Inherent passivity in the act of reading novels

Certainly the novel, as a genre inseparable from print and ingested in the home, seemed an inherently private art form. Unlike the oral drama, and unlike much early poetry, which was recited on public occasions, prose fiction was — and is — experienced in isolation. People commonly were alone when they read, and if they were not physically solitary, they were imaginatively cut off from the world around them through their engagement with the printed page. Even this engagement was a form of privacy or solitude. Eighteenth-century readers frequently penned their thoughts in the margins of the novel's pages, but their relation to the events and characters described within the story was nonreciprocal. Whereas theatergoers disrupted performances and sometimes forced changes in the action, novel readers were powerless to affect what happened in the narrative. Such passivity, combined with the subjective impression of involvement, could be construed as a kind of false consciousness, an ideological illusion corrosive of the participatory outlook necessary to republicanism.

Michael T. Gilmore, "The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods: the Novel." (621-622)

Not only the explanation of the reading novel in the Early American period, but there is something in this passage that tells us about the inherent individualistic passivity of the act; it can be also applied to the political implication of the act of reading today (unless one participates in the communal space, such as a reading seminar).