Women's Work, Part 1: Is Women's Literature...Bad?

Episode Topic: Is Women's Literature...Bad? 

Trashy romances. Sizzling beach reads. Chick lit. Fluff. As a culture, why do we describe women’s literature in the words that we do? In this episode, Chris Hedlin, assistant director and assistant teaching professor in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society at Notre Dame, talks with Ashley Reed, Associate Professor English at Virginia Tech and author of the book Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-century America, about the fascinating history of women’s literature in the United States and how that history continues to shape the ways people read and talk about women’s fiction today.

Featured Speakers:

• Chris Hedlin, Assistant Director and assistant teaching professor in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society, University of Notre Dame
• Ashley Reed, associate professor in the Department of English, Virginia Tech

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/37b365

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Women's Work. 

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Transcript

Introduction to Women's Work Series and Is Women's Literature Bad?

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 0:06

Welcome to Women's Work, a series about the working lives and literary works of U. S. women. We'll take up questions in this series like, Where did Americans get the idea that some kinds of labor are properly women's work? How is work gendered in women's literature? Women's work, or works, in another sense. How are feminist writers and philosophers recasting what it means to do meaningful work? I am your series host, Chris Hedlund. I teach in and help direct the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society at Notre Dame. The program helps students who are studying both business and the arts, humanities, or social sciences to ask big questions. Questions like, what makes work meaningful? Or, what makes a just economy? This ThinkND series, Women's Work, is based on an undergraduate course I have developed by that same name. The course and this series are made possible through the support of Notre Dame Women Connect, ThinkND, the Notre Dame Alumni Association, and a digital learning sprint that I received from Notre Dame's Office of Digital Learning and their partners. If you find the content here interesting, I hope you'll consider interacting with women's work in other ways, such as volunteering to do informational interviews with students, or participating in our shared READ program in conjunction with Notre Dame Women Connect. You can find out more information about these opportunities and others through the ThinkND website. Okay, let's talk about women's work. I am just so pleased to be joined here today by Dr. Ashley Reed, Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech and author of the book Heaven's Interpreters, Women Writers and Religious Agency in 19th Century America. Ashley has also taught courses like The Early American Novel, American Women's Writing to 1900, and I recently learned even a whole course on cringe literature. As I conceptualized this ThinkND series, I knew that Ashley was exactly the person I wanted to talk with about women's novels in the United States. Ashley, welcome! Thank you for being here.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 2:13

Thank you, Chris. I'm delighted to see you and I'm excited to talk about women's novels.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 2:17

Yay. so actually I titled this episode, Is Women's Literature Bad? and now here's where my head was at when I was coming up with that title. So when I talk with often women, and men some, but mostly women, about their fiction reading habits, I'm often surprised by how often they will, denigrate or minimize what they're reading as they're describing it. so the conversation goes something like, oh, are you reading anything over winter break? And they'll be like, yeah, just like trashy romances. And I'm like, oh yeah. Okay. And they're like, yeah, it's so great. But it's there's an apology that's needed. Built into what they're describing, even as they're saying that they liked it. and I noticed the same thing on professional reviews of women's fiction. if I'm reading on Amazon or something, often the comments have a, it's a compliment, but also it's insulting structure to it. so I'm thinking of terms like sizzling beach read. definitely a compliment, but also there's some. It's embedded in that a suggestion that A, it's maybe not too serious, and B, perhaps sexually tantalizing, so same duality as trashy romance, like it's bad literature in two senses, both not high quality and also maybe naughty or taboo or something like that.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 3:29

Yeah.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 3:30

So that was my, I had that in my head as I was thinking about this episode and as a fellow scholar of U. S. women's fiction, I'm sure you can probably guess where I'm going next, which is there has to have been a history here, right? there's a reason that we describe women's fiction in the way that we do today. So I'm hoping that in this episode we can tease out a little bit of that history for audiences. yeah. Okay, so my first one, question for you is a very broad framing one. so I mentioned I recently, you shared with me that you teach a course on approaches to cringe literature. which I'm imagining is similar to the phenomenon that I'm describing here. So I want to ask you, how do you in that course, or just for yourself, how do you define cringe literature? what do you mean by that?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 4:14

I have to confess that, I didn't conceptualize that course myself. I had a couple of graduate students. We have a master's program in literature here at Virginia Tech, and I had some graduate students who came to me and said they wanted to do an independent study and they wanted to call it Cringelit, and they wanted to read a bunch of, quote unquote, trashy books and, and then talk about them together, but talk about them in a sort of separate way. I'm not sure that this is a scholarly way, right? Not so much in a book club, here's what we loved about this book kind of way, but in a more scholarly, critical, why did people call this book bad? What makes this book bad? Do we agree that this book is bad? So the students actually made the syllabus and they came up with the books and I was pleased to discover that they weren't all romance novels, right? I thought, gonna bring me a list of just all books by women. And I was really pleased when they brought me. A syllabus that had something other than, it had Twilight, it had Fifty Shades of Grey, but it also had The Da Vinci Code, The Magician, some comics, some superhero comics, things like that. And so it wasn't just, we're gonna read a bunch of trashy romance novels and talk about how trash they are, right? it was a little bit broader than that. But I will say, I think You know, I have had similar conversations with people that I'm going to read these trashy romance novels. Oh, I read this book, but it's not a real book. It's just a romance. Something along those lines. And that is a very gendered way to talk about pleasure reading, right? No one who likes Brad Thor goes around saying, I read a bunch of trashy Brad Thor books. Or Tom Clancy, right? I read a bunch of crappy Tom Clancy books, right? And I don't mean to suggest that Brad Thorne or Tom Clancy is a terrible writer, only that these are popular books. There are many of them. They are meant for quick consumption, and yet we don't talk about These books, when they're written by men, as though they were trash in the same way we do when they're written right? So in that class on Cringelet, that's one of the many things that we talked about in that course was who gets to define something is bad or why it's bad? What does that have to do with the gender of the author or the gender of the characters or the genre of the story? then what do you do with a book that is universally believed to be terrible, but that is also extremely popular, right? Why do you just, who gets to decide that's a bad book if literally millions of people around the world are enjoying it? It doesn't even have to be good in some way if millions of people are enjoying it. So those were the kinds of discussions that we had in Cringeland.

