Do What I Tell You

“Be even cautious in displaying your good sense.”

 “The men will complain about your reserve. They will assure you that a franker behavior would make you more amiable. I acknowledge that on some occasions it might render you more agreeable as companions, but it would make you less amiable as women.”

“You will not easily believe how much we consider your dress as expressive of your characters.”

John Gregory, from A Father's Legacy to His Daughters , 1774

 “The danger of pedantry and presumption in a woman--of her exciting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other, would be I own sufficient to frighten me from the ambition of seeing my girl remarkable for learning.  Such objections are perhaps still stronger with regard to the abstruse sciences.”

If you have natural modesty, you will never transgress its bound, whilst you are converse with a man, as one rational creature to another, without any view to the possibility of a lover or admirer, where nothing of that kind is profest—where it is, I hope you will be able to distinguish the effects of real esteem and love from idle gallantry . . . .”

Hester Mulso Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 1773

The advice quoted above reminds eighteenth-century women to, in essence, remain stupid or pretend to be so. It suggests a careful calculation about behavior around men. And, importantly, it probably strikes a modern ear as so odd that we have to ask: Who read this stuff?  And why? 

While these quotations are somewhat out of context, and Chapone, in particular, actually was interested in educating women, much of the conduct literature of the eighteenth century sounds patronizing and degrading to our modern ears. Advice about reading, for example, suggests a limited critical understanding on the part of the reader. Don't read anything fictional without getting advice, Chapone warns. Samuel Johnson worries that readers won't be able to tell the difference between right and wrong if the bad characters aren't clearly delineated (see Rambler #4). At best, many of these essays and letters seem boring and overly moralizing to modern readers.

It is important to remember that texts like these were big sellers, steady sellers over decades of time. Excerpts from books like Chapone's and Gregory's were reprinted in anthologies and these anthologies sold well and kept the writers names and ideas in circulation for years after the original publication date, and after the author's death.

Before we dismiss this as simply another strange historical phenomenon, we should remember the enduring popularity of self help and advice books even today. In particular, we might compare the moralizing and religious strain of the steady sellers on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the enduring popularity of books about living spiritually. The language and the terms though which the issues are discussed is very different across time. But consider:  Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life is an all time best-seller; Spencer Johnson's, Who Moved My Cheese? also shows up there.  What Not to Wear is in its tenth season. Advice and self help show up on best seller lists like this one, this one, and even this one from 1968.

Think those rules about how women aught to behave about men are strange and outdated? Check this out, from The Rules, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider:

“Don’t meet him halfway or go Dutch on a date.”

“Don’t open up too fast.”

“Don’t call him and rarely return his calls.”

“You don’t accept a weekend date after Wednesday.”

Something Very Horrid

Even if you haven't read any gothic novels from the late 1700s, Austen's parody in Northanger Abbey makes many of their conventions fairly clear. A beautiful heroine finds her self in old castle or abbey--the older the better. It is filled with mysterious noises and lights. It has secret, locked chambers and staircases. Old cabinets and trunks hold secret manuscripts. The inhabitants are oppressed by a force no one seems able to name. The heroine herself has, in all likelihood, been kidnapped and brought to the castle against her will--locked up in one of the chambers herself, perhaps.

Austen domesticates many of these events in her novel. She makes the kidnapping, for example, into a event that hinges more on the social impropriety of backing out of a prior engagement than on actual abduction. The heroine is not taken away from her home, but sent back to it. Mysterious manuscripts turn out to be laundry bills. And while we can easily see the amusement in reversing or miniaturizing the overblown events of the gothic, it might be more difficult to see why she does this.

As many have noted, Austen was suspicious of some of the currents of thought represented by the gothic. The exaggerated feelings of sympathy and sensibility, the heightened workings of the imagination, and the preference for old, ruined buildings and landscapes--Romance--are her targets in many of her novels. Did common people really have such exaggerated feelings for potential lovers that they would refuse to eat or sleep? Would anyone really prefer an old house with ancient furnishing to one fitted up with modern conveniences?

