Fans before us

A friend forwarded a link to me today about the surviving fan letters to Susan Warner, the author of The Wide, Wide World (1850), one of the biggest bestsellers of the nineteenth century in the United States. The book and its author are hardly known today: she and her sister taught Bible classes to West Point cadets, and the sister, Anna, is probably best known as the author of the hymn, “Jesus Loves Me.” It was Dear Friend who got me to read it, six or seven years ago now, when she was reading it with a student group. (Have we really been friends for ten years this fall?) The book is extremely sentimental, even within the generic conventions of the time. If your major criticisms of Little Women (1868-69) are that it was too short and not heartbreaking enough, you’ll love The Wide, Wide World.

(The article appear in Common-Place, a publication written by academics for educated general readers interested in U.S. history who want something more challenging than a general interest magazine, but perhaps don’t read scholarly journals. It’s a sensitive publication that shows, I think, why scholarship is relevant, and I wish scholars had more time for this sort of thing. This site is one of the most interesting projects in public history by academics currently in operation.)

As I continue to think about fandom in general and my fandom of Mr. Armitage in particular, the following excerpts from the piece seemed particularly relevant, and I thought you might find some of them interesting:

On the novelty of fandom & typical fan behaviors:

While fans today are more likely to approach and engage authors through more twenty-first-century means than the now old-fashioned letter, the queries, preoccupations, and often unbridled enthusiasm of fans then and now share certain qualities. Warner’s readers in the 1800s wanted to know whether and when a sequel to a favorite book was forthcoming, whether a particular novel was founded on facts, how to succeed in writing a novel, and if Warner would be so kind as to respond, preferably with an autograph or photograph. Some readers quoted favorite lines back to Warner, with one reader going so far as to compose a full-length poem around a refrain in Warner’s second novel, Queechy (1852). Many readers described how Warner’s books kept a hold on them long after they put them down: readers wrote anywhere from a few minutes to twenty-four years after reading The Wide, Wide World and often described multiple re-readings, with one reader writing that she’d read it three times alone and three times aloud in less than a year.

On the desire for connection through fandom:

… the most important and fascinating threads that runs through these letters [is] their emphasis on connection and even community among readers and an accompanying desire to include Warner in that community. … This fannish impulse to write to Warner derived, in part, from how readers imagined her. Her fans saw her as a confidant, a mother, a mentor, a minister, or some combination thereof; more basically, they imagined her as approachable and receptive. … [T]hese fans clearly believed that a relationship with the author of their favorite novel was a possibility.

On author vs. characters [for us, actor vs. roles]:

For many of Warner’s fans, that passion and power [they derived from reading] were built on their belief in a form of personal connection to Warner herself and on the interest they took in the characters who came alive in her novel’s pages. … [M]any fans believed Warner’s characters to be more than fictional and used their love for certain characters to bridge the gap that separated them from Warner herself.”

On confusing or illusory feelings of intimacy:

[R]eaders bared their souls to a writer whom they’d only encountered through the medium of a mass-produced book. These letters nonetheless emerged from the paradoxical intimacy of that reading experience, and they showcase the conviction that Warner must be a kindred spirit, someone who fundamentally understood her readers. There was a form of trust extended in these letters, a trust that Warner would take such letters seriously and in the heartfelt spirit in which they were offered. Of course, that trust was not without its anxieties…

On the feeling of having one’s life changed by the object of the crush:

Warner’s novel helped other readers in more dramatic fashion. Joseph Molyneux Hunter, an Irish man, composed his fan letter to Warner over the summer of 1862 on sea voyages between Ireland and Canada. He wrote nine years after he first read The Wide, Wide World to recount the lasting change that the novel worked in him. He stated, ‘In the summer of 1853 I was brought to the Saviour by reading a very few lines of the ‘Wide Wide World’.”

On the genre of the fan letter:

[T]he fan letter gained its value precisely because it was an amateur’s genre, a mode aside from professional, more public commendation. The fan letter instead served as a place for making personal confessions, for adding more capital to an already significant emotional investment, for claiming and trying to prolong connection, for taking liberties.

On the feeling that one just *has* to write to the crush:

Many of these letters spoke less of liberty than of constraint when readers addressed the question of why they were writing to Warner. [One reader] … said he just couldn’t help expressing the great pleasure he felt in reading The Wide, Wide World. Other readers began their fan letters by arguing that they couldn’t help but write: one simply could not refrain from offering her thanks, another wrote that “impulse has overcome all prudence,” still another called “the desire to write … too strong to be resisted.”

On fans’ feelings of guilt:

Why, though, should that desire to write be resisted? What was illicit about composing a fan letter? A possible answer to that question is tied to another vaguely disreputable act to which the Warner fan letters were necessarily linked—novel reading. Opponents of the novel in the 1800s worried that novels activated a kind of “can’t put it down,” addictive reading, an idea that existed somewhat uneasily alongside these fans’ compulsive reading and re-reading of The Wide, Wide World … The idea that readers simply couldn’t put novels down implied that they should, or at least that they should be able to—and the fear that they could not accounted for some of the suspicion felt toward this relatively new literary genre. For many novel readers, their scruples about reading were swept away on a tide of emotion. For many of Warner’s fans, their scruples, and even perhaps the nagging sense that Warner didn’t really know her readers, that the praise of a young fan was unnecessary, that there was no good reason to write, were all swept away by what the sentimental novel and the fan letter offered—that powerful sense of connection and what it made possible.

On why fans wrote despite their scruples:

If writing a fan letter was itself a kind of compulsion for these readers, it was one that arose from the desire to be heard, to reveal oneself through talking about love for a fictional heroine, a deceased daughter, a loving god, or a tear-jerking novel. Though readers made such personal confessions, they were still unknown readers writing to an unknown author, with little chance of ever meeting that author face-to-face. Warner’s distance from them—geographical and otherwise—paradoxically made possible the intimacy of their fan letters and the connections they imagined: these letters could cross distances in ways that their writers most likely could not. The impersonality of this situation lent safety to readers’ self-exposure, making heartfelt confessions about their personal lives less daunting.

On the utility of the fiction of the author / fan relationship:

The Wide, Wide World is therefore just one kind of sentimental fiction that Warner’s fans embraced; another is that the author of a sentimental novel, who told familiar stories and knew so well what would bring her readers to tears, understood her readers—that a strong and even life-changing connection was formed between author and reader through the medium of a bestselling novel. The Warner fan letters helped to write that fiction then and help us to recover it today.

~ by Servetus on October 24, 2011.