Hello, DU darlings! Your Friday Afternoon Challenge awaits: Testing the waters!

[DevonRex]

14. And about The New Novel:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/2009/12/14/winslow-homer-and-the-women-of-the-new-novel/

"In 1877, Winslow Homer exhibited his watercolor, The New Novel, at an exhibition of the American Watercolor Society.

It is an image that below its surface of innocent, leisurely repose churns a contemporary cultural scene fraught with change and fear; the culture-war in the U.S. had begun.

“…Avoid also all those miserable sensational…novels and illustrated papers which are so profusely scattered around on every side. The demand which exists for such garbage speaks badly for the moral sense and intellectual training of those who read them…The extent to which the press is used in the publication of romance and fiction, and of books which, if they do not corrupt the heart, do little but to dwarf the mind and give perverted and false views of life – of its duties and responsibilities, transcends any means at our command to ascertain…In nothing perhaps is the taste of our people so lamentably demoralized as in respect to our reading matter” (READ, Rev. Hollis. The God of This World; The Footprints of Satan. 1872).

The New Novel captures the moment and encapsulates its cultural context. This is a young woman languidly lying down on her side, embracing a book as she might a lover, holding it close and dear, almost caressing its binding, her eyes half-lidded in dream-state transport. She is not engaged in “productive” activity at all; she is consumed within an inner life that leaves her unavailable to responsibilities, family, and potential suitors: She’s here but not here, gone into a world unavailable to those closest to her, that of her imagination, a dangerous place for a woman to be in the 1870s. Opening a woman’s mind to imagination was tantamount to opening Pandora’s Box."