How to Read

Alan Jacobs in “How to Read” in Books & Culture, March/April, 2007, page 12, reviews The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life, by Edward Mendelson. Mendelson sees Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dallow, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts as representative of the seven stages of life: birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood, and “the future”. Jacobs believes that “the rise of the novel from an uncertain, fumbling, and generally despised form of cheap popular entertainment to the central and dominant genre of Western literature, all in little more than a century, is one of the more remarkable events in the history of human sensibility.”

When you read a novel and identify with the characters, you are, according to Mendelson, “performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.” If we do this poorly, the answer is not to abandon this way of reading, but to learn how to do it better.

Mendelson tries to show how each of these seven novels signifies one of the seven stages of life. For example, Frankenstein signifies birth as Dr. Victor Frankenstein gives life to his creature. However, Victor Frankenstein’s traits show that his is not only an abortive father but also incapable of becoming a husband. Thus, as we read great literature, it opens up to us the great themes of life, and opens up a variety of interpretations of the life stage we are going through, showing us how we might live our lives or how we shouldn’t. How we read is a moral and emotional exercise and should be done with passion.


You can read this article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/6.12.html