Bodies and Books - Gillian Silverman

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       Bodies and Books

       Bodies and Books

       Reading and the Fantasy of Communionin Nineteenth-Century America

      Gillian Silverman

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      Philadelphia

      Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

      Silverman, Gillian D., 1967–

      Bodies and books : reading and the fantasy of communion in nineteenth-century America / Gillian Silverman. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      1. American literature—19th Century—History and criticism. 2. Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. 3. Interpersonal relations in literature. 4. Books and reading—Psychological aspects. 5. Books and reading—United States—History—19th century. 6. Authors and readers—United States—History—19th century I. Title.

      PS217.I52S55 2012

810.9′353—dc23 2011046743

       To my mother,Doris K. Silverman,and in loving memory of my father,Lloyd Howard Silverman

       Contents

       Preface

       Reading and the Search for Oneness

       Introduction

       The Fantasy of Communion

       Chapter 1

       Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading

       Chapter 2

       Books and the Dead

       Chapter 3

       Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre

       Chapter 4

       Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative

       Chapter 5

       “The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner

       Epilogue

       No End in Sight

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Preface

       Reading and the Search for Oneness

      This is no book,

      Who touches this, touches a man,

      (Is it night? Are we here alone?)

      It is I you hold, and who holds you,

      I spring from the pages into your arms.

      —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860)

      In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman articulated a theory of reading that would be satirically celebrated in an advertisement for the gay-positive magazine, The Advocate, a little over a hundred years later. According to this vision, reading is a physical experience—involving, above all, the sensory perception of touch—that leads to a deep spiritual and erotic connection, either between author and reader (as in Whitman’s example) or between readers of the same text (as in the cheeky Advocate ad shown in Figure 1). This study investigates this fantasy of communion as it developed and played out in nineteenth-century American literature and letters. I suggest that reading in this period could be a way of envisioning bodily intimacy with desired subjects. It facilitated unfamiliar forms of social intercourse, allowing readers to imagine physical contact and merger with populations who were absent or otherwise inaccessible.

      The profound communion that I place at the center of nineteenth-century reading practices is a far cry from the diffuse, anonymous “communities” that critics often associate with reading—Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities,” Michael Warner’s abstract reading “public,” and so forth.1 As the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century subjects attest, reading was most important not because it created broad affiliations along national or demographic lines, but because it promoted a heightened connection to a specific

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