Hannah Hecht's Blog

1. Last week, our readings focused on the importance of literary recovery. The one by Blouin focused on the difference between history and the archive. Because of limited data, history and the archive used to be the same thing. Now, there is more information to draw on, so the narrative that we refer to as “history” cannot possibly include everything in the archive. That’s why the job of the archivist (and why literary recovery) is so important. The archivist has to go back into the past and expand the narrative of history by adding in more pieces of information that may have originally been left out.

The one by Lautner was a historical overview of how minorities and women were systematically left out of the canon in the 1920’s. The professionalization of the study of literature, the privileging of masculine qualities in literature, and the need to compete with the already-established British canon all contributed to this phenomenon.

The article by O’Brien talked about how Willa Cather gained status as a canonical writer in the 20’s, only to lose it in the 30’s. I talked about that in an earlier WordPress post, so I’ll skip this one.

The final article by Bass focused on the idea of hypertext and the new function of the internet which allows author to upload the context along with the story. This article kind of confused me, since it talked about the internet in very primitive terms.

2. The book that we read for today was The Touchstone by Edith Wharton. Before I started the novella, I was really expecting to hate it. Last semester, I read Wharton’s Summer in Women and Literature, and it was one of my least favorite readings. Summer was a love story which gave some insight into women’s roles in the 1920’s, but I thought that the characters lacked depth and that the whole narrative was kind of hazy. To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Touchstone. The characters felt three-dimensional, and I found it to be engaging.

The Touchstone told the story of a man, Glennard, who decides to sell his correspondence with the late Margaret Aubyn, a famous author. Before her death, Aubyn was in love with Glennard, but Glennard never returned the feelings. Aubyn eventually moved to Europe and exchanged hundreds of letters with him.  Glennard decides to sell the letters to Mr. Flamel, who works at a publishing company and publishes them. The book becomes a bestseller, and Glennard has to live with the immense guilt that comes with selling someone else’s private words. His wife, Alexa Trent, knows he supplied the letters, but doesn’t let him know that she knows. The whole situation puts a huge strain on Glennard’s life and marriage.

At the end of the book, Glennard feels terrible about having sold the letters. Alexa explains to him that in feeling that immense remorse, he has become a better man than the man who originally sold the letters.

“’Don’t you see,’ she went on, as his eyes hung on her, ‘that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman—that’s the gift she would have wished to give.’”

In the end, the touchstone (a flint-like stone used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left when rubbed) refers to Glennard’s selling the letters. At first, the fact that he allowed the letters to be published marked him as a bad and impure man. Only a bad person would sell someone else’s private words and reap the profits. But, then, his sin ends up bringing out the best in him, through his remorse.

3. The secondary text, “Publicity and Authorship in The Touchstone, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Woman” by Mark A. Eaton, explains how the novella reflects Wharton’s (or at least, the author-function Wharton’s) view on the publishing industry. It begins by explaining that an author’s personality, or author function, is both more and less than the person herself. Instead, the personality has to be carefully cultivated in order to sell books. The same could probably be extended to modern-day celebrities such as music artists and actors. Because the general public feels as if they know celebrities (although they really just know the author-function version of the celebrity), they feel entitled to knowing everything about the celebrities’ private lives. The Touchstone is an exploration of that idea. The Touchstone also goes into immense detail about various marketing strategies that allow authors to sell both themselves and their books. Books are marketed much more by popular appeal than by their content. This made sense to me, mainly because people like to have read (or seen or listened to) things that their peers have read, mainly so that they have mutual things to talk about. Wharton seems to suggest that people ought to spend their time doing other things that gossiping about the private lives of celebrities.