hard to allow reason to shape her judgment. In her second reading, she "commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence" (205). Putting down the letter, she weighs "every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality-deliberated on the probability of each statement-but with little success. On both sides it was only assertion" (205). Unable to rely on textual exegesis alone, she brings to bear the evidence of her memory, with detailed analysis of her past experience and of other people's responses. She wanders the lane for two hours, "giving way to every variety of thought; re-considering events, determining probabilities, and reconciling herself as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so important" (209), a change, that is, in her understanding of Darcy and of Wickham, and in her own judgment. Darcy has convinced her, but only by virtue of her own ardent participation in the process of interpretation.

Elizabeth is an exemplary reader. But there are no guarantees of her rightness, even after her exhaustive and exhausting effort. Emotion has interfered with her capacity to interpret accurately, and emotion remains as a potential distorting force. IRONY, undergraduates like to write in the margin next to Elizabeth's self-- critical comment, "Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind" (208). Even on a first reading of Pride and Prejudice, one will suspect that she is in love and doesn't know it; subsequent readings make the point unavoidable. Unaware of her feelings for Darcy, Elizabeth may not assess his self-exculpation correctly. Or perhaps she is right: the reader can't know for certain, and neither, ever, can she.

Elizabeth has much at stake in interpreting Darcy's letter, more by far than anyone coming to terms with a work of fiction. Yet she stands as a model for novel readers. She tells us of the urgency of "private" reading, and of its dangers. The urgency depends on the fact that the community Austen imagines is often wrong. Echoes of Elizabeth's procedure, as well as of its results, reverberate back and forth through Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth's new comprehension, for instance, sharply suggests that truths universally acknowledged are more likely than not untrue. Austen has more fun with cliche and platitude in Pride and Prejudice than in any other of her novels. Mary Bennet's conduct book maxims and Mr. Collins's obtuse commonplaces and Sir William Lucas's predictable sentiments may serve to remind us that what the community accepts as self-evident need not prove accurate, relevant, or even meaningful. What the community accepts can create obstacles to thought. "Private" reading and speaking, therefore, provide the only inlet to clarity. Elizabeth's total immersion in the text and its problems, her effort both to use feeling and to prevent it from overpowering thought, her capacity for imaginative participation and imaginative expansion (she entertains herself by fancying, prophetically, how Lady Catherine might respond to the news of her marriage to Darcy), the way Elizabeth reads the crucial letter exemplifies the best possibility for interpretation.

But how far we must feel ourselves from the absolute moral clarity of Jeanie Deans! Elizabeth's endeavors of interpretation include and rely on the testimony of her feelings, perception, and intelligence, draw on her memory and her sympathetic imagination, demand the effort to divest herself of "prejudice." But her best efforts can produce at most provisional and personal clarity. A certain exhilaration, the exhilaration of the private reader, attends the process of attaining this relative clarity and stability of judgment. Elizabeth and her sister Jane, both of whom understand the exigency of interpretation, differ in this respect from the rest of their family and from others in their neighborhood, who rest in the comfort of the taken-for-granted. Elizabeth and Jane know that one must "read" constantly, read people and events and conversations as well as letters and books. Although they have each other, they know also that one must read alone. And if they can enjoy at some level the pressures of the need to interpret, they can never enjoy Jeanie's sense that God has authorized the course she follows.

It is a commonplace reiterated by generations of critics that Jane Austen interests herself in "society," in microcosmic societies that illustrate the tensions and the comforts of living within group conventions. Equally commonplace is the perception that she anatomizes the inner life of individuals. In many ways, the group, an essentially secular group, although all its members go to church, supports the individuals within it. But in the crucial process of interpretation as Austen renders it, the individual must stand alone, understanding her own ultimate undependability. When Darcy proposes for the second time and is accepted, he recurs to the subject of the letter. Now he, its author, has reinterpreted what he has written: "When I wrote that letter ... I believed myself perfectly calm and cool, but I am since convinced that it was written in a dreadful bitterness of spirit" (368). Elizabeth insists that they talk no more of the letter, since the feelings of both of them have radically changed since its writing. Now it would have been written differently, now it would be differently read. Private interpretation is a slippery matter.

I have been trying to distinguish between a kind of communal reading suggested by Scott's novel and the private reading that takes place in Austen's. The private reading, as I have described it, sounds much more "modern," although Austen wrote the first version of Pride and Prejudice probably in the late eighteenth century and published the completed book five years earlier than The Heart of Mid-Lothian (not that five years makes any real difference when one is thinking of historical time). Most readers now would agree about the necessary ambiguity of interpretation and the degree to which personal elements may dictate perceptions about a text, and they would agree that reading is a private matter. Yet Scott's approach as well as Austen's partakes of the Romantic debate over the place of the individual, fully-conscious self in the human community. David Bromwich speaks of "the imaginative identification of a self with the community of humankind" as an aspect of "Romantic idealism" (72). Scott's turn to the past (eighteenth-century Scotland) records his effort to construct and assert human bonds over time. His didacticism and his imagining of Jeanie Deans belong to the same effort. Austen uses the strenuous interpretive endeavors of Darcy and Elizabeth primarily as a basis for adumbrating a new kind of community, a community of the like-minded.

