Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a current Trustee and former Fellow of the National Humanities Center, where she worked on Gossip (1985) and Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-century English Novels (1990). This essay originated as a talk that she gave at the Center in Fall 1997. (Pictured above, A Pleasant Corner, by John Callcott Horsley (1865), courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London)

have noticed recently that in upscale hotels the tags that you put on your door to keep the maid from bothering you no longer read, "Do Not Disturb." Instead, they say "Privacy Please." Condensing the force of a negative imperative into a single powerful noun that needs no verb, the new phrase suggests repudiation, rejection of other people, a Greta Garbo stance: I want to be alone.

Privacy resists impingement. It shuts people out, not accidentally but on purpose. Horatian poems of retirement from classic times, widely imitated in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, typically included visions of dining simply with a welcome guest. Privacy requires no guests. Etymologically, it derives from a Latin word meaning deprived: specifically, deprived of public office; in other words, cut off from the full and appropriate functioning of a man. What originally designated a state of deprivation, however, has come, in the Western middle-class world, to refer to a privileged condition of freedom and control, a condition alleged by some in the United States to be a constitutional right.

Yet I hardly need remind you of the enormous contradictions that attend current attitudes toward privacy, or of the wide range of issues now evoked by the concept. Journalistic media stimulate anxiety about the possibility that Internet circulation of data may damage our privacy. We reject past customs of housing extended families under a single roof in favor of nuclear families, detached dwellings, a separate bedroom for every child. The richer we are, the more likely to seek walled enclaves for our homes and secluded Caribbean beaches for our vacations. In other words, we want our privacy. On the other hand, we watch Oprah and Geraldo, we share intimate sexual problems with pop psychologists on the radio, we consider a television appearance on "Good Morning America" a mark of success.

That we, of course, is slippery. I do not watch Oprah, and probably most of you do not either. I have refused a number of opportunities to appear on television. I have never set foot on a Caribbean beach, and I find walled enclaves distasteful. But if we can designate the culture at large, my sketch suggests a set of contradictions that we all inhabit in one way or another. Social class probably makes a difference in our specific attitudes, and so do the values of our families and our communities--which is to say we all have our own assemblages of contradictions. Each of us establishes individual boundaries of privacy, each of us may willingly, even happily, abandon privacy in different specific contexts. The idea of privacy, in other words, carries in modern Western culture no fixed assignment of value. Sometimes we want the state it designates, sometimes we do not. Probably, though, we at least believe that we can recognize privacy when we experience it, and we are likely to feel confident that we know when it is a good thing.

frequently invoked locus of privacy--and for most who acknowledge it an unambiguously positive one--is the cocooned pleasure of reading novels. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many people find in novel reading a zone of privacy. Women surveyed about their enthusiasm for popular romances consistently mention that such reading provides them with valued time of separation from the encroachments of their families. It puts them, they say, into their own space. When I was a little girl, grade school teachers were fond of reciting for our edification the opening lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson that begins, "There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away." The point, in the teachers' version of things, was that we could escape through books. They did not specify what we might want to escape from, but one obvious possibility is that we might want to get away from other people. The act of engrossing oneself in a book self-evidently creates its own privacy.

The special privacy of the novel is the delicious privacy it generates for its readers. When Dickinson declares an analogy between a book and a boat, she hints at the imaginative power of reading--the power of books to arouse, involve, and enlarge the imaginations of those who partake of them. Books carry us away not only by establishing an alternate reality but by stimulating us in such ways that pre-existent forms of reality--the cluttered room, irritating colleagues--assume new meanings, reveal new possibilities. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we understand new aspects and possibilities in ourselves as a result of reading novels, and the new forms of self-imagining immediately affect our perceptions of the world outside ourselves. We pay attention to new things in new ways. I associate such imaginative transformations with privacy because they are unique to each individual, unknowable to others unless the possessor decides to communicate them, and quite possibly at odds with communal assumptions. They belong to the realm of self-enclosure and of potential resistance that we connect with privacy.

Through the imaginative processes of identification and differentiation in relation to fictional characters, fictional actions, one learns more grandly to be oneself.

