Introduction

Invisible Hands
Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell

In a world of processed words and mediated information, secretaries are both iconic
and invisible. "Whatever they may do," one bibliographer has observed, "authors
do not write books." 1 This volume focuses on the representation, self-representation
and non-representation, in literature, film, and other cultural forms, of those who do
write - manuscripts and memos, forms and faxes. The figure who writes in the place
of another is by no means a recent invention, as Chaucer's "Wordes Unto Adam, His
Owne Scriveyn" makes clear. Scribes, clerks, copyists, literary secretaries, private
secretaries, and post-industrial data-entry workers all make the word flesh. Over the
past two centuries, however, the nature of their agency has changed. The typewriter,
the dictaphone, the xerox machine, and the personal computer have reshaped
the organization of data and of the persons who process it. Literary Secretaries/
Secretarial Culture explores the paradoxes of that implicit job description, asking
how the metamorphoses of the secretary intersect with the writing and reading of
literature.
From the "tappity-tap-tap and the thin bell and muffled whir" that provide
background noise for the opening scene of The Maltese Fa/con to what U .A. Fanthorpe
calls "the saddest dedication: lastly my wife, I Who did the typing," secretaries hover
at the margins of modem literature - and literary theory. Moviegoers may remember
Dracula for its blood and sex, but it is also a novel about typewriters and shorthand.
Secretaries permeate high culture (think of the "privysuckatory Shem" of Finnegans
Wake) and low culture (James Bond's Miss Moneypenny). More precisely, they figure
the latter within the former. When the typist in The Waste Land "smoothes her hair
with automatic hand I And puts a record on the gramophone," she acts out the split
between the different kinds oflinguistic labor the poem embodies - between Eliot's
artistic collaboration with Pound and the stenographer's more mundane interaction
with a dictator, between inspired minds and automatic hands. Yet the secretary does
not securely personify one of those two poles so much as negotiate between the
two, making manifest the economic transaction that produces the aesthetic artefact.
Henry James's secretary Mary Weld wrote in her diary not of the plot or style of The
Wings of the Dove but rather the important fact that the book involved 194 days of
dictation: a useful reminder that every great literary work of the twentieth century
has been typed by someone for money or love or both. 2 (The same holds true for
most twentieth-century writings about literature, at least until the advent of word
processing software.)
2 Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

How does the practice of (literal) writing affect the theory of (literary) writing
- and the other way around? The information theorist Allen Renear has argued that
literary-theoretical models are constantly reshaped by the unspoken protocols of
"publishing, office automation, textual editing, text processing software."3 Yet it's
not enough to argue against thinking about literary production and consumption in a
vacuum without recognizing that ideas of the literary are formed not just by analogy
with more mundane kinds of writing, but in opposition to them. (To place verbal
artworks in dialogue with vernacular text processing practices is also to acknowledge
how gingerly the two have acknowledged each other.) As the following chapters will
suggest, the office doesn't just provide a safely distant dumping-ground for all those
aspects of writing and reading which aesthetic experience filters out; it also provides
literature with a safely distant space in which to explore (or onto which to refract)
questions internal to its own theory and practice. In short, these essays ask not just
how the systems of producing, storing, retrieving and disseminating information
developed over the past two centuries have changed ideas about authorial agency,
attribution, and originality (and vice versa), but also how that interplay - the
invocation or interrogation of that analogy - has in turn changed understandings of
the relation between verbal texts and material objects.
Has writing become a dead metaphor - or is it rather paralyzed, caught
somewhere between artistic intention and mechanical reproduction? It could be
objected that nothing but semantic coincidence links "writing" in the sense of
producing material marks with "writing" in the sense of composing verbal content.
Yet it could also be countered that the dissimilarity of those two terms is precisely
what makes our culture define each in relation to the other. When Julian Huxley
explained natural selection by analogy with the scene of millions of monkeys at
millions of typewriters randomly generating Hamlet, he used the typist to stand for
everything that Shakespeare was not. One is plural, the other singular; one copies, the
other creates; one touches, the other thinks. (Truman Capote famously dismissed Jack
Kerouac: "That's not writing. That's typing.") The opposite of genius is typist. The
office encapsulates the very aspects of textual production whose absence demarcates
the aesthetic: commercialism, collaboration, materiality, usefulness. Adomo's axiom
that "culture originates in the radical separation of mental and physical work" finds
its occupational corollary in the division of textual labor.
In short, an idea of the aesthetic that emerged in opposition to commercial
culture has as its parallel a model of the author defined in contradistinction to
the clerk. More surprisingly, perhaps, the modem office has defined itself against
literature in tum. The twentieth-century business historian who dismisses filing by
date as "positively Dickensian" mirrors the nineteenth-century secretarial training
manuals that pepper their advice with the names of Tim Linkinwater and the
Cheeryble brothers. 4 If secretarial work provided literary writing with an analogue
and an antithesis, conversely the office distanced itself from literature in the process
of invoking it. One oxymoronically-titled Art of Typewriting published in 1905
uses an epigraph from Pope's Essay on Criticism to exclude what the manual calls
"the unskilled class - those who have skimped through the elementary textbook of
 Introduction 3

