Mothers, Fathers, and Others by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE ENIGMA OF READING

“Wuthering Heights is a strange inartistic story,” an anonymous English reviewer wrote in Atlas in January 1848. “This is a strange book,” commented another in the Examiner. “His work is strangely original,” said a reviewer in Britannia. “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism,” wrote a fourth in Douglas Jerrod’s Weekly Newspaper. He continued, “yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.” Strangeness was not a quality that led reviewers to recommend the novel Emily Brontë published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. At best, they treated the book as a flawed work by a gifted writer who might make something of himself after he acquired more polish.

A good number of the American reviewers responded to the book less charitably. They were morally outraged. “We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we had come fresh from a pest-house” was the verdict from Paterson’s Magazine. “It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” wrote the reviewer in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. Edwin P. Whipple concluded his review of Bell’s novel in the North American Review with this sentence: “Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.”

It is common practice to look back at excoriating reviews of “classic” books and smirk with superiority. In large measure, this smug attitude is the result of having been handed a piece of cultural wisdom by the invisible makers of the literary canon, whose selections have found their way onto reading lists for high school and college English classes. The 1925 headline of the review in the New York World of The Great Gatsby, FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD, is now infamous for its obtuseness. And yet, the very idea of a literary canon has been under fire for at least half a century. Whatever consensus there may have been in decades past about greatness has been replaced by warring political opinions. There is good reason to protest against the received wisdom of the canon makers who were blind to the work of writers who fell outside the strictures of their “taste,” many women and most non-whites, although exceptions were made for an anointed few.

Moral outrage of one kind or another remains a common American response to literature. The portrait of Wolfsheim in Gatsby, for example, has long been condemned as anti-Semitic, a fact that might prevent its inclusion on a course list in 2020. Then again, the scholar Michael Pekarofski argues in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review that Jay Gatsby himself is “a passing Jew”—an original thought. Cleansing literature of the taints of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia, not to speak of countless other ugly offenses against greater humankind, would quickly shrink our libraries to an alarming size of a few volumes blessed by those who have taken upon themselves the arduous task of literary purification. And yet, even profligate and sophisticated readers

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