In a simpler sense, the experience of absorbing oneself in a book is one of privacy because it necessarily shuts out the world. I can still vividly remember the resentful note in my mother's voice as she said, over and over during my childhood, "That girl always has her nose in a book." I knew her resentment justified: I was, for the time of reading, rejecting her and home and housework and even school. I had taken possession of my privacy. As Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis put it in a famous Harvard Law Review article in 1890, privacy expresses the "general right of the individual to be let alone."

I claimed my privacy through reading, as do many other readers, in a more positive sense as well. A rather klutzy but useful definition of the word, by the anthropologist Morton H. Levine, goes like this: privacy "is the maintenance of a personal life-space within which the individual has a chance to be an individual, to exercise and experience his own uniqueness." I would add discover to Levine's pair of verbs: to exercise and experience and discover his, or her, uniqueness. Reading novels permits and facilitates all these activities. They take place, of course, at the level of fantasy. Through the imaginative processes of identification and differentiation in relation to fictional characters, fictional actions, one learns more grandly to be oneself.

he value of the privacy created by reading has not always been apparent. When Jane Eyre huddles in her window seat, feet drawn up, behind red curtains, for the delicious indulgence of reading, she creates a memorable image for reading's self-enclosure. But it is a particularly nineteenth-century image. Brontë's novel, published in 1847, draws on and helps to solidify the metaphors of Romanticism. If it had been published a century before, Jane would not have inhabited the same setting or have thought of reading in the same way. If she read for the sake of imaginative stimulation, in 1747 or thereabouts, her creator would probably have introduced even into a fictional text some warning about the danger of such stimulation. The kind of anxiety that now attends, at least in some circles, consideration of images of violence on television or pornography on the Internet--how might they affect children?--once belonged to the idea of novel-reading, specifically because of its privacy and that space for fantasy privacy creates. In one exemplary statement in 1766 a clergyman, James Fordyce, counselled young women:

There seem to be very few [books], in the style of Novel, that you can read with safety, and yet fewer that you can read with advantage.--What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will.

Fordyce worries not only about the "nature," or content, of novels but about their "tendency"--that is, how their readers might interpret and use them. The possibility that a woman might be a prostitute "in her soul" while leading an outwardly exemplary existence horrifies, and perhaps terrifies, him. His anxiety stems from the impossibility of policing the inner life. The privacy of novel-reading is inviolable: one cannot penetrate the reader's consciousness. Anything might be going on in there.

n the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea of novel-reading as an embodiment of privacy began to assume positive implications, especially in response to a pair of novels. Roughly thirty years before Jane Eyre, Sir Walter Scott, the most popular writer of his time, published The Heart of Mid-Lothian, perhaps the century's most spectacular best-seller. Immediately accepted as a nationalistic celebration of Scottish virtue and heroism, it narrates the story of a country girl too committed to an ideal of honesty to tell a minor lie in order to save her sister's life. Instead, she journeys, mainly on foot, from Edinburgh to London to seek from the King a pardon for her sister, accused of murdering an illegitimate infant. Her success wins her powerful friends and inaugurates for her a happy and prosperous life.

Almost two centuries later, Jeanie Deans remains a splendid imaginative creation, a memorable heroine of fiction. The novel dwells on--indeed, largely derives from--her internal struggles, her experience of moral quandaries. Its focus on her rarely wavers, once the plot gets under way. But it is striking to notice how seldom she spends time alone. The narrator occasionally offers us a moment or so of Jeanie in her bedroom. She makes two or three brief trips unaccompanied, her thoughts occupied with the trips' purposes. The long journey to London, however, is full of other people--many of them vague figures who blur into one another. Just before an especially dramatic moment of the narrative, Jeanie waits alone in a kitchen for some time for the minister who seems willing to help her. Her solitude appears to cause her some uneasiness: she has no one to ask about what is going on. Privacy is not an issue in this narrative, and certainly not a goal for its characters. Even the minister's outlaw son assumes that life takes place, always, in the immediate context of community.