The History of the Novel in the U.S.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 6:38

Oh man, those are like exactly the questions that I want to think through more today, like you've got your finger exactly on the pulse of what I'm thinking about. and so maybe we can, it makes sense for us to go back. so we're both literary historians. let's talk history. I think because you mentioned, terms that I think a lot of times we take for granted, novel, romance. and because. I think it can be hard to remember that in fact, in the scale of literary genres, the novel is relatively new. so thinking about for our audiences, depending on who you ask, the novel was only invented in the 16th century. 1600s, 1700s, at least in the English language. Ashley, let's focus for our conversation on the U. S. context. what was the scene like in the early U. S.? thinking about kind of the era of the nation's founding, what were people, and maybe especially women, reading at that time?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 7:34

my students about the history of the novel and point out that the word novel means new. So even though we think of the novel as a really long standing form, and in some ways, it's still the primary literary form that we engage with now. That's actually a historically recent development, right? Three or four hundred years. And it's called the novel because it was a novel way of reading or a novel way of engaging with literature. And, the preconditions for the novel are in some ways the preconditions for our current, market capitalist system, right? You need a highly literate population because there need to be enough people to be able to purchase and get a hold of, and be able to read novels. But then you also need people with leisure time to read novels as well, right? And you don't really get that combination of high literacy and leisure time until the 16 so there's very sort of material and political and historical reasons. the rise of the novel. And then it really takes off in the late 18th century. And particularly in the United States, the most popular form of the novel, the most popular genre of novel in the late 18th and early 19th century United States was the seduction novel. This is true in Britain as well. There's these huge bestsellers, Clarissa and Pamela, written by Samuel Richardson. In the United States, the big bestsellers are Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rausen, The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster, of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, and they're all, they all belong to this genre known as the seduction novel. And when I teach the seduction novel, I always have to warn my students, it sounds like it's going to be really titillating and exciting and fun to read, but not nearly as fun as it sounds. It's actually a depressing genre about women who are lured away from their parents by libertine men, seduced, and it usually ends with them, it usually ends with them, pregnant, dying in childbirth, or somehow, even if they survive, socially ostracized. And this is a really strange to be super popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. And one of the reasons is a sort of political historical one. These are novels about consent. People are finding themselves living in these democracies where democracy is famously a form of government on the consent of the governed, but most of the people who live under democracies don't actually have the opportunity to consent to that government. and so there's a lot of scholars who believe that the seduction novel is actually a novel that thinks through the question of consent in this kind of political milieu. But they're also, to go back to a word you used earlier, just titillating, right? Even though they're not as fun as they sound, you, there's no sex scenes, you don't get to actually watch anyone get seduced, but they are about, they are about women being led astray by men and being, Engaging in illicit affairs or illicit sex in some way. And so they were titillating for readers. And so you have this really popular genre at the end of the 18th and the early 19th century, that is all about women. and sex and women's role in society and women getting seduced and taken away from their families. And it's a really, it's a pretty titillating form and no one was really sure if folks were reading it for its didactic purpose. oh you should read this because then you'll know not to get seduced. Or if people were reading it for its more titillating underpinnings, which is, Oh, I just want to read a novel about, illicit sexuality or illicit affairs between people of different classes or different groups. so no one was really sure what was the work that novel, that genre was performing, right? Is it didactic or is it titillating? Or is it some combination of the two? And so it gained a, a reputation, right? being, a little dangerous, and particularly, when women read it, right? Because women historically have been, we live in a paternalistic society that assumes that women are easily led astray, right? So if they're reading novels about other women being led astray, isn't it going to contribute to them being led astray, right? so the novel has always been considered a kind of dangerous form for women to read, In part because the novel is something you engage with kind of unsupervised, right? You take it to your room, you read it by yourself, and nobody really knows about the emotional or embodied reaction that you're having to it. And so there's something dangerous about the act of reading alone at all, because nobody can supervise your reaction to something that you're reading. And so culturally that seems very dangerous, in a society that's very concerned with controlling women's thoughts and women's behavior and women's ideas.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 12:08

Fascinating. Yeah. so you, so I hear you saying that in the early US the reputation around the novel was that it was, dangerous, that it was sexually promiscuous, that it has the power potentially to lead women astray. what were, what was the alternative to novels? what did people think? Oh, women shouldn't be reading novels. That'll lead'em astray. Like they should be reading

