Apr 4, 2017
In gratifying the self, novels foster self-love and a tendency to self-assertion that would make the mind ungovernable and thus jeopardize the agencies of social and psychological control. That most readers of novels (and virtually all those who read novels only) were thought to be women and youth made particularly ominous the implications of a novel reading based on self-gratification as opposed to social feelings.
Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America