...wise give themselves to reading with more or less ardor, depending on their capacities, their tastes, and their positions." (1) Readers may be everywhere in pre-Revolutionary France, but, for Bollioud-Mermet as for other eighteenth-century French critics, the sudden public visibility of the material apparatuses enabling the activity of reading does little to facilitate attempts to determine the effects of this activity on actual reading subjects. The growth of a literate culture of bibliomanes during the eighteenth century belies the difficulty of discerning what, exactly, reading does to those who engage in it. (2) As Louis-Sebastien Mercier queries in his Discours sur la lecture (1764), "Does reading perfect the human spirit, does it nourish genius any more than reflection does, is it useful, is it harmful?" (3) The gradual emergence of new reading publics throughout the period--including "the young," "women," and "the ignorant"--only heightens the urgency of the central question that preoccupies Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet in their treatises: how should the social effects of an act that each author describes as "a secret conversation" between reader and text be understood and narrated? (4) The raptness of the reading subject, whether distracted or absorbed, both invites and defies interpretation. (5) As Michel de Certeau writes in L'Invention du quotidien, "Despite everything, the history of man's movements through his own texts remains in large part unknown." (6)

In his discussion of modern reading practices, Certeau, like the ancien regime authors cited above, is interested in the way in which the "secret conversation" that binds the reader to her book may conceal a moment of transformation, an instance of what Mercier calls "the mind in metamorphosis." (7) Certeau makes the point that the frequent illegibility of the act of reading itself--the difficulty of interpreting an event that generates so few material signs of its passing--need not inevitably foster a reification of readerly passivity; reading, even as a practice that leaves no traces, is always more than just the "reception [of the text] from others without marking one's place there, without remaking the text." (8) Instead, Certeau forcefully argues that reading can and, indeed, should be construed as a productive activity. Yet the "product" of the act of reading tends, even for Certeau, to remain tantalizingly unlocalizable--or, sometimes, all too easily assimilable to an act of writing, in which something very different is at stake. In Certeau's description of the "silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic" acts of readers, it is the very "silence" of these acts that guarantees their disruptive potential: "far from being writers, founding a place for themselves..., readers are travelers; they circulate on others' lands." (9) In his rehabilitation of reading as an authentically dynamic interaction between reader and text, Certeau has in common with his eighteenth-century predecessors Bollioud-Mermet and Mercier both a fascination with the profound resistance of the experience of the reader to exegetical penetration and an investment in the theorization of reading as a constructive relation. (10) For Certeau, the reader's muteness ideally hides the possibility of her freedom, while for Bollioud-Mermet and Mercier the "secret conversation" ideally works to solidify the reader's private attachment to virtue. But, from both perspectives, the results of reading remain tricky to measure with precision and difficult to regulate with any certainty.

If the event of reading has in some ways consistently been defined by the difficulty of quantifying its productive effects, the figure of the woman reader can be considered in this context a doubly evasive one. The analytic tension that emerges from the dimorphic construction of reading as both secretive pleasure and transformative rapport is heightened in the case of the lectrice, who is thus poised at the center of ancien regime debates around the act of reading. (11) The woman reader--particularly the woman reader of novels (12)--is distinguished not only by her increased sensitivity to sensation, but by her vulnerability to the effects of the written word. With her exquisite susceptibility, the lectrice represents a kind of limit case against which to judge both the passivity and the productivity of the reading subject. It is likewise in the form of the woman reader that the potential social threats posed by reading as creative activity become most glaringly visible for eighteenth-century commentators, at a time when the Bishop of Chalons was far from alone in his belief that "[o]f all the traps that the Angel of darkness has set for human virtue, there is perhaps none more dangerous than that of the reading of nefarious books.". (13) While the effects of this kind of reading on men are also generally understood by writers like Chalons to be destructive, it is women's reading in particular that is often singled out by critics during this period as inducing everything from adultery to insolence on the part of the "naturally" lowly, be they children or servants. (14)

The figure of the woman reader thus functions consistently as a focal point of the ancien regime exploration of the potentially productive effects of reading. Importantly, the lectrice also serves as the implicit link between eighteenth-century theories of reading as a form of "perfection of the human spirit," in Mercier's terms, and Certeau's modern understanding of the reader as active figure of resistance. If the reader has indeed had to be rescued in the twentieth century from the myth of her passivity, it is in part because the transformational powers of reading as a form of production once appeared so uniquely threatening when presented in the guise of the lectrice. In the eighteenth-century French context, the woman reader is already seen as inaugurating, in the moment of her reading, the kind of localized transfiguration (of the text itself, but also of the reader's experience in general) that Certeau will later describe as the constitution of a "secret space, a place which one enters and leaves at will." (15) Clearly the possibility of just such a modification in the parameters of feminine perception is on the mind of those writers, like the Bishop, who fulminate against the catastrophic consequences of women reading philosophy unchecked, not to mention those writers and visual artists who fantasize about the erotic possibilities the image of a woman reading evokes. (16) Moreover, the image of the lectrice serves to ground discussions of the utility of reading by virtue of the exemplary nature of her status as reader in both the active and the passive modes. She is in one sense the ideal receptacle for another's words, but she is at the same time the most threatening of dynamically engaged readers, since she is thought to enjoy the (sometimes latent) ability to invest herself fully, unpredictably, and libidinously in a whole variety of texts. In the words of J. D. T. Bienville, in his 1771 treatise on La Nymphomanie, the activity of reading, undertaken by women, may resemble "a fiery glass, which unites all the rays of the sun in order to fix them on one part, and to enflame it." (17) The body of Bienville's libidinous woman reader becomes the site of numerous interdictions precisely because of her inflammatory productivity, even though this productivity is imbricated in her special passivity as reader. While the lectrice may at first appear to leave behind her few "substantial" marks of her presence, the trope of the woman reader, in ancien regime France, becomes the site of a collective thinking through of the problems not only of how to regulate reading matter (what should be read), but also of how to measure the material and social effects of reading as a generative activity, an event in which subjects are constituted and reconstituted as bodies engage with narrative.

In this essay, I will argue that the notion of the woman reader, in pre-Revolutionary France, becomes the source of so much heated debate and generalized anxiety because of the way in which the figure of a woman reading conjures the specter of a productive relationship not only to texts but to material substance itself. (18) This relationship is distinct from that structuring the disjunctions between mind and body in Cartesian dualism--itself under attack during this period on a variety of fronts (19)--and from that regulating the quality of sensibility in perspectives derived from Lockean empiricism (including those developed by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, the "French...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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