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 12:31

the Bible.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 12:34

Good alternative.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 12:35

reason, part of the reason for increased literacy was, was religious conversion and religious, conversion. Evangelism, right? That if more people could read, then more people could read the Bible. But of course, once people could read, they don't just stop with the Bible. They don't read anything they can get their hands on, right? So the Bible, sermons, poetry was still considered a very uplifting, a very edifying form of literature. so really, if you were a good, behaved woman, you weren't supposed to be reading novels. You're supposed to be reading the Bible, or sermons, or didactic. Literature, or poetry. Poetry that would uplift you rather than novels which would tell you a story that would get your emotions all overheated and that would lead you down, might lead you down a, more dangerous path.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 13:18

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. so we have on the one hand. Bible, sermons, poetry, something that will form your character in a positive way. And then on the other hand, there's these novels that are sexually titillating and, seduction, giving you wrong messages. I know though that your work is on women's religious fiction. so Square that circle. at what point did we start to have a shift where there's a religious press that's developing with, I guess if you can't beat him, join him sort of energy? how did religious novels come into being in the U. S.?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 13:51

Yeah, good question. So in the late 18th, so there's all those novels that I listed a minute ago, the seduction novels. Clarissa, Pamela, the Coquette, Charlotte Temple. Those are all from the 1780s, 1790s, maybe early 1800s. in the, famously between 1790 and about 1830, there's this huge religious revival called the Second Great Awakening that sweeps across both the United States and the That really results in much higher numbers of religious identification. People often think that used to be religious and now they're not religious, but religious identification in the United States tends to be a sign curve, like an up and down. The revolutionary era was actually a pretty era in American history. The levels of religious identification were pretty low. By the 1850s, you have enormously high levels of religious identification in the United States because there's this huge revival movement called the Second Great Awakening. And one of the things that spreads the Second Great Awakening is the rise of a really large, a really widely expanded print, print scene in, both the United States and Europe. So you have rising literacy through increased forms of public education. You have a huge explosion in print due to rising incomes, people having more, people having more money to spend on books and newspapers, but also through technological advancements like the steam press that make it much, much cheaper and faster to print things. So you get this kind of print revolution in the United States. between, the 1820s and the 1860s. And women are some of the first people to take advantage of this print revolution because there aren't a lot of, professions open to women at this time, right? You have increasingly educated women because of women's seminaries and women's education. and because of, I'll skip that part. That's confusing. Um, have, you have explosion in available print, you have rising literacy, but there still aren't that many professions that are open to women, but one of the ones that is, is authorship. because if you can get something, if you can convince your local newspaper editor to print one of your poems, then you can become a published author. if you can, Get enough people to help you, pay to self publish your book, or if you're rich enough to self publish your book, you can publish a book. Or, if you can convince a publisher that lots of women or lots of people want to read this story you've written, then you can get published, right? You don't have to go to law school, you don't have to go to med school, you can just write something and figure out how to get it published. So that writing is a profession that is open to women. But a lot of women in 19th century America did not want to be confined to writing the seduction novel, and in fact they too thought the seduction novel was a kind of titillating and degraded form, that it reinforced the idea that women were, sexually incontinent and that women couldn't be trusted with their own decisions. and so a lot of the story of 19th century women's literature, particularly before the Civil War, between about 1820 and 1860, is really a repudiation of the seduction novel. So you get the rise of this genre that Nina Boehm has famously called women's fiction, which is, There's at least 150 of these novels between 1860s, and they all have a similar structure, which is a Cinderella story. You have this little girl who is orphaned or otherwise separated from her parents, shuffled from family to family, is at some point usually converted to Christianity, and grows into a beautiful, respected, Really virtuous woman and then is usually rewarded with a good husband at the end of the novel. And so it's been dismissed sometimes as a fairy tale, particularly by 20th century critics who just thought all these novels were terrible. but it's a story about women. Growing into good people and learning how to make good decisions for their lives, particularly the biggest decision of most 19th century women's lives, which is who will I marry, right? And so instead of being a story about indecisive or easily led astray women who get seduced and then abandoned by these terrible men, it's a story about women learning to women and become, become, able to make good rational decisions for themselves and to build good Christian families by becoming wives of respectable men. so it's the anti seduction novel, right? That's this genre called women's fiction in the 19th century is the anti seduction novel. And it's not the only kind of religious fiction in the 19th century. It's not the only kind of novel being written by women, but it's a very ubiquitous one, a very well known one, very much beloved. Like I said, Nina Boehm found at least 150 of these novels, and there's probably more that have been discovered in the last few decades. And they are very much a product of the Second Great Awakening and the evangelical literary culture that grew up as a result of the Second Great Awakening. Because one of the ideas of the Second Great Awakening was, okay, we can use literature, we can use this print revolution to convert people to Christianity. Conversion doesn't just need to be a one to one conversation. You can convert people you've never met. If you write a pamphlet or you publish, a book, a devotional book, a book of prayers, or even a novel could convert people to Christianity if it's a good enough novel, if it's a virtuous enough novel. And so a lot of women writers of the 19th century adopted the novel form, this historically kind of trashy, titillating form, they adopted it and they transformed it. into a tool of Christian conversion where you could use stories of virtuous women serve as examples to women readers of the kind of good Christian woman that they could be. And then ideally the good Christian husband they'd be rewarded with if they were a good Christian girl.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 19:40