In positing such a community while sharply criticizing the society that actually exists, Austen may betray a kind of discomfort and awareness possibly implicated with questions of gender. The only character in Pride and Prejudice who appears able to claim the right to privacy when he wants it is Mr. Bennet, who has his library and freely asserts his privilege of retreating to it. Privacy does not belong to women, as eighteenth-century novels by women make apparent. Fanny Burney's Evelina, for instance, can almost never be alone, she can only be silent, claiming the internal space that Elizabeth Bennet also values. Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), an important marker in the development of female fiction, represents a disillusioned male aristocrat who decides to retreat from the court to the country. He chooses privacy for himself and inflicts it on his wife and daughter. The wife dies, leaving the daughter to the life of isolation her father has elected: not privacy, a chosen condition, but solitude. She fills her solitude, predictably, by reading romances, and therefore gets in trouble: an untrained reader, she fails to understand that romances have nothing to do with reality.

If social circumstance largely deprived women of the choice of privacy, as conduct books and personal letters confirm, it would seem unsurprising that a woman writer might dwell on the urgency of constructing psychic spaces of self-- discovery and self-assertion. Such construction, we have learned to believe-and by "we," now, I mean men and women of our historical moment-such construction can take place by means of reading novels. Jane Austen (and Charlotte and Emily Bronte after her) helped us to grasp the private way of reading. Of course, not only women thought or cared about privacy. But possibly early women novelists felt special impetus to imagine reading as temporary escape, a grateful interval of self-enclosure, and perhaps they in particular urged their readers toward a new way of reading.

Yet to understand Austen's implicit recommendations about interpretation as advocating a retreat from Scott's ideal requires ignoring aspects of Elizabeth Bennet's reading that seem less immediately appealing to twentieth-century readers than her attention to her own feelings. Although Elizabeth does not, like Jeanie Deans, emphasize her own religious commitment, she as much as Jeanie tries to judge according to moral principles that in fact belong to an existing, powerful, and significant community. Elizabeth reads, to the degree that she can, with the whole of herself: her experience, her feelings, her knowledge-and her principles. If she recognizes and values her uniqueness, she also values the ideas she has inherited. Her very determination to be just to everyone reflects her consciousness of ethical obligation. To call her a "private" reader fails to acknowledge the degree to which she understands the necessary participation of the private in the social. If Scott's anxiety about his readers communicates itself in nervous jokes about Jedediah Cleishbotham, perhaps Austen expresses comparable anxiety in her ambivalent account of how Elizabeth as a reader both asserts her independence and registers her deep involvement in the values she shares. In Elizabeth, the novelist represents the responsible "private" reader as subject to stringent self-discipline, by no means free to take from a text only what suits her purposes. What one wishes to believe, Austen urges, must not dictate what one finds on the page. The implicit contract between writer and reader depends heavily on the reader's good-faith commitment to a predictable set of social and ethical norms.

Even George Eliot, for all her moral certainty, indeed, partly because of her moral certainty, conveys uneasiness about her readers. Her coercive moralizing emerges from a consciousness convincingly persuaded of its own possession of ethical truth but less secure of an audience sharing the same convictions or even susceptible to their authority. The pronoun shifts of her allusions to readers in The Mill on the Floss suggest the realm of uncertainty. Sometimes she invokes the first person plural: "heaven knows where that striving might lead us if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things-if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory" (164). Such insistence on a fellowship of feeling with her readers often develops into observations in the first person singular, as in the instance I have just cited, which leads, a few lines later, to this assertion: "there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory-that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid" (164). The narrator, believing in the common elements of human psychology, can therefore openly declare her own commitments. Memory belongs to everyone, and memory inevitably entails emotion: of that the narrator of The Mill on the Floss appears certain.

Sometimes, though, her readers appear in the second person, and her relation to them is less secure. After alluding to the sense of oppression generated in her by certain villages on the Rhone, for instance, the narrator continues, "Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss.... It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons" (286). The same voice goes on to claim that "I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness" (287) and to explain that such feeling necessarily precedes understanding. But the sense of separation elicited by the earlier formulation of what "you say" bears its own weight of doubt. The narrator aware that readers may find the Tullivers' life "sordid" cannot feel altogether confident that they will trust in the value of the understanding that ultimately emerges.

Reflecting yet greater doubt are third-person allusions to the audience. "These narrow notions about debt, held by the old-fashioned Tullivers, may perhaps excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these days of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to which everything rights itself without any trouble of ours" (294). A moral gulf appears to have opened between the narrator and "many" of her readers, whose "wide philosophy" markedly diverges from her own. Their views are not hers, and she cannot trust them because she suspects that they will not trust her as moral guide.

In the context of apparently shifting expectations about readers, the narrator's moral insistence, her manifest approval of Maggie's hard rather than easy choices, her endorsement of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation for the sake of old ties of affection and loyalty take on a note of near-desperation. In effect, she fears the private reader, fears the possibility that her audience may read individually, for pleasure rather than enlightenment, or align themselves with the wrong moral decisions, or reject the ethical assumptions that she herself shares with an ever-dwindling community. She speaks explicitly and insistently for the paramount value of community, but she knows that private readers exist, threatening the stability of traditional alliances: those between writer and reader and those uniting members of an audience.

