Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright ©, 2005
Reading Women, or Women Reading?
A Brief History of Women in the Archive
by
Zoe Trodd
The novels that the sisters read and Jo tries to write, and the novel Little Women
itself, are a kind of people’s history, challenging the newly professionalized
history-writing of the late nineteenth century, America’s museum movement,
and the era’s faith in the importance of classification and order within society
and the archive. And numerous nineteenth-century photographs that show
women reading books, initially collected into carte-de-visite albums (CDV; albums that were themselves
motley archives, telling tales and narrating people’s history), explored, like Alcott, the storying of women;
their stored but also story-like interior lives.
Throughout the nineteenth century, curiosity became knowledge, cabinets became museums, and
professionalized history-writers ignored objects and focused on documents, thereby ignoring those
who had left no paper-trail. The rest, as they say, might seem to be history. But this is a story about
curiosity, the American archive, and women’s self-storying within that archive. Allen Sekula suggests
that archives “maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power,” that they should be
“read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced, or made
invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.” To examine CDVs is to read the archive from
below, and encounter a people’s history and a counter-memory: ordered spaces and the waste-lands
of relics and disjectia in between. Walter Benjamin glimpsed nineteenth-century photographs
emerging “so beautifully… from the darkness of our grandfathers’ days,” but CDVs of women-
readers emerge now from the unofficial darkness of our grandmothers’ days. This is a story of how
“hidden stores” become stories – how the “I” enters “stores” to make “stories”; stories that narrate
the individual “I” of the collectible “little women” in American photographs, consumed as objects
and storied as subjects.
Female character seemed particularly readable and contained within the visible and collectible “world
of things” during the late nineteenth century: a world of interior decoration, parlor collectibles, and
works of art. Even when equated with the book rather than the static art-work, women were still
collectible: in Edmund Gosse’s 1885 poem about his book collection, the treasures are his “harem,”
and Walter Benjamin echoes this imagery in his essay “Unpacking My Library” when he writes of
the collector rescuing a book “the way a prince bought a beautiful girl in The Arabian Nights.” If
people were collected as curiosities in Barnum’s spectacles and nineteenth-century Cabinet-books,
then women were collected as precious objects within the middle-class cult of what in 1880 Edmond
de Goncourt called bricabracomania.
[fig. 2]. White pages blend into their white aprons, for their stories are their
domestic lives. The books balance precariously, and they hold them with one
hand each while also supporting the child between them. They are connected
visually by a fence-rail behind them, a rail with the same connecting and
containing function as the toddler. Or, in several images, a big book is
compositionally central and echoes the Madonna and Child tradition: instead of
a baby the seated woman holds a book on her lap. Many images of reading
groups feature one decentralized book with women industriously sewing around
it, and several other CDVs of boys dressed as girls indicate femininity via props
of hat, parasol and book [fig.3]. In all these ways, reading was thus contained
fig. 2
The story might seem to end here, yet within other CDV images, as within Little
Women, the book in fact symbolizes the individual and storied life, and the
narratable self. The physio- gnomical and art-historical search for truth revealed
by external forms, and the Victorian attempt to read and classify the body,
pushed the interior life to the background, but the stories lost in the collecting
impulse thrived in the novel. The presence of books in collectible CDV image,
within albums that were of course themselves books, reclaimed these secret
histories. In various ways the little women of CDV images used the book within
the photograph to challenge the politics of collecting, of the nineteenth-century
fig. 3
parlor and archive, and of surveillance and photography. Some women, photographed with men,
stare at their books while the men look at them, and so invert the usual way of seeing. Many other
solitary figures make their faces unreadable, averting their gaze toward the pages of the books they
read. Burying their faces in books within the context of the modern-day Curious Cabinet, the women-
readers are curious in the other sense of the word: Foucault theorizes legibility as punishment, the
body of a prisoner as “an ever-open book,” and Hawthorne made the letter a scarlet symbol of
punishing legibility, so that Jo March’s crimson-covered book seems an ominously tinted echo, but
the little women of CDVs perform a visual exchange. As we read them as curiosities, so they are
curious readers.