Jeanie . . . had advanced to the bottom of the table, when, unable to resist the impulse of affection, she suddenly extended her hand to her sister. Effie was just within the distance that she could seize it with both hers, press it to her mouth, cover it with kisses, and bathe it in tears, with the fond devotion that a Catholic would pay to a guardian saint descended for his safety; while Jeanie, hiding her own face with her other hand, wept bitterly. The sight would have moved a heart of stone, much more of flesh and blood. Many of the spectators shed tears, and it was some time before the presiding Judge himself could so far subdue his emotion as to request the witness to compose herself, and the prisoner to forbear those marks of eager affection, which, however natural, could not be permitted at that time and in that presence.    Illustration from The Heart of Mid-Lothian (Houghton Mifflin, 1923)

The Heart of Mid-Lothian offers occasional hints about reading, which likewise seems different from what a twentieth-century reader might expect. They come mainly in the narrator's direct addresses and allusions to his own readers. If you have read any eighteenth-century British novels, you are familiar with invocations of the reader. There is Fielding at the beginning of Tom Jones, observing that a novelist resembles an innkeeper, with the reader as a traveler accepting or rejecting his bill-of-fare; and Fielding later on inviting his readers to paint the heroine, Sophia, in the image of the most attractive woman they know. Or think of Sterne in Tristram Shandy, alternately flattering and insulting the reader, whose intelligence, on the whole, he appears to distrust. The relationship such writers try to establish with their readers differs markedly from that evoked by Brontë, when, toward the end of what the title page calls her "autobiography," Jane Eyre announces, "Reader, I married him." Her confidential tone implies an intimate relation between writer and reader, almost an equivalent of personal conversation. Sterne and Fielding, in contrast, however confiding they may sound for a moment, never lose their implicit authority. They remain in firm control of the text and, they intimate, of the reader's response to it. If they invite temporary license, as in the suggestion that we imagine Sophia any way we choose, it is very temporary indeed.

Direct references to the reader in Scott's novel delineate a clear set of authorial expectations. Scott's narrator resembles Fielding's more than Brontë's, despite his greater closeness in time to the later writer, but his authority is more precarious, his tone often strained. Two characters intervene between Scott and the reader. An introductory address "To the Best of Patrons, A Pleased and Indulgent Reader" allegedly issues from the pen of Jedediah Cleishbotham, who claims authorship of the novel as a whole, but acknowledges following the manuscript of Peter Pattieson, schoolmaster, who figures both as voice and as character in the book's opening chapters. A sense of his individual presence and personality soon vanishes, but the voice of the narrator still intervenes from time to time. Cleishbotham's opening appeal to his readers, like his concluding "Envoy," insists on the financial nature of the transaction between writer and reader. Scott's frequent financial trouble and the historical moment in which he wrote, soon after the end of the patronage system, perhaps sufficiently account for the emphasis on the writing and reading of books as participating in a commercial arrangement. But this emphasis also depersonalizes or generalizes reading (to say nothing of writing) as an activity. Jedediah elucidates what Roland Barthes would call "the pleasure of the text" as preordained responses to a set of stimuli introduced for reasons of profit. If the reader chuckles or feels pleasure at what he finds on the page, what Jedediah has put on the page, Jedediah, he says, "simpers," and he claims his "delectation" at being enabled to add a second story to his house or to buy a new coat. Such equivalences effectively remove significance from the individual emotional responses of readers, assumed to matter only inasmuch as they stimulate profits for writers.

Indeed, the reader's position, as figured in this text, never depends on individual response. Rather, the narrator insists on the generalizability of reactions. The reader is in effect a spectator of the action, as the narrator explicitly says, but also, more importantly, a judge. The tone of the narrator's direct references to his reader varies from sober to mildly facetious, but in their substance his remarks always suggest the same assumptions: the reader will be a person of the middling classes, at least moderately wise in the ways of the world, sharing with others of the same class a set of clear moral standards. He--and I tend to think of this imaginary figure as a "he," although of course women, too, read Scott--may possess considerable emotional responsiveness, but he reacts to what he reads by virtue of judgment as well as feeling. His greatest pleasure in reading will come from the coincidence of judgment and feeling in his elicited responses.