It is perhaps just this knowledge that lends urgency to the emotional argument that undergirds the morality of The Mill on the Floss. The novel's resolution in Maggie's drowning, locked in her brother's arms, and its characterization of that drowning as "one supreme moment," its emphasis on an "embrace" (547) rather than on two deaths, these aspects of The Mill on the Floss offend many modern readers. The invocation of the siblings' past ("the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together" [547]) rings false to many, especially since the plot itself has emphasized Tom's early tyrannies more than any infantile fellowship. Yet the sheer emotional intelligence with which Eliot imagines her characters has its own persuasive power. Her subtle delineation of the various modes of repression that both afflict Tom and Maggie and enable their existence makes it hard for a reader to evade the conclusion, profoundly ironic in substance if not in tone, that the brother and sister really are happier together than apart, and that they are better off dead. The ethical message about the importance of alliance draws its energy from emotional perception. Eliot attempts (and, to my mind, largely succeeds) to rebuild the links between writer and reader and among members of the audience not by relying on existent moral tradition so much as by insisting on what moves us in common.

Not every reader is persuaded. If Maggie Tulliver once seemed heroic in her self-suppression and her devotion to a narrow, tyrannical brother, to many twentieth-century readers she has appeared the victim of self-suppression of another sort on the part of her creator. Maybe Eliot punished in Maggie what she feared in herself. That is not an idea, one suspects, that would have occurred to a nineteenth-century reader. And the kind of reader to whom it readily presents itself now will more probably belong to the academic middle class than to its mercantile equivalent. Austen still has a large popular audience, Scott probably retains some general readership, but many important nineteenth-century British novels now receive attention mainly from academics and (with increasing reluctance: those novels are so long) their students. Within the academic community, one finds little communal reading in the sense that Scott assumed and Eliot tried to generate. Instead, the privacy of novel reading, in our circles, has taken on a slight aspect of malignancy. Privacy no longer entails simple pleasure. Although we read, of course, with our students, and they with one another, as professional readers we work not only alone but often in opposition to one another, seeking to define individual positions for the sake of our careers, for the sake, even, of our intellectual respectability. Academics have their own versions of those walled enclaves that protect the rich. The privacy of our novel-reading is not altogether innocent, and it involves dangers that Thomas Gisborne could not have imagined.

Which brings me back to Oprah, and her astonishing creation of a new community of readers: hundreds of thousands of books sold, celebrated, discussed. On a much smaller scale, reading groups have long flourished in the United States: little assemblies, sometimes of women alone, sometimes of both sexes, meeting at regular intervals to discuss mutually agreed upon texts. The continued existence of such groups suggests a hunger for community in reading. The Oprah phenomenon constitutes an important fulfillment of that hunger. It speaks of a kind of popular awareness that academics can easily forget, an insistence on what readers share rather than on the uniqueness of every mind. We have lost something in our allegiance to the private. If reading takes us "far away," separating us from our lives' mundane actualities, it can also return us to important connections. We read as members of a historical and of a contemporary community, as ethical beings with values partly formed and informed by the past, as emotional beings whose feelings resemble those of our fellows. In reading, we share experience. To fail to remember that, to insist too much on the uniqueness that we may connect with privacy, diminishes the density of reading as an activity and as a way of life. There is value in maintaining urgent awareness of ethical continuities and of the degree to which we have been shaped by others, including other novels, as part of the equipment we bring to reading. The danger of falling into the merely moralistic inheres in the kind of reading Scott implicitly recommends, the kind Eliot tries to enforce. But there is a corresponding danger on the other side: that of solipsism. The solipsism of the inexperienced girl worried John Gregory; that of the professional exegete worries me. Ideally, we might read both as treasuring our privacy, like Elizabeth Bennet, and as valuing our community, like Jeanie Deans. Novels allow us to fulfill the Romantic ideal at its highest by doing both.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. The Novels of Jane Austen. Vol. 2. Ed. R.W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932.

Bromwich, David. 'Noee on the Romantic Self " Raritan 14.4 Ct-74.

Eliot, Ge. The Mill on the > Min Z * F/. 1860. New York. NAL, 1965

Gia, Thomas. Art Enquiry; into the Duties Qf the Female Sex. 1797. New York Garland, 1974

Gregory, John. A Father's Legacy to His Daughters. 1774. The Young Lady's Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor. 1790. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995.1-53.

Levine, Morton H. "Privacy in the Tradition of the Western World." Privacy: A Vanishing Value? Ed. William C. Bier. New York: Fordham UP, 1980. 3-21.

Scott, Sir Walter. The Heart of Mid-Lothian. 1818. New York: Dutton, 1906.

Warren, Samuel D. and Louis D. Brandeis. "The Right to Privacy." Harvard Law Review 4.5 (1890): 193-220.

Copyright Novel, Inc. Summer 1998
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