I feel like I have so many follow up questions. the, so the, I think it's really interesting the, that the term women's fiction, like that has a history that we're pointing to this specific time. I'm thinking about other terms like domestic fiction or sentimental fiction. Are those all synonyms? are those things that describing distinct genres in the 19th century?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 20:01

That's a really good question. This term, women's fiction, like I said, it was coined by Nina Bain to describe this particular sort of sub genre of the larger literary mode that is often referred to as sentimental fiction, right? And sentimental fiction, is not always written by women, but it was the one of the dominant literary forms in the 19th century. And the reason it's called sentimental is because its primary concern is with people's emotions, right? It is not necessarily primarily concerned with a quest, or an adventure, or the fall of a woman, although it can be sometimes about, fallen or seduced women, but it is prim it's primarily concerned with, with the emotions of the characters and the sort of emotional growth of the characters, and it all sentimental fiction in the 19th century was very much believed to have very specific, very explicit, a very explicit effect on the reader. We call it sentimental not only because it describes and is concerned with the emotions of the characters, but also because the assumption is that it plays upon and affects the emotion of the reader. But if you read a sentimental novel, you will be moved to pity. You might cry at the fate of the characters in the novel. you might get angry at the behavior of some of the characters. But sentimental fiction was both about the emotions of the characters, but also was meant to, was meant to affect and play upon, and we might even say manipulate, the emotion of readers. So in that sense, the seduction novel and the sentimental or women's fiction of the 19th century, they have an underlying premise in common, which is that a novel is meant to affect readers. the emotions of the reader, to have some sort of emotional, to gain some sort of emotional response from the reader. But whereas the seduction novel, we might think that emotional response is titillation, for the sentimental fiction and particularly the woman's fiction of the 19th century, that emotional response was supposed to be sympathy, empathy, pity, and then also, uh, a Christian response, right? You would have a, you'd have a sort of. religious emotional response to something that you were reading, and not just, it wouldn't just excite your emotions for no reason, it would excite your emotions, to affect some outcome. Either Christian conversion, or in the case of something like Uncle Tom's Cabin, you'd be so moved by the story that you would then take some abolitionist action. that's why we refer to sentimental fiction in the 19th century. and then domestic fiction, I think, is also, like women's fiction, is a subset of sentimental.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 22:46

Yeah, I can see, as you're describing it, the legacy of that, the goals of sentimental fiction being to move emotions. And I can already imagine then the kinds of reception that would lead to, is that the goal? The highest form of response that you could have to literature or is the like rational thinking self, that would be the real goal. And then this is, I'm already thinking of the trashy, that Oh, this is just your emotions. I could see how that would lead to, a variety of critical responses.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 23:15

Yeah. And I think sometimes when people, when I say something like, oh, the, literature, sentimental literature is supposed to engage your emotions. And you might think, isn't all literature supposed to engage your emotions? What's the point of reading if you don't have an emotional reaction to the book? But really, in the 20th century, you get this real pushback on sentimental literature. and you, and for most, from the late 19th century to the, all the way through the 20th century. The assumption among many literary critics and many scholars of literature was that in fact, yes, you should have some sort of higher intellectual reaction to a piece of literature. And if you did have emotional reactions, they should be subordinated to your intellectual engagement with the text. So I think often when we say something is trashy, we're not talking We have this real sort of mind body duality in our culture, right? It's if you enjoy something, you can't think about it. And if you think about it, your enjoyment will be diminished. This is often something that people say to me is, Oh, thinking too hard about the novel kind of ruins it, right? And it's because we think that when you react to a piece of art, you have an intellectual reaction and an emotional reaction. And the intellectual reaction is The purer, the better, the higher reaction, and your embodied or emotional reaction is somehow, the lower reaction. It's your animal reaction to a piece of literature. So when someone says to you, I read a trashy romance novel, I think often the assumption behind that is, this is the kind of literature that I only react to emotionally. Only in an embodied way, only in an emotional way, and there's no intellectual way to engage with that literature, and that's what makes it trashy, right? As you think of someone like Henry James writes novels about people getting married, people having babies, people getting divorced. they are domestic novels. They are often about women, they are about emotion, they are about families, all the things we associate with women. But nobody refers to Henry James as sentimental, and certainly not as trashy, because the assumption is that he's writing about those subjects in an intellectual kind of way, and that your primary engagement with, you The piece of literature, regardless of the subject matter, is intellectual, right? And so one of the things I like to talk to my students about is this kind of duality. Why do we think that your reaction, your intellectual reaction to a piece of literature is better, is more important, is more worth studying or engaging with than your emotional reaction to a piece of literature? And why do we assume that these are separate in the first place, right? Is there any way to approach a piece of art without your emotions or without your mind. No, you can't really do that. And so, why can't we approach every piece of writing, why can't we think about the things that we enjoy and the things that we read as always engaging both our emotions and our intellect, right? And can we think about those things, together, right? Without having to denigrate, the things that we think of as fun or emotional or sentimental or romantic or whatever, right?