shorthand, and can just bang on the typewriter keys" 5-or what another calls "illiterate
operators ... far more fitted to wield a spade ... who know more about Pitman's
shorthand and typewriting than they have ever known, or are ever likely to know,
about the composition of the English language."6 The 1901 British census which
expelled shorthand writers from the category containing "authors and journalists"
to another entitled "mercantile occupations" marked not just the social demotion of
a group whose value dropped as its numbers increased, but also the extent to which
writing had become the terrain contested in a larger battle between body and mind,
or the economic and the aesthetic.
That demotion doesn't just involve class, of course, but gender. Feminists'
perennial hope that writing could allow women to assert or find themselves clashes
with the grim statistics suggesting that women remain precisely those for whom
writing means wage-slavery rather than liberation, alienation rather than self-
expression. A few years before Roland Barthes died, an interviewer from Le Monde
asked him whether he did all his writing by hand. Barthes answered "It's not that
simple," before explaining why he had bought an electric typewriter.

Since I'm often very busy, I have sometimes been obliged to have things typed for
me by others (I don't like to do this, but it has happened). When I thought about this,
it bothered me. Without going into a big demagogical speech, I'll just say that to me
this represented an alienated social relationship: a person, the typist, is confined by the
master in an activity I would almost call an enslavement, when writing is precisely the
field ofliberty and desire! In short, I said to myself: 'There's only one solution. I really
must learn to type." 7

Barthes looked forward to a future when intellectuals' secretarial turns could

fudge the alienation of headwork from handwork by combining both functions in
their own persons. But the spread of word processing after his death seems to have
muddied that distinction without offering any solution to the "social relationship"
that he describes. If literary criticism is now more often composed at the same
time as it's keyed in, and by the same hand, that hasn't caused the salary or status
differential between different classes of office workers to narrow. On the contrary,
"office" is already becoming an anachronistic adjective for the vast majority of
keyboarders operating in factory-like conditions. Where at the turn of the last century
the dictaphone allowed secretaries to be grouped into typing pools whose layout
minimized contact between the individuals giving and taking dictation, now satellite
communications technologies have enabled First World corporations to outsource
data entry to cheap labor elsewhere. Women in Barbados now key in everything from
boarding passes to pornographic novels to academic monographs (one-twentieth of
a cent per keystroke, 10,000 keystrokes minimum per hour). As keyboards replace
sewing-machines in Philippine sweatshops, a geographical division of labor from
management replaces the earlier bodily contact that made possible jokes like "Try
this on your typewriter" - the caption to a photo of a woman sitting in a man's lap
next to an unused machine. 8
4 Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

