Gendered reading on the Titanic
Jan. 17th, 2013 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessVoyagers of the Titanic, by Richard Davenport-Hines, published in 2012, contains this gem of a statement* about second class passengers on the Titanic:
Interestingly enough, I just happened to be reading this otherwise interesting book because I was looking for solid, reliable facts.
* May not actually be a gem.
** These books are not identified, so alas, I cannot tell you what novels Davenport-Hines classifies as "salutary" and "moral" although clearly the category does not include anything featuring Sherlock Holmes.***
*** I don't actually know if the Titanic's libraries contained any Sherlock Holmes novels/collections, but it's ok if not because those stories are clearly formulaic anyway.****
**** I just thought about this, but the Titanic sailed and sunk before the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which means that most detective novels would have been those by Poe, Collins, Doyle and the other innovators and creators of detective fiction; the field had barely had time to become formulaic. (Not arguing that it didn't eventually, but if you are going to criticize detective fiction for being formulaic, you might want to wait a couple decades.)
Women sat there opening their hearts to novels with salutary moral purposes**; men reached to the shelves for formulaic detective stories or books that were heavy with solid, reliable facts.This statement is unsourced; the majority of men in second class on the Titanic did not survive, because the evacuation from the ship was largely conducted on gendered lines, with women and children going first on the lifeboats with the exception of the lifeboat boarded by Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his wife, Lady Duff Gordon (who were highly criticized for leaving in a not completely filled lifeboat, although both stated that women and children were not around that particular lifeboat when they boarded. It is entirely possible, if unlikely, that the 8% of surviving men filled their memoirs of the Titanic sinking with observations about the types of novels checked out by both genders in the second glass.
Interestingly enough, I just happened to be reading this otherwise interesting book because I was looking for solid, reliable facts.
* May not actually be a gem.
** These books are not identified, so alas, I cannot tell you what novels Davenport-Hines classifies as "salutary" and "moral" although clearly the category does not include anything featuring Sherlock Holmes.***
*** I don't actually know if the Titanic's libraries contained any Sherlock Holmes novels/collections, but it's ok if not because those stories are clearly formulaic anyway.****
**** I just thought about this, but the Titanic sailed and sunk before the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which means that most detective novels would have been those by Poe, Collins, Doyle and the other innovators and creators of detective fiction; the field had barely had time to become formulaic. (Not arguing that it didn't eventually, but if you are going to criticize detective fiction for being formulaic, you might want to wait a couple decades.)