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 26:16

Yeah, so helpful. But that duality, you mentioned like the 20th century investment in that duality. Are we seeing that already in the 19th century that people are starting to denigrate like sentimental literature or women's fiction as lesser than like real literature or serious literature?

Critical Acclaim of 19th Century Novels

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 26:34

I think the real society wide push to just to distinguish high art and high literature from trashy or low literature comes about after the Civil War. There's a really famous quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, where he's complaining that people aren't buying his novels because they are, they're buying The Lamplighter by Mariah Susanna Cummins, which is one of these women's fiction novels, hugely popular, published in 1854. And so he's complaining in a letter to his wife. Publisher that no one's buying his books because they're all reading that damned mob of scribbling women. And so people will often look at that and say, oh, no one respected women's literature in the 19th century. But actually before the civil war Women's novels in particular, certainly women's poetry, was often quite critically acclaimed, right? Uncle Tom's Cabin, in addition to being globally popular, was also very critically acclaimed. many critics in the 19th century thought that it was an extremely well written and good novel. And that's true for a lot of other novels, The Wide World, even The Lamplighter, the thing that Nathaniel Hawthorne was complaining about. We're often quite critically embraced and we're often read by men as well as women, and really the separation that we often see between of high literature and popular literature is a function of the literary critical landscape of the post Civil War era in the United States. people like Henry James, like William Dean Howells, this group of, group of writers who wrote for Scribner's and The Atlantic Monthly, they really constructed the course of the second half of the 19th century a dichotomy between high intellectual literature and low popular literature. And then of course modernist critics in the early 20th century just take that and run with it so that the entire 20th century is in some ways, up until I would say the 1970s, is really, There's really an intellectual process of drawing a huge line between high literature, high intellectual classic literature and low trashy popular literature. I think we are currently living through an era when that dichotomy is shrinking. I think a lot of readers are no longer care about that distinction, and a lot of teachers are less A lot of instructors, a lot of teachers, a lot of professors, a lot of even some literary critics are much less invested in maintaining that, that distinction than they used to be, which is very refreshing to me as someone who grew up under that regime of if you like it, it sucks. And if you don't like it, it's that's because it's a classic and you're not smart enough to understand it. That's really how. A lot of literature was presented to me when I was growing up. The

Gender & Race

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 29:11

Yeah, I love like the way when, as you're describing it, helping, you're helping me think through what's at stake for people in this distinction? Why does it feel important that we have good, high literature that we protect? And then there's the rest of all this trash, so thinking about like the formation of literary criticism as a real discipline and like that we need to have something at stake in that. yeah, that's very helpful. I want to say

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 29:37

to happen, no matter what the definition of high literature is that it's always whatever men are writing, right? So if men were writing romance novels, romance would not be trashy, right? If

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 29:48

see. Mwa ha! Okay.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 29:52

tell how old I am because I can't think of a romance writer. That woman is dead, I'm pretty sure. who wrote The Love Hypothesis? There's this really famous book right now called The Love Hypothesis, right? But if men were reading and loving The Love Hypothesis and women were reading and loving Tom Clancy, then Tom Clancy would be low And the love hypothesis would be Highlander, right? The way that our culture, which is a patriarchal culture, sorts out what is good and what is bad is that it often just looks at whatever it is women like and says, that's bad. And it looks at whatever men like and says, that's good.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 30:26

Yeah. I have three more follow up questions on that particular point, but I wanted to ask a couple more things about the 19th century before we move to the more contemporary. The, were, so you said 1820 to 1860 ish, which was when women were getting their legs underneath them with the press. Was that true for Black and white women? how did race factor into the kinds of books, novels, that women were writing in the 19th century?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 30:49

and I should really, this is a real problem that I fall into, and a lot of literary critics fall into, is that often when we talk about women's literature and women entering into the publishing scene, we are often by default talking about white women, which are really English women. English descended white women of, early North America. And, so much of what I've been saying about sort of women entering into the publishing field has applied specifically to white women. it's very difficult for black women to break into the publishing arena in the 19th century, even free black women, right? Because, because Publishing, the sort of arbiters of the publishing world were still white and male for the entire 19th century, right? Even if you were a woman who wanted to publish poetry in your local newspaper editor was a man, and you needed to convince that man to publish your poetry. so there are some, there were some Black women who did publish in the 19th century before the Civil War, often in newspapers and magazines, and often in Black owned newspapers and magazines. So there are some Black women poets of the early 19th century who are usually publishing in these venues that we now call ephemeral, right? If that were like physically ephemeral, they don't, they didn't get preserved as well. So magazines and newspapers. You did a few women, a few black women publishing poetry in the first half of the 20th century. Sorry, the first half of the 19th century. Ellen Watkins Harper is famously one of the earliest kind of successful black women poets and lecturers who was already not extremely famous, but somewhat well known before the Civil War as a poet and a lecturer. The earliest books published by Black women tend to be about slavery and oppression. So you have Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, who was a free Black woman in the North who published her of having been I'm really, terrible violence and oppression as an indentured servant, and a domestic worker in the north before the Civil War. And then you have Harriet Jacobs's incidence in the life of the slave girl, which is a novel length slave narrative written by Harriet Jacobs. The Her character in the book is named Linda Brent, but Harriet Jacobs is the author of that book, and it took her a decade to find someone who would publish that book, and she was only able to get it published through the bookstore. of Lydia Maria Child, who was a white abolitionist reformer. So it was extremely difficult for Black women to enter into the publishing sphere in the antebellum period. It becomes easier after the Civil War, but still pretty difficult because, so many of the gatekeepers of the publishing world were white men, or in some cases white women, who were sometimes more inclined to align their allegiances with other Black women. with white men than with black women. And so it was quite difficult for black women to become, get published, right? To enter into the publishing world in the 19th century, until the very end of the 19th century.