At the same time that Austen seems to be arguing that the novel might accommodate common people's stories (notice how often the word "common" shows up in the novel itself!), gothic terrors creep in as not entirely unfounded. This is especially true, of course, in the case of General Tilney. Catherine is right about many of her surmises--he is an oppressive force, there is a mystery about him, he is cruel and tyrannical. Is it possible that Austen finds more truth in the gothic than it seems on a first reading?

Read!

The Reading Rainbow. The Big Read. "Read with your child for 20 minutes every day." We make a pretty big deal out of reading and literacy in this country today; indeed strong habits of reading have been connected with involvement in "cultural, sports, and volunteer activities." Readers are more likely to "visit an art museum . . . [and] volunteer or do charity-work" (Reading at Risk). Other studies suggest that people who don't read as much "do less well in the job market." People in jail are more likely to poor reading skills and people who don't read are less likely to vote (To Read or Not to Read ).

Such studies, in other words, show a strong correlation between civic participation and reading. In this country (the United States), at this historical moment (the early 21st century), we want people to read so that they can be better citizens and have more productive lives.

But this has not always been the case. In eighteenth-century England (the historical context for Austen's Northanger Abbey), many were quite worried about increasing literacy and habits of reading. They were worried about what the lower classes might read--would they get dangerous ideas about overturning the social hierarchy? Some cultural arbiters tried to promote "safe" reading that would be "the best security you can have, both for the industry and obedience of your servants" (Hannah More, The Cheap Repository Tracts, c. 1795). Here, the proposed "safe" reading was the Bible, which might raise other questions, but the intent--to keep people in their places--is clear. Samuel Johnson saw novels as the "entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impression" and therefore recommended that writers be very careful about the kinds of lessons and examples they put forth in their novels (Rambler #4, 1750). Hester Mulso Chapone, while mostly encouraging young women to read and educate themselves, cautioned that "the greatest care should be take in the choice of those fictitious stories, that so enchant the mind--most of which tend to inflame the passions of youth" (Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 1773).

These are two very different sets of assumptions! Both moments see that reading has strong effects on people, but the earlier time tends to fear rather than applaud those effects as inflaming the passions and generating disruptive trends in thinking. Another way of thinking about this, I suppose, is that we now see reading as a path to critical thinking: we think (generally--there are still exceptions) it is good to read in order to shake up our established ideas.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are always a problem early in the semester. I usually say a paragraph is a unit of thought. But that seems ambiguous--units of thought might be small or large, short or long! An idea that might be a single sentence in one essay, might be explored for two or three paragraphs in another. How does one develop rules and strategies? Like everything with writing, the sense of what a paragraph is, that is, where your ideas end and begin, is one that simply strengthens with practice.

In the meantime, Parfitt offers a few good reminders. Have a clear sense of your paragraph's topic. Make that clear to the reader by stating it in a topic sentence (you'll want to make a claim as well and someetimes the topic setnence and the claim are the same). Keep linking each sentence back to the topic. But, as he notes, "repeating the exact same word frequently will create a sense of  tedium." He goes on to explain that "words and phrases that are related but not identical, that work as variations on a theme, can forge connection and develop your point at the same time."*

Developing a strong constellation of key terms is, therefore, important in showing the links between your ideas and writing unified paragraphs. A constellation is a group of words or phrases that help you express similar ideas. It requires some work, and maybe a thesaurus, but if you take five minutes and brainstorm a variety of ways to express your central ideas, you'll have them ready as you revise your paragraphs.

I also like Parfitt's explanation of the "map view" and the "globe-trotter's view"* of a paragraph. Seeing the whole paragraph at a glance, the map view, is probably what we do when we are drafting. We say, Ok, this paragraph is about X, the next one about Y. But the reader experiences the paragraph one sentence at a time and must "work to make sense of each one in relation to the previous sentences and paragraphs." It is important, then, to think about each paragraph as a trail that moves forward, or a mini narrative. What does the reader need to know first? Is this a conclusion or is this helping to set up my claim? The more you ask those questions and revise to create a logical order, the easier a time the reader will have.

And, the more you ask those questions, the more you can revise to give your reader signposts. The small words seem to the words that beginning writers often avoid and yet they are the most helpful--when used correctly--in guiding the reader. First. Then. However. And. But. Therefore. One the other hand. Yet.

* From Matthew Parfitt, Writing in Response (Boston, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012), 131-132; 139