a register of his idleness (“most useless”). His propensity toward wasteful and nonproductive activity is articulated effectively through metaphors of the body—he gluttonously “feasts upon libraries” only to amass “crude and undigested knowledge.” Such a reader is guilty of sacrificing rational enjoyment for crass sensual pleasure. He has, in Kelly Mays’s formulation, “confused the proper hierarchical relation between body and mind.”47
Janice Radway has written that metaphors of reading-as-eating have the effect of imagining readers (and especially female readers, for whom these metaphors were most often in place) as passive consumers of mass culture rather than active, sense-making agents. Such rhetoric, she claims, “was marshalled to characterize this process by which large numbers of users bought, in a dual sense, the ideas of others.”48 More recently, critics have challenged Radway’s position as a denial of biology. By understanding reading only in terms of perception, comprehension, and sense-making, they argue, she has deprived the practice of its sensual aspects and in the process denied her historical readers their materiality. Retaining or resuscitating the eating metaphor is thus crucial for rounding out our understanding of the noncognitive or sensual aspects of reading, and thus for rematerializing the abstracted body of the reader.49
The problem with this intervention, however, is that it fails to account for the variable meaning of the ingestion metaphor for the different populations who mobilized it. While everyday readers may have invoked this metaphor as a way of commenting on the physical delights of book consumption, cultural authorities rarely deployed it in the same way. For them, “devouring” books was indeed a statement about the cognitive failure of readers. “Injudicious reading is just as likely to produce mental debility as indiscriminate loading of the stomach is likely to produce dyspepsia,” wrote one; “and let us never forget that a healthy and vigorous mind, though its fare be scanty and homely, is far preferable to a pampered and sickly one.”50 It is difficult to understand this as a celebratory statement about the physicality of reading, since references to the body serve only to reinforce the “mental debility” that is the writer’s primary concern. The eating metaphor was usually deployed in conduct manuals precisely as a way of talking about the necessity to read mindfully, that is, to read in a way that eliminated the body and its associations with passion, carnality, and desire. Even when writers spoke of “wholesome” and “healthy” reading, it was with an eye toward emphasizing the perceptive acuity that accompanies such a diet. Moreover, the reading-as-eating metaphor was a way of denigrating not only bad readers but also the mass-produced texts they “consumed,” since images of uncontrolled ingestion were usually paired with admonitions concerning the deluge of trash issuing forth from the press. Radway is thus correct in locating in this metaphor a condemnation both of passive readers and of mass culture, both of which are referenced negatively by the term “consumption.”51 Apocalyptic tirades on the indiscriminate ingestion of books were a way of warning against an emerging consumer society of readers gone wild.
Reading and the Mandate for Self-Improvement
What was the cure for reckless, compulsive ingestion of books? As I have already suggested above, conduct manuals tried to redress this condition by turning reading into a productive (rather than a consuming) activity, in which the body was regulated or better yet eliminated altogether, and the pace of reading was routinized and controlled. This involved embracing a rhetoric of self-improvement, in which books were promoted as the gateway to moral development, religious uplift, and intellectual advance. Books should “inform the mind, refine the taste and improve the heart,” wrote the Rev. Edwin Hubbell Chapin in 1840, “and we may be both wiser and better for the perusal.”52 These twin imperatives—to be “wiser and better”—constituted the majority rationale for reading. Books, when used well, worked to “cultivate the intellect,” but even more importantly, they created “moral character,” defined by one writer as “the love of beauty, goodness and truth … a sense of duty and honor.”53 Lydia Howard Sigourney echoed this assessment. Reading, she claimed, could do much to “cultivate the intellect,” but “This is not enough. It must also strengthen the moral principles, and regulate the affections.”54 What is stressed time and again in these accounts is the utility of reading, its serviceability in creating a more virtuous and better-informed citizenry. Even fiction, the most distrusted of genres, was generally sanctioned for its functional contributions.55 Chapin, for example, approved novels because they advanced “a keener insight into men and manners, a more graphic knowledge of the past, a more vivid sense of our relations to humanity, and of the claims of duty.”56 Of course, contemporary commentators did not deny the pleasures of books. Indeed, they often waxed effusive about the “profound delight in a course of reading.”57 But these satisfactions were generally understood as ancillary to the primary goal of self-improvement, and, indeed, too much pleasure was often a sign that the “duties” of reading were being neglected.58
Dutiful reading was typically articulated in two ways—through metaphors of ideation and systematization. First, readers were expected to read actively, that is, to make use of their minds while reading and to “reflect” on their reading material assiduously. In an interview meant to act as a model for young readers, Henry Ward Beecher claimed, “Reading with me incites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas.”59 Cultural custodians echoed Beecher’s method, insisting that reading always be accompanied by thoughtful scrutiny. “Reading in a hasty and cursory manner, without exercising your own thoughts upon what you read, induces a bad habit of mind,” writes Harvey Newcomb in How to Be a Lady.60 He adds, “THINK AS YOU READ.—Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water; but examine them, and see whether they carry conviction to your own mind; and if they do, think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind.”61 Newcomb’s language is significant, because here he actively replaces the discourse of gustation (“Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water”) with that of cerebral introspection. His prescriptions for readers still rely on a metaphor of absorption (“think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind”), but it is one that is largely free of the baser corporeal appetites (eating, drinking, swallowing). Similarly, in the interview referenced above, Henry Ward Beecher’s book practices are referred to as “moral hygienic reading,” a description remarkable for the way it attempts to divest the reading process of all bodily adulteration.62
Newcomb’s characterization of reading as an active, assimilative exercise in which new information is slowly absorbed by a controlling agent was the standard for appropriate reading—a way of dealing with the tricky problem of a book’s influence. “An author should be valued, not so much for what he has thought for us, as for what he has enabled us to think,” writes an anonymous author in 1866, thereby emphasizing the necessity of readerly preeminence.63 This approach to books was infinitely preferred over what commentators described as “the mechanical exercise of reading,”64 a mode of intake in which the mind automatically processes material without questioning its merits or integrating it with previously arrived-at truths. Such a depiction likens readers to machines, suggesting that in rapidly consuming books they have become cogs in the modern industrial complex rather than controlling agents set apart from it.65 Referencing this phenomenon, Chapin differentiates between “the acquisition of knowledge” and the “development of the faculties.” To engage in the first is “merely to learn by rote, to cram the memory with a collection of facts,” while the second means to “to draw out the mind so that it may know how to use facts, so that it may become greater than those facts.”66 There are “mere encyclopedias from whom you can get any fact upon any subject,” he adds later, “but those facts are packed up in their minds as dry items; they have been preserved, not planted there.”67 In invoking the metaphor of industrial assembly (“packed up … as dry items … preserved, not planted”) and contrasting it to a more agricultural vision, Chapin connects bad reading to a mechanistic
