An Ethics of Reading :: Edith Wharton Literature Feminism Essays

An moral philosophy of ReadingAt the age of nine, Edith Wharton fell ill with typhoid. The local restitute told her parents nothing could be done and that their daughter would soon die. Only the ministrations of another(prenominal) physician, who happened to be passing through town and was prevailed upon to examine the girl, saved her life. Her febrility fell, and the young Wharton began to reanimate. During her convalescence, she read voraciously. One of the books she was given contained a super-natural tale a invention which turned out to be, in Whartons own phrase, precarious reading (Wharton, p.275). In the original manuscript of her autobiography, Edith Wharton describes how reading this uncanny 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 danger and when I came to myself, it was to enter a world haunted by formless horrors. I had been a naturally fearless child now I l ived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot say and point at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror. It was like roughly dark undefinable menace forever dogging my steps, lurking, threatening (pp.2756).1 correspond 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 into adulthood. In Women and Madness the Critical Phallacy (1975), Shoshana Felman tells another uncanny story of reading. Analyzing the critical definition that brackets Balzacs Adieu in a Gallimard/Folio pocket edition, she demonstrates how cardinal scholars, Pierre Gascan and Patrick Bertier, effectively rewrite Balzacs story by centering their analyses entirely on a section of historical backstory despite the circumstance that this element comprises but one-third of Balzacs narrative.2 In addition, by adopting a criteria of alleged realism and labeling Stphanies m adness as super-natural, they excise Balzacs main character (a madwoman) and replace her with protagonists who are soldiers in the Grand Army. The madwoman inhabits, concord to these critics, a state of semi-unreality linked to the presence of the invisible which renders her inexplicable and outdoor(a) the purview of discussion (qtd. in Felman, 1975, p.6). As a result, Felman argues, critical interpretation meant to situate Balzac Adieu in a wider literary context ends up repeating Philippes cure in erasing from the text the disconcerting and ex-centric features of a womans madness, the critic seeks to normalize the text making the text a reassuring, closed retreat.