Why is it important that the secretary be a person (instead of/as well as) a thing?
Like its spin-offs, the personal computer (PC) and the personal digital assistant
(PDA), the term "personal secretary" transfers the adjective from the noun that it
grammatically modifies to an unnamed user, stripping the secretary of personhood,
let alone personality. But this is nothing new. Until the first decade of the twentieth
century, as Fleissner and Olwell note, a "typewriter" referred to the worker as well as
to her machine: only gradually was the term changed from a free-standing noun ("a
lady type-writer") to an adjective ("a typewriter girl") and finally severed from any
reference to human operators by the invention of an alternative term, the "typist. " 9 (As
readers of Our Mutual Friend will remember, "secretary" has moved in exactly the
opposite etymological direction, from a term for a desk to a metonymy designating its
occupant.) In 1897, Grant Allen peppered his eponymous novel with an encyclopedic
range of possible designations: "type-writer girl," "type-writer (female)," "a lady to
type-write for you." All that allows the operator to be distinguished grammatically
from the machine is that one can be gendered and the other can't: "a lady typewriter"
is clearly human whereas "a typewriter" could equally well be mechanical. But as
"type-writer" goes from modifying gender designations to being modified by them,
the reversal of noun with adjective determines whether the referent is a human who
happens to type, or a writing instrument that happens to be human.
The case studies collected in Literary Secretaries exemplify the paradoxes of
women's empowerment and subjection in the twentieth-century workforce. G.K.
Chesterton (not a noted feminist) quipped, "Twenty million young women rose to
their feet and said 'We will not be dictated to' and immediately became shorthand
typists." 10 Tum-of-the-century feminists associated standing up for one's rights
with sitting down at one's desk; the history of the typewriter (human operator and
machine) is bound to a history of the contestation and re-installation of gender roles.
When Henry James hired Mary Weld from Miss Petheridge's Secretarial Bureau
to replace his outgoing Scottish male secretary, William MacAlpine, he wrote the
brutal truth in a letter: "MacAlpine's lady successor is an improvement on him!
And an economy!" 11 But "economy" is not everything, as Fleissner's essay cautions:
given that women's labor is usually cheaper and that employers usually want cheaper
labor, cost alone is not enough to explain why some fields become feminized at
particular historical moments rather than others. 12 The essays in this book draw on
literature, film, and other cultural artefacts to interrogate the received understanding
of the feminization of secretarial work at the end of the nineteenth century.
For economic as well as cultural reasons, these case studies cluster around
the tum of the century. In Britain at least, the First World War consolidated the
emergence of a clerical workforce that was larger, lower-paid, and more mixed in
social origins as well as gender than a generation before - changes that historians
have explained by factors as various as corporate mergers, the 1870 Education Act,
and the commercialization of the typewriter and the phonograph along with lower-
tech inventions such as the filing cabinet and the index card. In one modem scholar's
estimate, the number of women filling clerical jobs multiplied more than 80 times
between 1850 and 1914, going in the same period from 2 percent to 20 percent of the
 Introduction 5

total number of British clerical workers. 13 Yet, however often those statistics reappear
in contexts ranging from women's studies courses to (male-dominated) listservs
for antique typewriter collectors, it's striking how exclusively they're framed as
changes in womens position - whether for better or worse. Several of the following
essays turn that question around, exploring the problems that the feminization of
clerical work posed for masculine authorship (Karlin, Kreilkamp), for male clerical
workers (Fleissner) or for men's leisure reading (Price). Early twentieth-century
conservatives worried that working side by side with men in public would unsex
women, but the intervening 100 years have not borne them out. (The history of
sexual harassment dovetails neatly with the feminization of secretarial work.) 14
On the contrary, it is when machines promise to replace bodies that the secretary
becomes sexualized (think of Fawn Hall with the paper shredder and the big hair,
or Melanie Griffiths' changing outfits in Working Girl) or extravagantly embodied
(witness Dolly Parton in the earlier movie Nine to Five, a title shared with the name
of a labor organization). In the joke of the boss with his "typewriter" on his lap, the
confusion of woman with machine offers no safe harbor from sex stereotyping, but
rather creates new erotic demands and imagined supplies. If the secretary's mind is
sometimes pictured as disposable, a machine for mechanical reproduction, her body
is simultaneously consolidated as easily accessible on-site. In fact, Working Girl and
Nine to Five both revolve around the too-smart secretary whose abundant brains are
eventually revealed under her too-evident body - the structuring contrast between
the head made for business and the body built for sin, as Melanie Griffiths' character
puts it. The reward usually takes the form of leaving the secretarial position behind
- moving up and out of the nine-to-five punch card typing pool (which both films
represent as a communal and often supportive female space) to displace the boss
(as Lily Tomlin does in Nine to Five). 15 Whereas the fictional representations of
secretarial lives discussed by Fleissner pictured the ideal trajectory as from the office
back to the domestic space of the home, the cinematic secretary usually makes the
shorter journey to a cubicle of her own.
An alternative story about data entry in the twentieth century, however, would
involve the progressive divorce of copying from reading. The first generation
of typewriters, whose type bars hid the page from view, forced operators to key
in each new line without re-reading for sense the text that came before it. When
Remington experimented with repositioning the type bar at the turn of the century,
manufacturers of the older models fought back by claiming that re-reading their
own words would slow typists down. In the words of one advertisement for an older
model, "the writing [on the page] being concealed, the notes [being copied] receive
whole attention." 16 At the very moment when the triumph of "visible" typewriters
allowed typists to read for context, the commercialization of the dictaphone prevented
them from reading for content: the centralization of typing pools made possible by
new recording technologies prevented any one typist from obtaining the kind of
intimate knowledge of a single employer's business that allowed telegraph boys
to blackmail, or private secretaries to plagiarize. 17 Here again, digital sweatshops
provide a telling parallel. In the 1970s, the first US data entry brokers sought out
6 Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

