<i>Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France</i> . By <scp>François Proulx</scp> <i>Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France</i> . By ProulxFrançois. (University of Toronto Romance.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 403 pp., ill.

It is an immemorial paradox that European literature spends a great deal of time warning its readers against the dangers of reading. François Proulx’s ambitious and thought-provoking book focuses on a particular iteration of that paradox: the literary and cultural obsession with the deleterious effects of reading on young men in Third Republic France. The backdrop to Proulx’s account is formed by post-débâcle anxieties about the intellectual, sexual, and physical development of French youth, and the work of doctors, moralists, and pedagogical reformers who viewed reading, both as an activity and as a means of understanding the world, as potentially damaging to that development. In the foreground are a number of Third Republic writers whose works problematize young men’s relationships to books, including Jules Vallès, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, André Gide, and Marcel Proust. The chapters on each of these authors offer fresh and important insights, including many which point beyond the book’s primary theme to make stand-alone contributions to the study of the authors in question; indeed, one of Proulx’s great strengths is his ability to tell a historicist, contextualist story though sustained and sensitive close readings that do full justice to the literariness of the works under discussion. The benefit of this particular thematic structure, on the other hand, is to offer compelling but unexpected rapprochements between writers (most obviously between Vallès and pretty much any of the others). The breadth of material and works considered is impressive; one is only surprised that Proulx does not have more to say about Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, briefly discussed in the penultimate chapter. Analysis of this novel has tended to favour the formal at the expense of the thematic, yet it focuses many of the thematic questions at stake here — particularly intergenerational relationships of influence, education, and eroticism — in unique and provocative ways. No doubt it is in the nature of the subject matter that there should be (very) few women’s voices heard in Proulx’s book. This is not to say that gender as a mode of analysis is absent: on the contrary, Proulx demonstrates that an incoherent parade of sexual horribles, from effeminacy to outright homosexuality, from petty Don-Juanism to impotence, lurked just beyond the penumbra of the young man’s reading lamp. Fin-de-siècle doomsayers were more likely to invoke Emma Bovary than Frédéric Moreau as the emblem of dangerous reading even (or especially) when the reader-victims they had in mind were male, and the anxiety studied by Proulx is in this sense a metastasis of the perennial preoccupation with women’s reading to which Madame Bovary attests, and which nineteenth-century prigs were apt to regard as the ‘lesson’ of that novel. The contradictions within this genealogy (women mustn’t read because it’s not ladylike; men because it’s too ladylike) could no doubt stand further exploration, but Proulx’s nuanced and patient work here does much to elucidate this strange — and, one suspects, highly significant — incoherence.

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