Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
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and the baker has never before denied Eva bread (so women are not radically isolated). Nonetheless the story does highlight the economic vulnerability of the family, which is in fact so isolated that it must rely on the generosity of strangers to subsist.
A True Terrifying Horrifying Story lends itself to further analysis, just as it did in 1817, when the censors and police wrestled over the proper reading of the story. On one level the story offers a lesson in the perils of religious unbelief, stressing in the first few lines the fact that Eva, who will become the perpetrator of the unspeakable crime, has lost faith. This is also a story of serious economic hardship, as the family continues to starve despite the husband’s hard work. On another level an adequate account of the story must keep in mind that the themes offered in the story are themselves part of an existing body of narrative tropes, as Cheesman points out. Thus the history of such a text is related to real economic vulnerability of the kind certainly experienced by many tenant farmers, but the story has another history rooted in conventions and tropes dating to the eighteenth century, and probably earlier.
A second reading of this story links it directly to the early nineteenth-century concerns I have been exploring about the vulnerability of the subject, the dangers of intense emotions, and the ease of falling into vice. Eva, we learn on the first page, is mentally unguarded. The crucial moment in the story, the moment in which Eva loses her sanity, resonates with a broader preoccupation with suicide, melancholy, Schwärmerei, and the “falling away” from (already fragile) reason. Recall that the 1788 law focused on the fragile mental states of vulnerable subjects, condemning publications that “nourish base instincts—defamation, envy, vengefulness—and disturb the equanimity of good and useful citizens.” In the text the base instincts of the central character emerge as she succumbs to the impulses that make her murderous and suicidal. The law and the text share a common vision of human nature in which dark instincts are barely veiled, easily accessed, and potentially disastrous. Ironically the very emotions the story promises the reader, terror and horror, are precisely the problem. Involving imagination and fantasy, they bypass reason, intelligence, and mental balance.
Another confiscated publication, this one recorded in the file concerned with “obscene publications and unproven medical remedies,” provides another example. While we may puzzle at the title of this file, with its combination of morality and medicine, it had contemporary logic. Just as people could easily destroy their mental health by reading, they might corrupt their physical health by consuming poison packaged as medicine or by mistaking lies for legitimate knowledge. The combination of these two dangers—one mental, the other physical—also suggests that just as legitimate knowledge and real medicine would heal the body, the right kind of text might heal the soul. Thus a second kind of immoral text offered false, dangerous, or unauthorized knowledge about the body. In April 1824 the police in Magdeburg confiscated a pamphlet entitled The Book of Secrets: A Collection of More Than 200 Magnetic and Mysterious Remedies against Illness, Bodily Defects and Ailments and for the Promotion of Other Useful and Salutary Ends.46 Several copies of the pamphlet, the police reported, had been confiscated from a local bookseller on grounds that the work “promoted superstition, or is partially of an immoral tendency.” Shortly thereafter a report from the police in Düsseldorf noted that the work had been confiscated from a local bookstore, and the government of Saxon-Weimar wrote to the Prussian authorities warning that the work was “wretched, dangerous, and immoral” and the instructions themselves were even “life-threatening.”47
An early nineteenth-century edition of the text, published without a date and with the false imprint of “Bonston,” was bound in paper and contained no illustrations—both signs that the book was inexpensive. The text itself is divided into three parts: a titillating introduction by an unnamed publisher that makes misleading promises about the content; the body of the text, consisting of hundreds of remedies for a variety of ailments and circumstances; and a detailed index.
The introduction begins with an account of the publisher’s discovery of a dusty manuscript in “1814 in France, in a completely plundered castle or seigniorial manor, [found] under many other scattered books and papers.” The editor asserts that the unknown author of the manuscript was a medical man of some renown, who engaged in a series of “debates in Latin concerning various medical topics” and in “correspondence with first-rate doctors, who were well known at the end of the last century, among whom Mesmer is particularly worth mentioning” (a reference to Franz Anton Mesmer, whose theories of animal magnetism and hypnosis were the subject of some fascination). The editor writes that the author was a “scientifically educated man and a well-known practicing German physician” and promises that the book will “unlock the secrets of nature,” including “Animal Magnetism, Somnambulism, and Sympathetic Remedies.”48 Here again the very things that aroused the reader—the references to animal magnetism and “sympathetic remedies”—also attracted the attention of the police.
Though the introduction promises to reveal the techniques of Mesmerism, the “secrets” that follow show no sign, except for a few Latin phrases, of having been written by a prominent doctor or a man of science. The bulk of the pamphlet is dedicated instead to a list of ailments and corresponding remedies, largely focused on sick or wounded bodies of men (rarely women), horses, and dogs. The reader finds solutions to barking dogs, lame horses, smashed limbs, and wet gunpowder. Mentions of virility, as well as advice on how to prolong an erection and avoid nocturnal emissions are squeezed between advice on how to win a duel, avoid “red dysentery,” and cure bladder worms. It also provides advice on how to evaluate the character and intentions of the people sitting around a table and how to “make a piece of paper that a man has burned reappear in his hand.” Readers are instructed on how to make waterproof gunpowder and find a missing relative. The book offers tricks and sleights of hand: how to make a gold piece heavier, how to change the color of a horse’s hair, and how to win a bet. Recommended remedies (for which recipes are provided) call for mercury, mother’s milk, and the bones of humans or various animals. A remedy for use against “red dysentery, particularly for soldiers in wartimes,” reads as follows: “Take a small rib from a hanged criminal, pulverize it, and give it to the sick man in a glass of wine or vinegar.”49
We might be tempted to read the text as a mediated record of experience, though it is just as likely that readers read it because it was sensational. If the remedies speak to the material conditions of readers, the lives of these readers were harrowing, involving illness, the loss of valuable horses, wounds, cold, hunger, and missing friends. Ailments included worms, lice, dysentery, cancer, and melancholy. Based on this content, it seems likely that the body of the text either dates from or was expanded and revised during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps its readers occupied a world where tables were filled with strangers whose intentions were difficult to discern; maybe the only way to get along was to know how to make gold heavier and to be able to change the color of a stolen horse. Such concerns as crushed limbs and waterproof gunpowder were in any case very different from the problems that would begin to fill popular medical works at midcentury, when the preoccupations of a respectable middle class would eschew reading about worms, red dysentery, and lost manhood.
To read the text with the expectation of continuity between introduction and body fails to account for the historical conventions of the genre of popular medical works—works that today appear cobbled together from texts and introductions produced, borrowed, and recycled over decades. In some cases this cobbled-together quality may have been a strategy for attracting readers, throwing the police off the trail of an obscene book, or both. A second example of this kind of discontinuity is the 1821 book Magnetism and Immorality: A Remarkable Contribution to the Secret History of the Medical Practice, attributed to the notorious author Christian August Fischer (who often wrote under the pseudonym “Althing”).50 In the book the author promises to reveal the “dark secrets” of the relationship between the practitioner of magnetism and the patient, that is, the secret history of magnetism and its relationship to the sexual drive. The story that follows describes the development of a sexual relationship between a woman patient and her Mesmerist doctor, told from several points of view. The first section of the book takes the form of a dialogue between two women. One woman narrates the story of her initial visit to a Mesmerist gathering (complete with the performance of a somnambulist), where