former British colonies like Barbados and India. By the 1990s, though, their strategy
was just the reverse. What drove employers to Mexico and the Philippines was not
just the fear of unionization, but the quest for an allophone workforce. "Offshore
workers go faster," according to one company that contracts US companies' data
entry needs to Mexican maquiladoras, "because they don't understand what they're
keyboarding." 18 The ideal worker becomes a non-reading writer.
Billed as cutting down human error along with costs, the export of data entry
across linguistic borders projects the spatial segregation of the typing pool onto the
face of the globe. From the anteroom ofVictorian counting-houses, to a different floor
of a Manhattan skyscraper, to a different part of the anglophone world, keyboarding
finally migrates across linguistic borders. 19 But then, linguistic difference has always
allowed workers to transmit information without receiving it: as early as the Great
War, stenographers volunteered to take down interrogations of war prisoners in
Isaac Pitman's "phonetic" system without compromising the state secrets of which
they could have no conscious knowledge. 20 When Etta Cone agreed to type-up the
handwritten manuscripts of Three Lives for her friend Gertrude Stein, she began
slowly, typing out letter after letter, until Stein gave her official permission to read
the contents - at which point the work progressed much faster. Stein herself was often
accused of ignoring content in favour of sheer linguistic materiality. Here we see
what happens when a typist follows her lead. That fantasy of divorcing transmission
from understanding culminates in William Gibson's recent cyberfiction "Johnny
Mnemonic," whose title character rents his brain on an "idiot/savant basis" that
denies him access to its encoded contents. Because the information passes through
its human storage space without leaving any trace, no commercial rival can "drug it
out, cut it out, torture it out" - a new solution to the old quest for a form of data that
can be processed without being appropriated or betrayed.21
This lack of trace, this ideal of perfect mediation, may help explain the role that
secretaries play in competing strands of contemporary literary theory. The women
who stand between mental and manual (or white-collar and blue-collar) modes of
labor also occupy the threshold between metaphysical and material understandings
of language. In the wake of Friedrich Kittler 's work on "discourse networks" - the
medical, technological, scientific, and literary discursive systems at a given historical
moment that connect apparently disparate subjects such as writing technologies to
the formation of human subjectivity - deconstructive explorations of the relations
between speech and writing have begun to engage with historical research on material
technologies of communication. The secretary can be located at one intersection of
these contrasting approaches: mediating between historical questions about class,
gender, technology and economics, and philosophical questions about - well -
mediation. The secretary's supplemental position in the office reveals the inability of
the boss's name to signify an authentically occupied identity (those pp.sat the bottom
of the letter give the game away). Speech and writing, the loss of, and nostalgic
longing for, full agency, seem to meet in her job description. The temptation is to
reduce the secretary in the abstract to a high theory box of metaphorical delights, a
mantelpiece from which to hang many purloined (and cc.ed) letters. 22
 Introduction 7