If novels appeal to and reinforce our desire to be left alone, to escape the burdens of our everyday existence, . . . they also speak to quite different impulses. . . . They invite their readers into a community of books and of other readers.

The narratorial statements that reveal most about Scott's attitudes toward his readers do not necessarily allude directly to the reader's existence. One especially suggestive comment refers to Jeanie's conflict over whether she should lie for her sister. After a conversation on the subject with her pious and rigid father, she mistakenly believes him to have encouraged her toward the lie. Trying to grasp the justification he might have in mind, she contemplates the possibility that the ninth commandment prohibits false witness against one's neighbor but not in favor of someone. Then the narrator observes, "But her clear and unsophisticated power of discriminating between good and evil instantly rejected an interpretation so limited, and so unworthy of the Author of the law." The adjectives carrying assignments of value in this sentence--clear, unsophisticated, limited, unworthy--convey much of the novel's moral scheme. Moral clarity is Jeanie's crowning virtue. It attends her lack of sophistication, a word that carries negative weight, suggesting the confusion created by excessive knowledge of the world's ways. Ignorant by conventional standards, Jeanie writes only with difficulty and lacks book knowledge. But true limitation, Scott's language indicates, belongs not to this woman of sparse education but to those more sophisticated (that is, more corrupted), possessed of linguistic skill but perhaps lacking the capacity to think in ways worthy of their obligation to God.

The reader to whom this statement is designed to appeal will probably not value reading for the privacy it provides. At any rate, Scott does not try to reach him by virtue of the imaginative expansion or enclosure fiction can offer. On the contrary, he invokes moral tradition and community: what readers share rather than what makes them unique. To read The Heart of Mid-Lothian is to be reminded of a complex, demanding set of principles to which many Westerners have long paid lip service. The novel explores the possibilities, costs, and rewards of actually living by such principles. Such exploration, relying on fictional embodiments and fictional actions, invites imaginative and emotional response as well as rational assent, but, making separation from the community a prescription for misery (through the outlaw character, George Staunton, and through Jeanie's sister, Effie, a less dramatic kind of "outlaw," who marries him), it insists that happiness, even comfort, depends on rejecting "sophistication," rejecting the principle of specialness, in favor of various forms of sharing.

Reading. The artist John Harden focused on family life, many of his domestic scenes portraying people reading in a social setting of solitude but intimacy. (Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria)

The experience of reading The Heart of Mid-Lothian remains, of course, in some necessary sense private. I have read the book many times; it makes me cry. That is my private and personal response to the imaginative experience Scott engenders. Still, the novel always reminds me of another aspect of novel-reading, one that we are likely, in the late twentieth century, to forget. If novels appeal to and reinforce our desire to be left alone, to escape the burdens of our everyday existence, to live for a time within the private imagination, stimulated by the imagination of another, they also speak to quite different impulses. All novels, like other forms of writing, partake of, participate in, literary tradition. They invite their readers into a community of books and of other readers. The tone and the substance of Scott's novel emphasize various kinds of inevitable human connection. Even the novelist's characteristic involvement in questions of historical authenticity speaks to his unfailing concern for human interdependence as it survives through time. If he depicts Jeanie Deans as rarely alone and as unconcerned with privacy as an issue, he implies that his readers, ideally approaching the character's moral integrity, should likewise care less about privacy than about community and its obligations.

A more economical way of putting this last point would be to say that Scott is a didactic novelist. J. Paul Hunter has called attention to the fact that we in the twentieth century have lost our forebears' capacity to take pleasure in the didactic. We assume, rather, that the didactic belongs to quite another realm from that of pleasure. But an adequate reading of The Heart of Mid-Lothian must acknowledge that the claim to provide instruction inheres in the fundamental imagining of the text. If we fail to contemplate the meaning of Jeanie Deans, with all her manifest limitations, as moral exemplar--well, our minds and imaginations will have less to work on than the novel contains. If we assume the paramount importance of our privacy as readers, we miss the point.

(More, to Part 2 of 2)

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