Audubon and his readers

                Both Scott Russell Sanders and Christoph Irmscher address the problems inherent to studying Audubon’s writing, problems which stem in part from the “tidy-minded” editing of his granddaughter, Maria Audubon (Sanders 1).  Sanders describes how the Audubon writing “cooked” by Maria’s editing is blander than the original – stripped of references to sex, feelings, or excess – and made, in other words, more correctly Victorian (2-3). 

                In addition to these deletions, Maria also excises Audubon’s frequent references to his audience.  In “My Style of Drawing Birds” (Irmscher edition), Audubon repeatedly invokes his reader as companion, student, admirer, and judge.  He tells us that his original “mankin” “cannot [be] describe[d] in any other terms than by telling you that when it sat up it was a very tolerable looking ‘Dodo’!” (760).  The tone of jovial camaraderie is followed by a strategic withholding of information from the reader.  In speaking to the wife of his tenant at Mill Grove, Audubon tells us “a curious scene ensued… which is not worth your While to hear” (761).  Such authorial reserve could be interpreted as an instruction to the reader to pay greater attention to what follows, as this will take the place in the narrative of other, held-back information.  A paragraph later, he engages the reader again: “Think not reader,” and, later in the paragraph, “Reader, this was what I shall ever call” (761).  These calls upon the reader urge him/her to participate as witnesses in the trajectory of Audubon’s bildungsroman.  The more frequent calls upon the reader occur at the climax of the “New discovery,” when Audubon begins using wires to arrange recently-deceased birds prior to painting them.  Audubon does not just conceive of his reader as companion (or admirer?) at such moments of discovery, however.  He also invites his reader to judge the finished product which stems from that moment, “Successfull or not, I leave for yourself to decide” (763) – essentially a rhetorical question.  Audubon seems to be constructing an ideal audience: one which will laugh with him at his early attempts, pay attention to the important parts of the narrative, admire the apparent stroke of genius which allows him to go forward with his project, and be present for the final, triumphant, reveal of the drawings.

                Maria deletes each of these references – either excising the single words, “reader,” “you,” or the entire clause or sentence which refers to audience.  This is puzzling: Maria’s recalibration of her grandfather’s character to erase its “asperities” (to borrow from Audubon’s description of his own style) is understandable, albeit lamentable in our eyes.  But why should she interrupt the conversation which Audubon establishes with his audience?

                I am not sure why Maria should interfere in this particular way with Audubon’s writing, but will speculate that this aspect of her editing perhaps stems from the same motivation which inspired her to delete his references to strong feeling, sex, etc.  If her goal was to re-craft Audubon’s persona into a standard-issue Victorian gentleman, then the references to the reader – which could be seen as emphasizing the distance between author and reader – must be deleted as well.  Audubon’s readers were wealthy, sometimes noble, and highly-educated; Maria would prefer that Audubon be seen as one of them.  Instead, Audubon’s references to the reader could be seen to establish his role as one emphatically distinct from them: the authentic frontiersman leading his audience into the wilderness.  His attempts at establishing a conversational equality with his readers would be interpreted by Maria as another acknowledgment of their actual inequality.  Whenever we come across a reference to ourselves as readers, after all, we are reminded that we are just readers, and are distinct from the author as consumers rather than producers of the text.  In this sense, Maria’s consistent deletions of Audubon’s “dear reader” moments could be seen as re-fashioning Audubon’s character by papering over, however slightly, the differences between a wealthy cultured reader and an individual whose buckskin dress figures the nineteenth-century status of American culture, emerging out of the wilderness.

                Imaginatively, I wonder if Maria cringed as she thought of her grandfather walking through London in fringed buckskin.  Perhaps she would have preferred that he be a more genteel armchair naturalist, the kind which he repeatedly assured his readers he was not.