As a corrective, it's important to remember how unimaginable the secretary who

figures in late-twentieth-century literary theory would be without early-twentieth-
century fiction and film. The persons and machines that produce texts are themselves
a product of textual machinery: of the ad campaigns that spurred businesses to want
new supplies and services, and of the literature (from serialized romances to New
Woman polemics) that lured thousands of women into indebting themselves to buy
typewriters or obtain diplomas. Secretaries' images, as well as their services, have
always been bought and sold. Their ubiquity in tum-of-the-century media registers
warring contentions about the condition of modem women. Was the secretary a
sexually adventurous, independent feminist, or an economically depressed drudge
looking for a way back into domesticity via marriage? What stories about the female
bourgeois subject made these two seem like mutually exclusive options? And how
have these stories changed - or resurfaced - in an age of digital reproduction?
The collection begins with a reminder that men also performed (and perform)
secretarial labor, and that the iconic late-nineteenth-century female secretary is
preceded by the mid-century male clerk. Stenography holds a central place in Ivan
Kreilkamp's approach to Dickens, probably the most famous figure ever to combine
the secretarial and authorial roles in one person. Yet the triumphalist narrative of
Dickens's rise from stenographer to journalist to author is undercut, as Kreilkamp
shows, by David Copperfield's parody of the improbably utopian claims made by
early-Victorian shorthand manuals. If, in the era of Johnson's Dictionary, standard
English was thoughtto reform the arbitrary profusion of speech, in the early nineteenth
century shorthand manuals like those from which Dickens himselfleamed reporting
offered to cure the historical contingency of English. The how-to manuals that
Kreilkamp examines claim to provide not simply an efficient system of information
storage, but a means by which writing might be infused with the fleeting moment
of vocal articulation. David's skill in shorthand promises (without quite succeeding)
to lend him not just a new kind of professional authority, but control both over the
feminine evasiveness of speech and over his wife. In Kreilkamp 's reading, the errant
voice becomes at once the object of desire and the threat to meaning; the sign system
of shorthand can be read either as a tool of professional authority or as an arbitrary
code associated with ancient hieroglyphics.
Leah Price's chapter traces another unexpected link between shorthand and
the vicissitudes of male professionalization, uncovering a vast (and understandably
unstudied) tum-of-the-century canon reprinted in shorthand. By 1900 two shillings
would buy the Old and New Testaments in shorthand, Swedenborg in shorthand,
A Christmas Carol in shorthand, English-Welsh and English-Hindi dictionaries in
shorthand, Gulliver s Travels, Tom Browns Schooldays, Around the World in Eighty
Days, highlights from Washington Irving, and all of the Sherlock Holmes stories as
well as a digest of the magazine in which they appeared. Not only do "phonographic"
publishers juxtapose biographies of Calvin and Galileo with fictions of Protestant
self-help like Pilgrims Progress, but their teach-yourself-accounting books find a
counterpart in classics of autobiographical book-keeping like Robinson Crusoe and
Franklin's Autobiography. Shorthand editions didn't just ratify the increasingly sharp
8 Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

polarization of contemporary popular fiction according to the gender of its intended

