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as the heart that dictated it. I cannot thank you, for words seem to me inadequate to express the sense I feel of your … affection.… I shall most certainly read, and love it, for the sake of the donor and as certainly fancy there is something of a communion between us when reading your favorite passages.¹

      In these remarkable lines, Wordsworth’s poetry becomes the medium through which two readers, separated by distance, unite. While Case first picks up her friend’s book in quest of “companionship,” what she ultimately achieves is “communion”—a deep sense of psychic bonding with Edgarton brought on by the experience of reading and appreciating a common text. Hers is a desire not for abstract or intellectual fellowship, but rather for sentient experiential contact, signaled in part by Case’s confession that she turned to the Wordsworth volume, impatiently looking for “some traces of yourself.” Edgarton’s pencil markings are the metonymic extensions of her writing hand, and Case suggests that this trace of materiality is as significant as the mutually appreciated language of Wordsworth in producing a felt connection between the two women. Indeed, there is some ambiguity in Case’s description of finally hitting on “that one as delicate and affectionate in its revealings as the heart that dictated it.” Does she mean by “that one” Edgarton’s markings or Wordsworth’s poem? One presumes the latter, but Case’s italicization of these words links them to the “yourself” (i.e., Edgarton) in the previous sentence. The ambiguity here is precisely the point. The Wordsworth poem has become so inseparable from Edgarton’s felt presence that reading it gives way to Case’s intimate apperception of her friend (“the sense I feel of your … affection”).

      This study argues that the ability of reading to produce experiences of mental and bodily contact was typical of nineteenth-century American life. Reading, and particularly book reading, could precipitate fantasies of communion—between reader and author, between reader and character, and (as in Case’s example above) between like-minded readers. In using the word “communion” I mean to emphasize the intimate and exclusive nature of the imagined bond that reading engendered. In contrast to the more abstracted term “community” (about which, more later), “communion” suggests psychic unity, rootedness, confidentiality, and kinship.² It is a word that implies not simply association but mutuality and oneness. This connection was often felt on or with the body, and the word “communion” also conveys the physical aspect of the imagined bond—the sense of indwelling or bodily incorporation that reading could create. As nineteenth-century philosopher Noah Porter put it, “Every book which [attentive] persons read enters into the structure of their being—it is taken up and assimilated into the very substance of their living selves.”³ While Porter described the book itself as the object of bodily assimilation here, more often readers characterized this consubstantiality in terms of physical incorporation of an author, as is apparent in Herman Melville’s response to reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection Mosses from an Old Manse:“already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”⁴ Melville’s repeated references to the “soul” are articulated alongside more corporeal images of amplification and discharge (“dropped,” “expands,” “deepens,” “shoots”), making communion in reading at once a spiritual and carnal project.

      As Melville’s comments suggest, the sense of intimate bodily contact brought on by reading could have a distinct erotic component.⁵ This could manifest itself not only in relation to the figure of the author, but in the mutual experience of two readers. Consider, for example, Margaret Fuller’s description of reading in her “Autobiographical Romance” published in 1840. Fuller, in the throes of an infatuation with a young woman from Liverpool, describes a brief separation she was forced to endure when her beloved momentarily left her to greet some visitors: “She went into another room to receive them and I took up her book. It was Guy Mannering, then lately published, and the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen. I opened where her mark lay, and read merely with the feeling of continuing our mutual existence by passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been.”⁶ As with Case, for Fuller the activity of reading a shared text gives way to a powerful sense of merged subjectivity or what she calls “mutual existence.” The erotic implications of this are highlighted through Fuller’s language of virginal encounter (“It was … the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen”), her innuendos of invasiveness and compromised privacy (“I opened where her mark lay”), and, most significantly, her description of reading as a comingling of body parts (“passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been”). Indeed, the intensity of this description of reading is notable in part because it seems to exceed Fuller’s descriptions of her actual encounters with her beloved, descriptions that appear somewhat attenuated and sentimentalized.⁷ In Fuller’s account, then, reading creates an alternative space to that of lived social relations, one in which fantasies of bodily contact with love objects can be realized more fully. These objects might include same-sex individuals (as with Fuller and Melville above), but also the racially other, the geographically distant, and even the dead.

      No doubt there is a Romantic sensibility to these descriptions. The intimate communion that nineteenth-century readers report resembles the spiritual affinity between subjects articulated by Romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic; indeed, in this context it is significant that the texts I have cited as evoking these reactions in readers (Wordsworth’s poetry, Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel Guy Mannering) are themselves classic examples of the genre. And yet, I hesitate to conflate the merger articulated in the instances above with the Romantic sublime, because the latter, especially in its American incarnations, tends to take on an abstract universalism distinct from the imagined specificity of contact that I am identifying with the work of reading. In Emerson’s famous “transparent eye-ball” section of the essay “Nature,” he writes, “I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”⁸ While this is clearly a variant of the oneness fantasy I invoked earlier, its emphasis is so all-inclusive that it tends to ignore and even denigrate the specificity of the other; by contrast, in the strain of reading I am highlighting it is precisely the exclusivity of the bond (in Emerson’s language, “the name of the nearest friend”) that is valued. When Fuller picks up Guy Mannering, she uses the historical romance as a way of reinstating her singular connection with her beloved, turning absence into presence.

      In this way, reading had a psychologically adaptive function. Through her engagement with the book, a reader like Fuller was able to remain intimately connected with another reader who was otherwise elusive (either through distance, death, or social prohibition). The book’s portability aided this process, since it meant that the reader could quite literally carry with her the ideational and material traces of a beloved fellow reader. In psychoanalytic terms, then, reading was a kind of grief work, a way of internalizing the absent loved one. When a relationship is shattered due to death or abandonment, writes Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the libido of the bereaved is not simply removed from the object and redirected. Rather, the ego forms an “identification” with the abandoned object, and aspects of the other get incorporated into the self. “Thus,” in Freud’s famous formulation, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”⁹ Translated into the terms of this study, books could be a way of preserving the inaccessible love object. Through reading mutually valued language and physically engaging the same material text (if not the actual copy belonging to the beloved, then a simulacrum thereof), the reader incorporated into herself aspects of the other, thereby keeping that other psychically present.¹⁰ This grief work could be directed not only at fellow readers but at a book’s author and characters as well. After all, reading entails intimacies and renunciations that are often out of the reader’s control. Characters may die or be left undeveloped, and a book’s ending can entail a painful separation. But by returning to the book at will (rereading passages, coddling the material object, and so forth), a reader could attenuate and manage the loss, by imaginatively taking the author or protagonist into herself.¹¹

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