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READING WITHIN WALLS
he stationery shop around the corner from my house in Buenos Aires had a fair selection of books for
children. I had (and have still) a lustful craving for notebooks (which in Argentina used to carry the profile
of one of our national heroes on the cover, and sometimes a detachable page of gummed stickers
depicting natural history or battle scenes) and I often hung about the shop. The stationery was in the
front; in the back were the rows of books. There were the large, illustrated books of the Editorial Abril,
with big letters and bright drawings, written for little children by Constancio C. Vigil (who, at his death,
was discovered to have amassed one of the largest collections of pornographic literature in Latin
America). There were (as I’ve mentioned) the yellow-covered books of the Robin Hood series. And there
were twin rows of books with cardboard covers in a pocket format, some bound in green and some bound
in pink. In the green series were the adventures of King Arthur, dreadful Spanish translations of the Just
William books, The Three Musketeers, the animal stories of Horacio Quiroga. In the pink series were the
novels of Louisa May Alcott, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the stories of the Comtesse de Ségur, the entire Heidi
saga. One of my girl cousins loved to read (later, one summer, I borrowed from her John Dickson Carr’s
The Black Spectacles and was hooked on detective fiction for the rest of my life) and we both read
Salgari’s pirate adventures, bound in yellow. Sometimes she borrowed a Just William book from me, in the
series bound in green. But the pink-bound series, which she read with impunity, was (at the age of ten I
distinctly knew) forbidden to me. Its covers were a warning, brighter than any spotlight, that these were
books no proper boy would read. These books were for girls.
The notion that certain books are intended for the eyes of certain groups only is almost as ancient as
literature itself. Some scholars have suggested that, as the Greek epics and theatre were directed
primarily at a male audience, the early Greek novels were most likely intended for a predominantly
female one.
Though Plato wrote that in his ideal republic schooling would be compulsory for both boys and girls, one
of his disciples, Theophrastus, argued that women should be taught only as much as was necessary to
manage a household, because advanced education “turns a woman into a quarrelling, lazy gossip”. Since
literacy among Greek women was low (though it has been suggested that the courtesans were
“thoroughly literate”), educated slaves would read novels out loud to them. Because of the sophistication
of the authors’ language and the relatively small number of fragments that survive, the historian William
V. Harris has argued that these novels were not massively popular, but rather the light reading of a
limited female public with a certain degree of education.
The subject was love and adventure; the hero and heroine were always young, beautiful and well born;
misfortune befell them but the end was always happy; trust in the gods was expected, as well as virginity
or chastity (at least in the heroine). From the earliest novels, the contents were made clear to the reader.
The author of the earliest Greek novel that survives in full, who lived around the beginning of the
Christian era, introduced himself and his subject in the first two lines: “My name is Chariton, of
Aphrodisias [a town in Asia Minor], and I am clerk to the lawyer Athenagoras. I’m going to tell you a love
story that took place in Syracuse.” “Love story” — pathos erotikon: from the very first lines, the books
allotted to women were associated with what would later be called romantic love. Reading this permitted
fiction, from the patriarchal society of first-century Greece all the way to twelfth-century Byzantium
(when the last of these romances were written), women must have found in the pap some form of
intellectual stimulation: in the labours and perils and agonies of loving couples, the women sometimes
discovered unsuspected food for thought. Centuries later, as a child reading novels of chivalry (sometimes
inspired by the Greek romances), Saint Teresa found much of the imagery that she would develop in her
devotional writing. “I became accustomed to reading them, and that small fault made me cool my desire
and will to do my other tasks. And I thought nothing of spending many hours a day and night in this vain
exercise, hidden from my father. My rapture in this was so great that, unless I had a new book to read, it
seemed to me that I could not be happy.” Vain the exercise may have seemed, yet the stories of
Marguerite de Navarre, La Princesse de Clèves by Mme de La Fayette and the novels of the Brontë sisters
and Jane Austen owe much to the reading of romances. As the English critic Kate Flint points out, reading
these novels not only provided a means for the woman reader occasionally “to withdraw into the passivity
induced by the opiate of fiction. Far more excitingly, it allowed her to assert her sense of selfhood, and to
know that she was not alone in doing so.” From early days, women readers found ways of subverting the
material that society placed on their shelves.
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