readers; by reprinting eighteenth-century authors like Defoe, Swift, and Franklin,
they also invented a prehistory for the new transatlantic genres of boys' romance.
What shorthand adventure stories share with secretarial how-to manuals, Price
argues, is a narrative of masculine mobility (either upward or outward) increasingly
foreign to desk-bound clerks in dead-end jobs, no matter what their gender. The
marketing of shorthand to boys coincides with the moment at which social critics
began to figure the mass public as a clerical worker, and more specifically as a male
clerk. Shorthand reprints provide one clue, then, to what it means for men to write
and read in a society when the movement of a hand across the keyboard or eye across
the page is coming to be coded female.
Jennifer Fleissner's article on Dracula approaches that "female" coding from
a different angle. Fleissner questions recent feminist re-evaluations of the novel
that see Mina Barker's active secretarial role as progressively contained by the
dynamics of the novel. These critics argue that although Mina begins the vampire
hunt aspiring to be like the lady journalists she emulates, the task of keeping and
interpreting the piles of vampiric information turns her into first a helpless vamped
female, and finally, a fully domesticated mother. By contrast, Fleissner suggests that
Mina's trajectory can be read very differently as part of an acceptable narrative of
the life of a middle class working woman; the journey from secretarial reproductive
labor to sexual reproductive labor is one that women were encouraged to take, one
path by which the apparently "new" woman could go home again. Fleissner notes
the ways in which Mina's leading role in the book is presented as simultaneously
active and unconscious. Hypnotically tapping her mind provides the male vampire-
hunters with information about Dracula's whereabouts, but Mina is unable to prevent
Dracula from similarly using her breachable brain to gain information about their
movements. In this doubled image of Mina as active agent and passive medium, she
resembles one image of the ideal tum-of-the-century secretary as the woman who
"knows how not to know," who is thus able to transmit information without being
"exposed" to it. Fleissner's explanation also enables us to understand two seemingly
opposed rationales offered for women's entry into clerical work via the suitability of
the newly-deployed typewriter. Fleissner asks "how could the 'feminine' aspect of
[secretarial] work be at once a matter of the machine-like nature of women's bodies,
and a tribute to their charm and social know-how?" The claim that women were
more suited to repetitive, mechanical work could be resolved with the depiction
of the secretary as a domestic hostess figure, one who was actively preparing for,
not avoiding, the conventional role of wife and mother. If, as Fleissner suggests,
the feminization of secretarial work threatened notions of separate spheres, then
by training to be the perfect secretary one could also imagine oneself training to
be the perfect wife. At the precise moment at which the female clerical worker's
image shifted from posing a threat to the family to providing a support for domestic
ideology, Mina Harker embodied the unbeatable combination of wife, mother, and
writing machine. In her, Stoker created a paradoxical genius of the automatic and
unconscious - the ultimate working (but uncorruptible) secretarial body.
 Introduction 9

The typing body is the concern of Victoria Olwell's article as well. The year in
which Dracula appeared, 1897, also saw the publication of another typewriting novel,
Grant Allen's The Type-Writer Girl. Olwell's article uses Allen's novel to explore the
ways in which typewriting was imagined as de-corporealizing writing, only to re-
corporealize it in the conspicuously sexualized, yet simultaneously automatized, body
of the female typist. Through reading fin-de-siecle works of typewriting pedagogy,
Olwell makes a case for linking the new machine-age, "automatic" woman with the
earlier stereotype of the feminine as "nature" to masculine "culture"; the typist who
could speed type accurately was often shown in the "how-to" literature as possessing
an instinctive link between the muscles of her nervous system and the alphabet on
the keyboard. Olwell refracts Allen's novel through his impassioned engagement, in
his newspaper and journal articles, with current debates about the enfranchisement
of women and the evolutionary degeneration of the race. Culturally-shared anxieties
about the loss of modern women's ability to bear children because of the dangers of
excessive education surface in Allen's portrayal of his Girton-educated, smart and
sassy, but significantly single type-writer girl, Juliet Appleton. Allen's conflicting
views on women's place in modernity and in the body politic can be seen in fin-
de-siecle culture's contradictory expectations of female typists, those mediating
bodies and minds so in danger of disappearing behind the perfectly mechanized
typewriters with which they seemed to become (linguistically and metaphorically)
co-extensive.
The secretarial mediums of Bette London's article are concerned with a
different kind of disappearing body, that of the dead author: for in the early twentieth
century, some secretaries found themselves taking orders from beyond the grave.
London explores the case of Louise Owen, private secretary to the newspaper
magnate and mass populiser Lord Northcliffe, who received messages from him
via seances and automatic writing for years after his death. London shows the ways
in which the qualities that make for a successful private secretary to a public figure
- the taking on of the other's voice, the anticipation of his or her every need - are
precisely the qualities that make for a successful medium. London places Owen's
story - which ended unhappily for her in her bankruptcy after a contested lawsuit
over Northcliffe's post-death legacy - in the context of the many other mediums at
the time who were receiving posthumous dictations from the literati of the previous
century. Northcliffe's case, like that of another post-death dictating newspaper man,
W.T. Stead, illustrates the ways in which trance mediumship and secretarial labor
were brought into dialogue with a continuing concern for communicating with "the
man and woman in the street."23 London's exploration of the post-death return of
the populiser Northcliffe via his private secretary shows the ways in which Owen's
career can shed light on the complicated path to professional recognition that some
women at the time were finding as "secretaries to the stars."
Daniel Karlin's chapter, "The Case of the Capable Fingers," examines the role
of the secretarial sidekick in Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason detective stories,
as well as in successive biographies of their creator. In fiction by Gardner as well
as non-fiction about him, the secretary personifies what Gardner himself called the
10 Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