In some images the only blur is that of the pages as they turn: the viewer might seek to read at first
sight the whole character of the sitter, but here is an event in time – an ongoing story. Similarly, if
photographed with a man, often a women holds a book at the same angle as his fob-watch, or holds
it against her body at the same place as the watch, suggesting her life in time – her narrative event.
Again suggesting the presence of a living story, one image positions two girls with books either side of
a seated girl in white surrounded by flowers: she is as pale as death, might be dead were it not that she
is seated upright without obvious rigor mortis. Bookless, storyless, hers is a kind of social death, while
the standing girls hold their books at the same angle and wear the same dress: they’re connected
readers and a community of two [fig.4]
The blur of moving pages even appears in images where the solitary woman
is interrupted in her reading and looks up from the book: though
interrupted, her story persists [fig.5]. This tradition of interrupted-reading
extends from the famous Metsu painting of a women being interrupted in
her reading, to a 1999 photograph by Witkin called Interrupted Reading,
where a woman-reader fragments into separate body-parts as her reading is
interrupted [figs. 6-7]. She keeps a finger between the pages of book, as do
most of the nineteenth- century interrupted women-readers, in resistance to
the fragmentation of self through the interrupting, objectifying, classifying
eye.
fig. 4
fig. 7
fig. 6
fig. 5
Often posed next to small statue-heads that sit, disembodied, at the same angle as their own heads,
the women-readers have books to make them whole: the book stands for the whole story of the
individual, as opposed to the story of holes and separated, cataloged parts [fig. 8]. And the specific
books they hold restore women’s history beyond the parlor: African American women hold books
about abolition, postbellum women hold medical books to indicate their role as nurses during the
Civil War, and women read suffragette volumes together.
Often surrounded by empty (holey) vessels (urns, teapots, vases, boxes), women in
CDVs touch and hold the book, an open zone, present absence, and whole story.
The book is the open but full potentiality. After all, as Benjamin points out in his
Arcades, “collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects
knowledge”: though collected, the women-readers are thus also collectors and, as
the main consumers of novels in this period, they are also consumers in these
images, even while consumed as art objects. Collected within albums that had
botanically-themed surrounds, the women often hold their books beneath vases of
flowers, or hanging vines, so that nature seems to explode from within the books’
covers, spilling out, like the loose pages of several books do in other images [fig.9],
and so challenging – like imaginative fiction within Victorian culture – the
confined spaces of parlor, national archive, legible female body, and natural
history museum.
fig. 8
fig. 9
In one 1870s CDV, a woman holds a book and simultaneously looks through
binoculars, connecting the book to the outside world; she is likely a bird-watcher
and so is reader, gazer, and collector of bird-sightings [fig. 10]. Using a
taxonomical text, she reclaims the usual dynamic of woman as collectible within
systems of classification. The site of her gaze is beyond the frame of the
photograph, and the contents of her book are invisible to the viewer. Again, the
book is a full but open potentiality of meaning, her mind a hidden store of living
stories. Out of the Cabinet of Curiosities come curious women.
fig. 10
Photo credits:
Fig. 1 Jessie Willcox Smith; Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, 1915.
Fig. 2 CDV, 1880s; by Dr. A. Lane, Pike, NY; from the author's collection.
Fig. 3 CDV, 1860s; from the author's collection.
Fig. 4 Cabinet card, 1870s; from the author's collection.
Fig. 5 Cabinet card, 1890s, Portland, OR.; from the author's collection.
Fig. 6 Gabriel Metsu; Girl Receiving a Letter, 1658.
Fig. 7 Joel-Peter Witkin; Interrupted Reading, 1999.
Fig. 8 CDV, 1870s; Rochester, NY; from the author's collection.
Fig. 9 CDV tintype, 1860s; from the author's collection.
Fig. 10 CDV, 1870s; by C. M. French, Youngstown, Ohio; from the author's collection.
Contributor's Notes...
Zoe Trodd teaches in the History and Literature department at Harvard. She published the book Meteor of
War: The John Brown Story (with John Stauffer) last year. Her book American Protest Literature is
forthcoming with Harvard Press, and has several chapters on early women's rights literature and the literature of
the modern feminist movement. She has published numerous articles on literature, history and photography,
including several on women's history.
