Thursday, February 7, 2019
An Ethics of Reading :: Edith Wharton Literature Feminism Essays
An Ethics of ReadingAt the age of nine, Edith Wharton fell ill with typhoid. The local anesthetic doctor told her parents nothing could be d unrivalled and that their daughter would soon die. unless the ministrations of another physician, who happened to be passing through t protest and was prevailed upon to examine the girl, deliver her life. Her fever fell, and the unexampled Wharton began to recover. During her convalescence, she read voraciously. One of the books she was given contained a super-natural bilgewater a story which turned out to be, in Whartons own phrase, perilous reading (Wharton, p.275). In the original manuscript of her autobiography, Edith Wharton describes how reading this supernatural story occasioned a relapse, which brought her, once again, on the point of deathThis one book brought on a serious relapse, and again my life was in endangerment and when I came to myself, it was to enter a world haunted by unformed horrors. I had been a naturally fearless child now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot introduce and even at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror. It was interchangeable some dark undefinable menace forever dogging my steps, lurking, heavy(a) (pp.2756).1According to Wharton, an act of reading plunged her body back into fatal illness. The young Edith Wharton did recover from the relapse, but its uncanny effects continued to haunt her well up into adulthood. In Women and Madness the Critical Phallacy (1975), Shoshana Felman tells another uncanny story of reading. Analyzing the fine commentary that brackets Balzacs Adieu in a Gallimard/Folio theca edition, she demonstrates how two scholars, Pierre Gascan and Patrick Bertier, effectively rewrite Balzacs story by focusing their analyses entirely on a section of historical backstory disdain the fact that this element comprises but one-third of Balzacs narrative.2 In addition, by adopting a criteria of alleged realism and labeling Stp hanies madness as super-natural, they come up Balzacs main character (a madwoman) and replace her with protagonists who are soldiers in the potassium Army. The madwoman inhabits, according to these critics, a state of semi-unreality linked to the presence of the invisible which renders her unfathomable and outside the purview of discussion (qtd. in Felman, 1975, p.6). As a result, Felman argues, faultfinding commentary meant to situate Balzac Adieu in a wider literary scene ends up repeating Philippes cure in erasing from the text the abash and ex-centric features of a womans madness, the critic seeks to normalize the text make the text a reassuring, closed retreat.
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