"Fiction Factory," an "assembly line" in which dictating, typing, and revising were
delegated to a series of different hands. Yet in retrospect, Gardner's representation
of his early life upstages the secretarially-lubricated assembly line by a one-man
sweatshop: that is, Karlin reveals the industrial production made visible by writing
machines and human typists as the effect rather than the cause of Gardner's mass-
market success. And the secretary's role shifts just as drastically over the course of
the 85 Perry Mason books as it did over the course of Gardner's 40 year writing
career; as successive stories overwrite the early novels' hints at a sexual relation
between Mason and his secretary Della Street, they also change her from central
character to marginal observer. It's as an employer rather than a husband, Karlin
shows, that Mason (and Gardner) can negotiate the contradictions of masculine
authorship.
Douglas Brooks 's final chapter offers a counter-intuitive history of the
alphabet that raises questions about the relationship between writing technologies
and embodiment, and the gendered ways in which the act of writing has been
historically imagined. In an argument that weaves its way from the invention of
parchment codex to Chaucer to the recent outsourcing of the transcription of medical
records to third world countries, Brooks suggests that the body, in particular the
reproductive female body, is never far absent from technologies of transcription. For
Brooks, the metaphor that equates the woman with the white sheet of nature onto
which a male stylus can transcribe was present in the material/technological origins
of writing itself. Revisiting Heidegger's "disquisition on the typewriter," Brooks
speculates about the implications for "being" in the not-too-distant future when
voice recognition software may render obsolete our current models of secretarial
mediation, along with the hands, scribes, and word processors that have historically
done the labor of writing. If improved voice recognition technology threatens the
complete disembodiment, and indeed, erasure, of secretarial labor, then, Brooks
suggests, it may be significant that this kind of technology emerges at a moment
when the female body as the locus of sexual reproduction is also being challenged.
The collection concludes by asking what the future holds for the modem secretary.
What new economic and technological conditions have transformed secretarial
labor into something that its nineteenth-century practitioners would be hard put to
recognize? Now that we are past the age of typewriters, and typewriter girls, what is
the future of textual mediation?

Notes

Roger E. Stoddard, "Morphology and the Book from an American Perspective," Printing
History 17 (1987): 2-14; 4.
2 H. Montgomery Hyde, Henry James at Home (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1969) 150.
3 Allen Renear, "Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Textuality," Electronic Text:
Investigations in Method and Theory, Kathryn Sutherland, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon P,
1997) 107-126; 107.
 Introduction 11