The Challenge of Defining 'Good' Literature

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 34:08

Very helpful. Yeah, very helpful. a question, so I know when I talk to people about that I work on 19th century religious fiction or women's fiction, sentimental fiction, a lot of times people's next question is is it good? should I read it? how do you respond to that question? People ask you like, are the novels you're working on in the 19th century, are they good?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 34:31

Yeah, there's a short answer to, there's a long answer to that question, and then there's the short answer to that question, right? The long answer is, that you have to rethink what is your definition of good, right? scholars of women's literature who have been trying to recover 19th century women's literature for the literary field since about the 1970s because so much, women were wildly popular as authors in the 19th century, but the 20th century process of canon formation that decided what were the books that were good enough to be retained as classics and good enough to be taught in schools wasn't right. submerged all of that literature, right? Except Emily Dickinson. She's the only woman who survives that process. The only woman writer who survives that process. so scholars of women's literature have spent the last sort of 50 to 60 years having to recover all of this lost literature from the 19th century. And I don't mean physically lost, it's all in libraries. But, no one had been writing about it for 70 to 100 years. No one had been studying it because it had been lost. all been dismissed as trash, right? And so the question, so in the 1970s when feminist scholars of literature start bringing these texts back into literary discussion, saying, hey, we need to talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin. We need to talk about The Wide World, which was a huge bestseller in 1850. We need to talk about all the other poets besides Emily Dickinson. The first question, the first thing they get hit with is, we don't talk about that because it's terrible. None of it is good, right? And but the, what had happened was the way of deciding what was good the modernists of the early 20th century their predecessors in the late 19th century, had constructed a definition of good that by definition excluded these novels, right? So the novel has to be confusing, or complex, or it has to deal with timeless themes, and of course timeless themes like Having a baby doesn't count as a timeless theme. Starting a war counts as a timeless theme, right? so the first question that these women scholars, these feminist scholars had to contend with was, why do you want to read all these terrible books? And so then they had to go back and look at the definition of what makes a good book that had resulted in a situation where you could. dismiss a hundred years of extremely popular literature by saying it's all trash, right? So they had to rediscover, they had to reconceptualize what does it mean for a novel to be good, right? do we say something is good because it was popular? of people thought it was good enough to read, so why is that not how we define a good novel, right? Popular. Why doesn't popular mean good, right? So if we're not, if that's not how we're deciding what is a good piece of literature, what is a good novel, then, okay, does it have timeless themes? okay, but what do you consider timeless? People have been having babies for the entire history of human So student novels about childbirth and child rearing be novel or domesticity, how to raise a family. Isn't this the most timeless theme of all, right? So how do you define what makes a timeless theme, right? it should be, it should be intellectually complex or it should be, it should tackle a difficult subject. Okay, so slavery is the most difficult subject you can tackle. And Uncle Tom's Cabin is an incredibly complex novel that, that looks at slavery from so many sides of the slave system. okay, then that's a complex novel. but that's not, that wasn't considered a classic for the whole 20th century, right? So this is a very long answer to your question, and you might end up cutting it out of this podcast, but what

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 38:12

Thank you.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 38:12

saying is, that when someone says to me, are they good? Are the novels that you're, that you study good? This is this is the hamster wheel that happens in my head when someone says, are the novels you study good? Because then I, because I have to think, Okay, but, what is your definition of good? Is it your, you my age, and your ninth grade high school teacher told you that, the Scarlet Letter was a good novel, and then I have to figure out, is there another novel that's like the Scarlet Letter that you should read, right? or is your definition of good, this is a novel I'm going to enjoy, I'm not going to want to put it down? In which case I might say, then you should probably read, you might want to read The Wide World. It actually is a page turner for a lot of people, right? It's so you have to, so when someone says, are these books good? You really have to think about what is their definition of good that they are working with, right? So that's, so the long answer is let's talk about the whole history of the field of literary criticism and how it constructs is considered a good novel and always constructs it in a way that excludes the kinds of themes and the kinds of texts that women write. I can give you that whole history or I can say, what kind of novel do you like? What kind of recent novels do you like? And I'll try to come up with one that, that I think is similar to what you're, to what you're describing. That's the kind of short answer, when someone says to me, are these novels? And then the

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 39:34

Yeah.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 39:34

are you asking me because you want to know if my field is worth studying? Or are you asking me because you want a recommendation? That's another,

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 39:43

huh.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 39:43

mean in that case, right?

