In part two of her book, Dee Garison takes on the thorny marriage of fiction and the library from 1876-1920's, in particular looking at the gulf between the rhetoric that fiction was bad and the fact that most libraries over time began carrying it while simultaneously arguing that it was bad. She explores the hypocrisy there, but also the pragmatism of stocking things people actually wanted to read.
I think most of us got a kick out of Section 2, laughing at the Victorian notions of what was scandalous and inappropriate. But I think it is also important to note the ways that appropriate and inappropriate fiction were gendered. What kinds of things were immoral or inappropriate and for whom? How did these ideas change over time, and what external factors influenced this change? How does this all tie into the genteel female library hostess role? (FYI keep these questions in mind for class, I'm working on an activity using passages from some of these actual books)
She also discussed the way libraries used fiction to lure patrons in, with the hopes of steering them towards more worthy works. Why was or was this not successful? Why would certain novels appeal more to people of differing classes or genders or social status then others? And in the context of Victorian culture, what was so appealing about scandalous novels in the first place?
And how was the library as an institution (I'm speaking very broadly here) shaped by this gendered and classed debate over moral and immoral fiction? Can we even draw broad claims here?
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Please forgive me for not pursuing your discussion questions here, but I have to vent about this section of Apostles of Culture.
Why on earth did Garrison think it was a good idea to summarize novels without saying what the titles were? She gave the authors and the names of their heroines, but at least half of her summaries of scandalous Victorian novels didn't mention the name of the book that was being summarized! The titles are in the endnotes, but I found it VERY annoying to have to keep flipping back to the end of the book just to find out what the novels were called.
It's not like these books are so well-known that we don't need to be told what they are -- Garrison herself says that most were out of print by the '40s. The only one I'd ever heard of before was Belinda.
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