Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
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The modern reader, perhaps unaccustomed to drawing parallels between the emotional states generated by religious practice and the provocations of profane narratives, might be surprised by this movement from pietist “ravings” and Schwärmerei to the superstition and mental disequilibrium attributed to reading secular texts. Yet it should not be surprising that as the religious monopoly over the soul gave way to an emerging practice of secular reading, vocabulary used to describe the effects of one would provide a starting point to discuss the other. Religion had long provided a language for Seelenkunde, and this language continued to have currency, even as the emerging secular sciences of psychiatry, neurology, and phrenology (each finding their footing in German-speaking states in the early decades of the nineteenth century) invented new terms to describe inner life. Romantic authors were simultaneously in the process of charting the existence of the human psyche and populating it with emotions, passion, imagination, and enthusiasm. German scientists and authors were at the forefront of various explorations of inner life, and some of these ideas found expression in heated discussions of obscene and immoral texts.
WESSENBERG’S MEDITATION ON READING AND MORALITY
More than any other figure, Ignatz von Wessenberg straddled the distance that separated the street-level scuffles of printers and police and the intellectual world of Romantic authors and early psychologists, each preoccupied with inner life (though imagining that space in different ways). Wessenberg studied what we might today term “mentalities”; that is, he worked to understand the assumptions and styles of thought that framed and shaped political, social, and cultural upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In his 1826 On the Moral Influence of Novels he applied himself with equal rigor to both highbrow and lowbrow texts, from Goethe to Paul de Kock, the French author of racy popular novels, whose work was often evoked by the police when they wanted to indicate that they were speaking of the lowest end of popular reading habits. In 1833 Wessenberg published On Schwärmerei, in which he offered an extended discussion of this pregnant (and, by the 1830s, no longer exclusively religious) contemporary epithet.61 He was also well-versed in contemporary philosophy, combining his analysis of popular literature with the aesthetic insights of Herder.
Wessenberg’s thought also reflected the intersection between religious and secular conceptions of the self that characterized so much of early nineteenth-century commentary on books and morality. As a Catholic and cleric, he used the language of the “soul” (Seele) to describe inner life. If he believed in original sin, he did not stress this point. He chose instead to describe an interior world filled with innate capacities and composed like an instrument of multiple notes, which, when artfully played by stimuli from the external world, might result in a well-balanced chord. The opposite was unfortunately also true: play false notes, cultivate the wrong capacities, and emotional distortion would result. For Wessenberg, the popular novel offered a means of both examining and shaping inner life. As the secular genre most closely associated with imagination and the emotions, novels played the crucial role in shaping the inner space of the self. While he did not bemoan the rise of the novel, he did suggest that this shift to secular reading had serious consequences. It is for this reason that he insisted that the study of the novel and its moral effects is crucial work, not to be dismissed as frivolous. Anticipating the criticism of his peers, he wrote, “Is it somehow irrelevant, how we pass the time when we have a moment free, or which images we favor to amuse our fantasies?”62 Insisting on the importance of fantasy, Wessenberg laid out an analysis of novel reading, grounded in his own articulation of early psychological theory.63 He was, as we have seen, not alone in his attention to the moral effects of secular reading habits, nor was he alone in his fascination with the substance and tenor of the human mind and soul, a problem tackled by the emerging disciplines of psychiatry, anthropology, and phrenology.64 He was joined in his efforts by the police and censors, who also worked to understand and articulate the mental effects of new reading habits.
In a sense Wessenberg’s treatise was a book on aesthetics, in which he used the contemporary novel to examine the constitution of human subjects and community. In taking the genre seriously he probably challenged assumptions of his peers, particularly those who decried the frivolity and immorality of the novel. His position was to explore the moral potential of the genre. While he warned of the dangers of “overheated fantasies” and explained that novel reading (particularly in the Romantic vein) might lead to insanity and Schwärmerei, he also saw potential in a genre that might shape and refine inner life.
For Wessenberg, the novel was the important modern genre because it provided a means of examining the content of the soul. He assumed that novels provided relatively direct representations of inner states, and because of this they presented an external manifestation of mental topography: “The deepest secrets of human nature, the riddles of love and hate, the greatest depths of character—such as our lives and histories reveal—are most vividly developed in the novel.” The topography of the soul was deep and inaccessible: “That which lies buried in the depths of man, all his natural inclinations and propensities, everything that springs forth from him, can be seen contained in the vivid colors of the novel.” He also advanced a vision of inner life as complex and varied, full of possibilities and inclinations. “This, in fact, is the advantage of the novel’s art,” he wrote, “that it shows life not simply on its surface—as it would strike the sensualist—but instead opens up life in its inner depths.” A close study of the novel provided tools to investigate the moral impulses of the modern subject, which were found in the depths of the human soul, not (at least not first) in actions in the world. This, then, was a vision of morality focused on thoughts and emotions rather than actions. Wessenberg’s vision of morality stressed the content of the soul; morality was not (or at least not initially) a matter of acts performed in the world. Because the novel played upon the fantasies and emotions of the reader with ease, it could distort an otherwise “clear” soul: “Indeed, the real element of the novel is the business of the heart. What a blessing [the novel] is when it functions like water and air, imparting clarity and order. Yet how pernicious it is, when it runs wild in the same space, bewildering and clouding [the heart].” The goal of art was to open the soul to light and air, thus making it more transparent. Wessenberg’s vision of morality was marked by a Christian view of the soul, rooted in intentions and thoughts rather than actions.65 The Prussian police also worked with this Christian-inspired model of morality, albeit grafted onto a secular context. Booksellers, peddlers, and lending library proprietors who passed on obscene and immoral texts were believed to be guilty of the crime of “corrupting the mind and soul” of the youth or of “spoiling [them] for real work or real study.”66 The police evoked the consequences of moral corruption (loss of productivity), but the real damage took place inside the reader’s mind.
Wessenberg devoted over ninety pages to detailed discussions of individual novels. While he took on a few novels individually—Sade’s Justine merited separate treatment—he often grouped texts together into loose and idiosyncratic categories: English novels in the style of Fielding, horrifying mysterious novels, and French tales of court intrigue. He read and interpreted each novel through the lens of moral development and insisted that the value of a text was strictly a matter of its effects on the reader and had nothing to do with the intentions of the author. Damage took place in the interior space of the reader’s mind and was prompted by several factors, including problematic depictions of female virtue or marriage and descriptions that mystified or aestheticized a straightforward description of events and characters. Far worse, however, were the texts that provoked and distorted the feelings and fantasies of the reader, and in this regard, Wessenberg had to admit, it was German authors who produced the deepest and most “soul-distorting” novels of all.
While French novels like Diderot’s The Nun might provoke the reader’s “feelings of shame,” and English novels like Fielding’s Tom Jones could be sexually explicit, they were nonetheless realistic and bracing depictions of human nature. Frankness about sex was not the problem. Commenting on The Nun, a novel that includes explicit references to sex between women, Wessenberg wrote, “As a painting, it shows deep knowledge of the human heart, and though it is painted in very strong colors, it is also executed with sensitivity, and summons moving tones from hidden