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 39:45

yeah, I have to get like probed to the heart of the question of what are you really asking? Yeah. Yeah. That's so helpful. And I love how you're pointing out that even taking sort of the, I don't know how to describe the words coming to mind object is objective. That's not right. But like the 20th century of this is what makes Good literature, the high literature, you pointing out that in fact the 19th century trashy literature fulfills those criteria a lot of ways. So it's not in fact just the criteria, there's something about the gendered aspect of it that really is an implicit criteria.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 40:18

yeah, and you can often get at this if you ask someone, if someone who, is denigrating something like romance novels and they say all that is just trash and you can ask them what do you think is trashy about? Why do you think romance novels are just trash and often the answers you will get are exactly what we've been talking about here they're just emotional or they're just they just manipulate your emotions or they just make you feel good they just they're just titillating you just like the sex scenes, right? And the sort of assumption behind that is anything that any piece of literature that is primarily speaking to your emotions is bad why do we assume that since, why would you read if your emotions weren't involved, right? Who wants to read things where you're completely emotionally unattached to them? or, any, or you will sometimes get an answer that, that is just blatantly misogynist, right? Like those books are just written for women and they're not real literature. And then you're like, why do you assume anything written for women is by, is bad by definition, right? often interesting to think. Back, think of, think about the kind of underlying assumptions when someone says to you, that piece of literature is bad, or that literature is trashy, or that literature is cringe, in the case of my, in the case of my cringelit course that I did with the grad students.

19th Century Literary Ecosystem and Family Bonding

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 41:29

Yeah. I'm struck as you're talking about like the role today that things like BookTok play in, or Bookstagram or, like it seems that part of in our contemporary moment, the policing of good literature versus not has to do also with how you found out about it. if you found this on, the Booker Prize list, it's probably good. but if you've learned about it through BookTok, maybe not so good. I'm curious, was there like, what would be the 19th century equivalent of BookTok? How did people learn about the literature that was best selling, that was popular? Cool.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 42:11

sort of news and information sphere was actually very similar to what we have now, because you had an enormous proliferation of newspapers and magazines without a lot of copyright regulation. So lots of things were being reprinted all over the place. They were being reprinted in slightly different versions, lots of misinformation and disinformation, and a lot of, so there was a lot of sort of circulation. And most newspapers. In the 19th century and most literary magazines or any kind of magazine had a literature section. They included a lot of literature reviews, a lot of book reviews. a very robust, critical landscape in the first, in the whole 19th century. Really, this is, But a lot of it was based, and this is something that's true of book talk too, I think, a lot of it was based on what used to get referred to as puffery, if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. So I'll give you a good review of your novel. If you give me a good review of my book of poetry, right? And this is something that. Edgar Allan Poe was often complaining about the sort of cultural, culture of puffery, even though he was perfectly willing to engage in it himself as well, right? some of the way that people found out about things was, was The critical sphere, right? That there were book critics and poetry critics publishing reviews, and you didn't have to be an official critic, right? Walt Whitman famously published a bunch of anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass that he just didn't sign. So there, it's all him, sending reviews of Leaves of Grass to these newspapers. Because he'd worked in the newspaper business, he had a ton of contacts, and so he would send these anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass out to newspapers. So The people who study Walt Whitman have collected all of these contemporary reviews of Leaves of Grass that are written by Walt Whitman, where he just gives um, really, reviews of Leaves of Grass that are all written by him. It's amazing. My students love that story. So yeah, so there is a huge kind of, ecosystem, critical ecosystem in the 19th century. And as I said, that ecosystem was in some ways slightly less sexist than what we have now. Um, many male critics of the 19th century loved, Uncle Tom's Cabin, loved the Wide World, loved all of these female poets that then got tossed out the window by the canon formation processes of the early 20th century. but another way was certainly word of mouth, which is also a similar thing to something like book talk, that your friend tells you that they loved Uncle Tom's Cabin, and so You pick it up and you read it too. there's an early history of circulating libraries, where people, where towns would have a, like a sort of proto lending library where you could go and borrow the books. There's also a real tradition in the 19th century of group reading or family reading. I talked a little while ago about the interiority of reading a novel that you could take it to your room and read it by yourself, and nobody would know what you were doing with that novel. It seemed a little dangerous, particularly if you were a woman, but there was also a, in the, certainly in 19th century, a huge tradition of sort of group reading or reading aloud so that a family You know, in the evenings, there's no TV, there's no radio. So what do you do in the evenings, when it's too dark to really do any work, you don't own a farm, so it's not like you have to get up at four and milk the cows, but, if you're a sort of urbane middle class family living in a city in the 19th century, what do you do in the evenings? And often the whole story. family would sit around and take turns reading a book out loud to each other. And it was a family bonding experience. It was a way to pass the time. It was also a way to teach your children to read. They could practice reading aloud to the room. It was also, if women were, women were constantly engaged in domestic labor in the 19th century. I talked about one of the preconditions for, The novel being leisure time, but often women's time was half labor, half leisure. You would be sitting and sewing, but you wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with your mind. And so often women would take turns reading to each other while they were sewing together. So that, So that there'd be something to listen to and talk about while you were mending your family's clothing or sewing a blanket for the family next door that was having a baby, you would sit around and read The Wide World and then talk about it together. So it was like a book club, but everybody was finishing their sewing while they were reading and talking about the book. So that was one of the, one of the ways that a lot of, Literature circulated in the 19th century was through these kind of family reading practices or through group reading practices, while you were engaged in something like sewing, some kind of domestic labor.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 46:43

