Entitled: Inevitable Titular Guilt

The political implications of the title of Ellen Rooney’s essay “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form” run deep, insisting on being “symptomatically read, disclosed by an interpreter as not being fully in control of our text, of our languages, or even of what we know we meant to say” (134). Published in 2010, her explanation of her title pun as an East-coast regionalism ignores the Tea Party Movement’s current national absorption of this phrase from the American Revolution. In this context this phrase suggests a freedom from governmental oversight, a limitation of centralized government power that is not complicated by electing politicians who build repressive structures of government even as they claim to tear them down. The tea party is a call for regionalism that asks voters to think in general terms, a movement towards surface reading that claims the “dream of freedom” (Rooney 116). A party whose platform is non-interference with the self-evident truths that define Americans— a new formalist approach to government. The (unintended?) connotations of Rooney’s title demonstrate how titles prime the reader to read guiltily and disallow an approach to a text that is truly neutral.

            Written over a century earlier and the product of an age of imperialist government and breakneck social change, Lady Audley’s Secret tests the limits of the unembellished formalist approach against the titular suggestion of subversion. The result is an oppositional tension that attempts the Tea Party’s formalist approach but implicitly asks the participant to read surface symptomatically, to distrust meaning while participating in it. The sensational novel is a work of surfaces and generalizations—its structure relies on the reader’s belief in the essential correctness of universal ethical and legal structures. These structures insist on their objectivity—they are absolutes. Detailed descriptions of ornate objects suggest their concreteness and weight, and places are familiar resisting Althussarian “surprise” (Rooney 114). Ripples on the surface of the generalized plot, the “sensation” that the genre suggests, lap harmlessly against the bank of expectation. Before the book has been opened, these unalterable events are come into being so that the reader observes them but does not make them himself.

            Simultaneously, the title of this novel suggests this surface is unreliable. The titular “secret” insists that the surface is artificial and the cacophony of normality, decadence, harmony and settledness drowns out an essential truth. Braddon’s narrative asks to be read in general terms, but the title of the work suggests that to do so is the ignore the work’s intent. Surface is the subject of the novel, but is the unreliability of surface and assumption, rather than surface itself that is its subject. The title of the book denies the reader the luxury of reading the text “neutrally” because the suspicion of a double-game and “guilt” is suggested before the narrative commences.

            Stephen Marcus and Sharon Best’s title, “Reading ‘The Way We Read Now,’” invites a similar inquisitiveness that Rooney is unable to resist responding to in her essay. This title is a pun on Anthony Trollope’s serialized 1875 novel, The Way We Live Now, which is a cautionary tale about the treachery of surface, the ruin caused by lack of inquiry and blind investment in a generalized belief. In his autobiography Trollope explains his target:

a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. (XX)

The very surfaces that Trollope describes are the surfaces of Lady Audley’s country house that, as he suggests, carry the inherent taint of dishonesty and invite an irresistible desire to scratch away the gilt finish. The use of a pun on this work undermines Best and Marcus’s argument by demonstrating the “trace of force never entirely in the control of either reader or writer” that is the implication of Rooney’s defense of symptomatic reading (116). Furthermore, their insistence on the apolitical position of new formalism is undermined by this reference to Trollope’s clearly political novel and the polarizing effects of their approach to reading. Rooney’s argument, though thoroughly defended, could have been argued in title alone since that string of words is always already the textual manifestation of inescapable guilt, a residue that haunts the reader as he produces the text.

Trollope, Anthony. Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. Project Gutenberg, 2004. Web. 25 Oct 2012.