4 Martin Campbell-Kelly, "The Railway Clearing House and Victorian Data Processing,"
Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business ed.
Lisa Bud-Frierman (London: Routledge, 1994) 51-74; 70.
5 George Carl Mares, The Art of Typewriting (London: Guilbert Pitman, 1905) 12. Another
manual, which Fleissner's essay in this volume discusses in greater detail, makes the
distinction even more explicit by calling attention to the structure of its own chapter
divisions: "There is a wide gap between the stenographers and clerks of the previous
section and the secretaries of this ... It is the workers rather than the employers who
chiefly fail to realise this, and so miss many of their opportunities" (M. Mostyn Bird,
Woman at Work: A Study of the Different Ways of Earning a Living Open to Women
[London: Chapman and Hall, 1911] 133-34). The introduction ofwordprocessing in the
1970s at first widened the gulf separating copyists from typists by dividing a previously
homogenous class of secretaries into "correspondence" and "administrative" categories:
see Elena Softley, "Word Processing: New Opportunities for women office workers?" in
Wendy Faulkner and Erik Arnold, Smothered by Invention (London: Pluto, 1985), 222-
237; 229.
6 "Some Points about the Typist," Writing Machine News 5 (May 1900): 39.
7 Roland Barthes, "An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments" (1973), The
Grain of the Voice (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985) 177-79; 179
8 For a provocative discussion of this advertisement, see Christopher Keep, "The Cultural
Work of the Type-Writer Girl," Victorian Studies 40:3: 401-26; 417.
9 A book published in 1909, for example, already refers to "typewriter operators, or
typists, as it has become fashionable to call them" (George Carl Mares, The History of
the Typewriter [London: Guilbert Pitman, 1909] 10). For a more detailed discussion of
the lexical problems, see Leah Price, "Grant Allen and the Division of Literary Labor,"
Grant Allen and Cultural Politics at Fin de Siecle, eds. William Greenslade and Terence
Rodgers (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
10 Attributed to G.K. Chesterton in Wilfred A. Beeching, The Century of the Typewriter
(Bournemouth: British Typewriter Museum Publishing, 1990) 34.
11 Qtd. in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master 1901-1916, (London: Avon Books, 1974)
94.
12 See Samuel Cohn, The Process ofOccupational Sex-Typing: The Feminization ofClerical
Labor in Great Britain (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1985).
13 Meta Zimmeck, "Jobs for Girls," Unequal Opportunities: Womens Employment in
England 1800-1918, ed. Angela John (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 153-78. See also
David Lockwood, The Black-Coated Worker: a Study in Class Consciousness (Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1989).
14 By contrast, Friedrich Kittler asserts that "In the discourse network of 1900 - this is
its open secret - there is no sexual relation between the sexes" (Discourse Networks
180011900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990] 357).
Kittler's otherwise compelling argument about the association of women with mechanical
reproduction in the tum of the century marketplace here simplifies the proliferation of new
sexual possibilities - in reality or fantasy - opened up by the influx of women into the
office. See also Pamela Thurschwell, "On the typewriter, In the Cage, at the Ouija Board"
in Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
200 I) 86-114; 94, and Thurschwell, "Supple Minds and Automatic Hands: Secretarial
Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Literature" Forum for Modern Language Studies
37.2 (2001): 155-168.
12 Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

15 Nine to Five (1980) makes an interesting case study in the image of secretarial workers. It
separates the over-sexualized secretarial body of Dolly Parton (whose primary concern is
making a living to support her husband and kids) from the sexless mastermind (played by
the lesbian icon Lily Tomlin) who winds up taking over the boss's job.
16 Mares, Typewriter 91. On the Barlock's design, see Bruce Bliven, The Wonderful Writing
Machine (New York: Random House, 1954) 89.
17 On plagiarism, see Leah Price, "From Ghostwriter to Typewriter: Delegating Authority at
Fin de Siecle," The Faces ofAnonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from
the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 211-231.
18 Debbie Nathan, "Sweating out the Words," Nation 270 (21February2000): 27-30; 28.
19 See Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 176-180; Fred Davis, "Electronic Immigrants:
Cheap Labor without Green Cards," PC Week 8 (3 June 1991): 142; and Carla Freeman,
High Tech and High Heels: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean
(Durham: Duke UP, 2000).
20 Alfred Pitman, Half a Century of Commercial Education and Publishing (Bath: Pitman,
n.d.) 83.
21 William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981 ), Burning Chrome and Other Stories
(London: HarperCollins, 1999) 14-36; 23.
22 See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the
Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S. Tomaselli, ed. J-A Miller (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1988) and Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987).
23 Roger Luckhurst discusses the way in which W.T. Stead's "new journalism" combined
his popular press and occult interests; the powers of the press over the reading public
were conceived as akin to mass hypnosis (The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 [Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2002] 133).