I want to, I'm looking at our time. I don't want to keep you for too long. Is there anything that hasn't come up yet that was on your mind as you were coming into this conversation that you'd like to say?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 46:54

Oh that's a good question. Let me go look back at your notes. do you have more questions? I'm assuming that this is gonna get cut out.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:16

put, yeah, I always put more questions in for things like this than I would need. I,

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:21

You had a question at the end about, recommendations. and I have, a whole list of

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:26

Okay.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:27

I often get when people ask me for recommendations, I often do that sort of deer in the headlights thing, where it's you've never read a book in your

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:33

Yep. Good.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:37

ask me, I'll have an answer, and I don't sound like I've never read a book before, and why on earth am I a professor of American literature when I can't name a single book?

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:45

Okay. Yeah, totally. And these are recommendations from the 19th century. Is that

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:49

yeah.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 47:50

All right. then I'll tee you up for that as like a last question. and then, do you, would it make sense? Are you your next project? Do you know, is it related to this in some way or would that be a meaningful question or is it like, it's would take us in a totally different direction?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:03

It's about spiritualism, so

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:05

Oh, nice.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:06

in a different direction.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:07

Sure.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:07

So it is very related to women and women's, women's minds and things. But I don't know, I don't know a lot to say about the literature of it just yet.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:15

Okay. All right. then I will, ask you about the, Entry point. Okay. last question for you. if people are looking for recommendations like an entry point, a gateway drug into 19th century U. S. women's writers, where should they start? What would you recommend?

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 48:33

when people ask me this question, I try to get a sense of, what genre they like, or what are other authors that they like? Because, again, if it comes back to just that question of, Can you tell me a good novel to read? Then I have to go through this whole process what do you mean by good? What do you consider a good novel? So it's often you can skip that by saying what do you like to read, right? What are the kinds of things that you like to read? And so depending on the answer they, they come back with, I might give them a different answer, right? So if someone says, I like adventure novels or things where there's, lots of stuff happens, then I say, you should read, Hope Leslie by Catherine Maria Sedgwick, which actually everyone should read Hope Leslie by Catherine Maria Sedgwick, because the way that I always describe it to people is that it is Jane Austen writing a Jerry Bruckheimer movie because you have, have the romance, you have these, you have a love triangle, these three beautiful young people that are, these four, sorry, these four beautiful young people, who are all deciding going to marry whom. so you have the romance, but you also, it's in a story of settlement in, colonial Massachusetts. And so You have massacres, you have a pirate ship that explodes, you have a woman running around an island being chased by drunken men, like it's really exciting but also romantic and It's and also an incredibly important and influential novel for 19th century literature and for the study of 19th century literature. and also I happen to be the president of the Catherine Mariah Cedric Society, so then I can like, do a little, do a little bit of a promotion for that. So Hope Leslie by Catherine Mariah Cedric. If you like memoir, and memoir is hugely popular in, in contemporary literature right now. If you like memoir, I often recommend that people read Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which I mentioned earlier, and Zitkala Shah's Recollections of an Indian Childhood, which was this series of articles that was published in the Atlantic Monthly around 1900, that is beautifully written and really devastating series of pieces about her being taken from her family and put in a settlement school. and it's a really incredible read. And so I often will recommend that to people. if you like poetry, I recommend Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to people, who was also a novelist, was also a lecturer, was just an incredibly, like a real renaissance woman of the 19th century, also happened to be a novelist. A free African American woman from Maryland, and wrote really wonderful poetry. So I often recommend Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. If someone says to me, I really like Dickens, and then I might sometimes tell them, go read Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. If you like short stories, or stories of immigrants, then I recommend Edith Maude Eaton, whose pen name was Sui Sin Far. She wrote a series of stories about Chinese immigrants living in the United States and Canada in the late 19th century. 19th century, including a story that I teach as a piece of transgender literature. and so she's, wonderful and I recommend her. If you're into modernism, if you like Virginia Woolf, you like that kind of, complex, sometimes difficult to follow, I tell people to read Elizabeth Smith. Stoddard's The Morgusons, which is just this stunningly beautiful novel from the 1860s, set in a New England whaling town. if they like romance, I tell them to read The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, which is sad, but also just like, and if they like fantasy, then I tell them to read Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood, which is a really banana pants, but amazing novel from the late 19th century about discovering a race of People who have been living under Africa for thousands of years. It's just amazing. So my point is like anything you like in the 21st century, you can find in the 19th century and you can probably find a woman writing it. And there's always something to recommend to people when they ask.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 52:11

Amazing. Those are, yeah, I'm just so grateful both for the list of reading recommendations, but also just for all of these insights and for you joining us. thank you, Ashley.

ashley-reed--she-her-_1_12-16-2024_100917 52:22

Been such a pleasure, Chris. so much.

chris_1_12-16-2024_100917 52:24

Yeah. and thank you listeners too, for joining us for this episode of Women's Work. I think I can speak for all of us at ThinkND and NDWomenConnect when I say that I hope you've enjoyed this conversation. If you would like to learn more about this series or the Women's Work course or other series that might interest you, please visit think. nd. edu. Until next time, inspire your mind and spark conversations.