Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page

Abstract

Pen and paper have long been conceptualized as the male and female of writing. Listed by Sigmund Freud alongside pipes and umbrellas as phallic symbols, pens are taken up by poets as figures of literary paternity and held awkwardly in the imagination of women who approach the domain of authorship as outsiders. 1 Studied in the spirit of twentieth-century theory, writing manuals become clues to the way in which the logocentric project of writing fuses together the male body and pen, leaving no trace of the word's material production behind. 2 Paper, on the other hand, is associated with perfect blankness-its whiteness lauded as the space on which all can be written; its surface surveyed by female authors as an endless landscape on which their writing takes no other shape but that of scribbles. 3 "This model of the pen-penis writing on the virgin page participates," Susan Gubar argues, "in a long tradition identifying the author as a male who is primary and the female as his passive creation." 4 It is an "omnipresent metaphor," confirms Friedrich A. Kittler, that has "equated women with the white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of its authorship." 5 This essay discusses a cluster of short, eighteenth-century tales that rewrite this list of imagined alliances between the tools of writing and the bodies of the men and women who use them. The narratives on which I focus are told from the perspectives of quills, paper, and printed or handwritten pages-narrators who are all figured quite strongly as female. While it-narratives cast pens as vulnerable, feathery females exploited in the production of Christina Lupton is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. She is working on a project exploring the way print reading shapes the experience of time in the eighteenth century.