Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls - Sarah L. Leonard Material Texts

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It was not the Revolution’s transformation of political forms that disturbed Wessenberg, but instead the cultural reaction to the Revolution. He saw the response in Germany as yet another retreat into subjectivity, emotionalism, and the schwärmerisch authority of the imagination. This manifested itself as a kind of cultural hermaphrodism, in which men moved easily from one position to another, incapable of standing firm: “What a swarm of hermaphrodites we see today in every rank, at all levels of society…. Their heads nod incessantly to the left side, and their mouths are constantly open trying to take back what they have just said.”73 Wessenberg’s cultural concerns were cast in terms of gender norms. While novels might bring the sexes closer together by educating both in the language of love and empathy, there was also the danger that men would cease to be adequately firm of character. If both sexes consumed and internalized the lessons of novels with equal enthusiasm, he feared that feminized men would be as vulnerable as women, incapable of autonomy and out of touch with reality.

      Yet Wessenberg’s logic must be taken one step further. Was the real threat of secular reading habits—linking it to pietism and the French Revolution—the fact that they provided an alternative source of authority through which the reader could cobble together an understanding of the world and a vision of the good life independent of “official” voices and sanctioned knowledge? This, of course, might work both ways: for those denied access to formal education (or to knowledge of certain kinds), the availability of books made it possible to cobble together an unauthorized understanding of the world around them. Certainly the growth in the secular book trade and the boom in venues for book exchange opened up the possibility that one could pursue knowledge (or pleasure, or both at the same time) without asking one’s priest, teacher, or father. In this sense it offered a secular version of the autonomy enjoyed within pietist religious practice—the autonomy to bypass authorities in the crafting of one’s own inner life.

      By positing the importance of novel reading in the cultivation of inner life, Wessenberg made an argument for the essential role reading habits could play in the creation of secular culture. If actions in the world proceeded from the impulses found in inner life, and if morality was rooted in the tone and texture of interior spaces, it was essential that authorities not make the mistake of underestimating the texts that held sway in the mind and heart of the reader. Nor should they underestimate the power of fantasy, dreams, and passions, for these inner impulses found expression in external actions and were thus well worth taking seriously.

      The expansion of secular reading practices constituted not so much an escape from external authority as a shift in where authority came from, that is, a shift in who could speak, in what terms, and on which subjects. This was the dilemma that faced the censors, police, provincial governments, and the interior minister as they sorted through the growing body of texts available in new venues and new forms. Who could write and, more important, who was strong (or educated) enough to read? Early psychological theory, adopted and employed piecemeal by these authorities (who, after all, looked to civil society for moral models), gave them the tools to contemplate a mutable state subject, one that could be crafted and cultivated, leaving him or her vulnerable to others who set themselves up as authorities on subjects that interested readers.

      This early nineteenth-century understanding of obszöne und unsittliche Schriften was rooted in a set of concerns about politics and the self specific to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Jan Goldstein writes that particular visions of the self become broadly relevant at certain moments in time: “One must speculate that at different historical moments, different mental operations—themselves constructed rather than given—are singled out as particularly anxiety-provoking and, hence, as the focus of cultural obsession.”74 In the period roughly between 1810 and 1830 a complex vision of the human subject and of the relationship between inner life and authority informed discussions of secular reading practices. Ironically, amid all the talk of the vulnerability of the individual there was an important subtext: the individual was vulnerable not only because the world was newly filled with nefarious authors and booksellers but also because he or she was finding new sources of autonomy. This autonomy (the corollary of vulnerability) marked an important shift in the way knowledge was produced, identities were crafted, and selves were refined.

      CHAPTER 2

      Dubious Sources, Dangerous Spaces, Porous Geographies

       Understanding the Bookseller’s Crime, 1811–1840

      Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their form, their uses, and their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things.

      —ARJUN APPADURAI, The Social Life of Things

      Arts of transmission.… The phrase nicely exemplifies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us.

      —JAMES CHANDLER, ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON, AND ADRIAN JOHNS, “Arts of Transmission: An Introduction”

      Early nineteenth-century definitions of obscenity hinged on a vision of “half-ripe readers” who were easily seduced by fantasies and half truths. Yet a closer look at the habits of readers suggests that they were anything but. During the 1820s and 1830s readers in the patchwork of territories that constituted the newly expanded Prussia invented strategies to get the publications they wanted. They were aided by the liberal press laws of other German states, porous geographical boundaries through which books could pass and bold colporteurs willing to take risks. A new breed of lending library proprietors capitalized on the loosening of guild restrictions and the growth of the reading public and established new venues for lending books in cities throughout the German states. Political upheaval in France, punctuated by another revolution in 1830, fueled the German market for French books of all kinds. Polish territories under Russian rule staged a failed uprising against the czar in 1830–31; readers in the German states expressed their interest and sympathy by buying (or lending) books like Johann Scheible’s 1834 edition of Roman Soltyk’s Poland and Its Heroes in the Recent Fight for Freedom.1 That same year the Prussian government responded by banning books published in Polish.2 In some German states popular unrest and political agitation allowed liberal parties to extract political concessions from rulers. In the midst of the changes and reorientations that marked this period, readers participated in an expanding market for books, both licit and illicit.

      In his subtle discussion of what he terms “the social life of things” the social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai reminds us that the meanings that adhere to commodities are historical and local. They can be discerned only when we suspend our own notions of value and try to understand how people in specific contexts understood the movements and meanings of objects. In this chapter I continue to explore early nineteenth-century understandings of what constituted obscene and immoral publications but take a different route. I will explore how assumptions about social spaces—who offered a book, to whom, and in what context—marked a text as a certain kind of object. As publications traveled along new routes in unprecedented numbers, they accrued meanings that branded them as dangerous, even criminal. Decisions about what constituted obscene and immoral publications were not simply a matter of the words on the page. The judgments of police, censors, and members of civil society were inflected by attitudes toward the people who produced, distributed, and consumed books and about the social spaces they passed through and occupied.

      To understand the meaning of obscenity we must also consider the changing status of knowledge in the 1820s and 1830s. Contemporaries asked a series of questions: Did it make sense to use the term knowledge to describe the content of the popular novels, sensational tales, travel narratives, popular medical remedies, and astrological texts that occupied the energies of police and censors in the 1820s and 1830s? And if so, what forms of knowledge were deemed dangerous or obscene? Today, in part as

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