Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
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sessions with the doctor in a state of somnambulism, the woman discovers that she is pregnant. The story continues with an account of several attempts made by the doctor to induce an abortion, followed by detailed recipes (reproduced in the text) of the abortifacients. The text then turns to a series of three expert witnesses, each asked to comment upon the efficacy of the abortifacients and the likelihood that the recipes in the book would have successfully induced an abortion. In the end the case against the doctor is undecided, and he receives no punishment for his alleged crimes. The story of the abortion attempts and the recipes for abortifacients are hidden in the body of the text. As with The Book of Secrets, the preface to Magnetism and Immorality appears to promise a medical and scientific treatise about Mesmerism; what it offers instead are seemingly unrelated recipes and a titillating and mysterious story, cast almost as a legal narrative.
In the eyes of the police, the three texts discussed here were obscene and immoral because they played upon the mental susceptibility of the reader to superstition, emotionalism, and irrationality. Implicit in their judgment was also a notion of what constituted legitimate knowledge—something that these stories, at least from their perspective, did not offer. In A Terrifying Horrifying Story irrationality is embodied in Eva Riedelin’s mental break, followed by murder, cannibalism, and suicide. Her story works on the reader by producing strong emotions of horror and terror (indeed the title explicitly promises these emotions). Even in six pages, the text manages to structure the reader as an empathetic witness by aligning him or her with the sympathetic (and horrified) gaze of the baker’s wife. In their files the police and provincial governments expressed their conviction that emotionalism is dangerous because it depletes mental energy (Geisteskraft), rendering subjects useless for “real work.” It seems possible that their concerns were in fact deeper. Emotions are powerful, pleasurable, and potentially disruptive; all three suggest ways subjects might fall into dangerous (and dark) mental states. Such states rendered subjects receptive to destructive, self-destructive, and potentially rebellious actions.
The Book of Secrets and Magnetism and Immorality were troublesome not because of the emotions they evoked through narrative structure but because of the way they invented and authorized what was passed off as scientific and medical knowledge. The existence of this kind of popular medical text spoke to readers’ desire for knowledge about the body and, as in the case of Mesmerism, about the mind. But what readers may have perceived as legitimate knowledge looked like superstition and irrationalism to the police. Seen in this light, the link between obscenity and unproven medical remedies begins to crystallize. In both cases subjects were attracted to remedies and knowledge that masqueraded as legitimate, but they lacked the requisite skepticism to navigate the sea of (titillating) information. Thus in battles over obscenity in the early nineteenth century questions of knowledge—how it was produced, authorized, and policed—were at stake. So too were questions about mental disarrangement produced by strong emotions.
In the remainder of this chapter I frame these early nineteenth-century controversies over printed texts and their allegedly vulnerable readers in a broader context of thinking about the intersection between reading, inner life, and the nature of authority. This involves a return to figures we have already encountered. First, in an attempt to understand the conceptual genesis of secular obscenity law in more detail, I look at the principles of eighteenth-century cameralist thought. I then return to Wessenberg’s 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of the Novel, as it represents a serious effort to think about the relationship between popular reading habits, moral development, and actions in the world. In stressing the importance of these contexts, I do not wish to reduce the complexity of each individual development; contemporary debates within civil society about the novel, for instance, existed adjacent to (rather than in direct contact with) legal discussions of obscene and immoral texts. Wessenberg’s book did not directly inform the Prussian authorities’ judgment of books like The Book of Secrets or A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother. Wessenberg was also not explicitly concerned about the formulation of law (though he did advocate some kind of police control of secular reading practices). Nonetheless it is worth mentioning that official fantasies about the mental fragility of uninitiated readers developed in a world in which the properties of inner life were under close scrutiny and reconstruction, and had been for some time.
“WHERE THE EYES OF LAWMAKERS AND EVEN THE PENALTIES OF JUDGES CANNOT REACH”
Writing in 1769, the influential legal and political theorist Joseph von Sonnenfels advised absolute monarchs that they should keep a close watch on religious leaders and movements, as religion (unlike law) provided access to the deep recesses of the subject’s soul. “Religion,” he explained, “makes up for the deficiencies of legislation: where the eyes of lawmakers and even the penalties of judges cannot reach, religion is present in these transactions, capable of checking evil enterprises through intimidation.”51 Referring to the spaces that elude “the eyes of lawmakers,” Sonnenfels pointed to the importance of consent to the maintenance of power. Something besides external coercion was necessary to the maintenance of civil order and productivity, two of the primary goals of the regent’s governance. What was needed was access to the soul, for only through direct access could evil be checked at the source rather than prohibited once it had already emerged.
One place to look, then, for early links between public order and inner life is the cameralists, who contributed to the creation of secular obscenity law by linking the productivity and security of the state to the morality and virtue of the individual subject.52 Cameralists provided one coherent set of thought about law, statecraft, and modern policing in the German-speaking states during the second half of the eighteenth century. The justification for the state apparatus was being reconceived during this period, and with it the role of law. Legal reform was pursued by the Austrian monarch Maria Theresa and Prussia’s king Friedrich I, both of whom worked to reform legal codes in ways that would centralize authority and reflect this emerging body of thought about law and statecraft. Supported in their endeavors by absolutist rulers, cameralist thinkers articulated a vision of the relationship between the state and its subjects that reflected the impulse toward rationalism, codification, and heightened economic productivity. They promoted a broad and positive (that is, not simply prohibitive and punitive) role for the modern state by suggesting that one of the central goals of statecraft was the promotion of the commonweal (Gemeinwohl) and happiness (Glückseligkeit) among the state’s subjects. This conception of happiness bore little resemblance to Anglo-American property rights and individual freedoms being articulated at the same time. Happiness was defined in terms of collective prosperity and tranquility through state protection from public disorder. Mental equilibrium was believed to be an essential tool for maintaining order, and the power of the state was promoted by carefully maintaining this equilibrium.
Two works are particularly helpful in understanding the connection between statecraft and inner life articulated by cameralists: Johann von Justi’s Grundsätze der Policeywissenschaft, popular enough to merit three printings between 1753 and 1782, and Joseph von Sonnenfels’s Grundsätze der Staatspolicey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, published in six German editions between 1769 and 1820. Justi, the influential cameralist and economist, worked in the Austrian civil service under Maria Theresa and later found work in Prussia under Friedrich I. Justi’s work on statecraft helps us understand eighteenth-century thinking about the link between the moral vulnerability of subjects and the nature of state power. What he called the effective state was defined by positive goals of promotion rather than reaction to transgressions. The state should ensure that society was well-run and orderly, so that subjects could pursue productive lives. This was not a vision of individual freedoms and rights; instead these theorists stressed collective well-being and productivity that linked the behavior of each element of society to the broader happiness of all.
According to this theory, the best state was that which promoted the health and happiness of the commonweal by assuring the health, fertility, and productivity of its subjects. Justi’s vision of statecraft was broad in its implications: “One understands statecraft as that which is demanded for the smooth functioning of civic life [bürgerliches Lebens] and therefore for the maintenance of good discipline and order among the state’s subjects.” In Justi’s mind, the key to the development of a community was agriculture,