Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls. Sarah L. Leonard
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presented “a masterful depiction of the raw side of human nature.” Though Wessenberg worried that it was dangerous to “show humans how closely they border on the animal world,” he defended Fielding’s novel on grounds that it was “the apotheosis of natural feelings, which constantly tend toward goodness and mildness, rather than toward the arrogance and pedantry of virtue.”67 Wessenberg did not take issue with depictions of sexual rawness (which he believed might in fact be a good thing, restoring health, vigor, and contact with the reality of human feelings). And though it may seem odd to find an early nineteenth-century Catholic cleric arguing for the benefits of frank literary depictions of sex, his position becomes clearer when we understand what really concerned him, namely, the move away from reason and objectivity toward the subjectivity and exploration of human emotions that accompanied Romanticism and the cult of sensibility. Romantic literature, rooted in a deep and unflinching exploration of the subjective states of human consciousness, was in fact what threatened the mental equilibrium of the German reader. Though the two movements were distinct, Wessenberg nonetheless grouped together Romanticism and pietist Schwärmerei because both explored interiority and embraced emotion and fantasy. It was the heightened emotional states associated with Romanticism and pietist “enthusiasm,” not the rollicking good times of Tom Jones nor the lascivious French denizens of the cloister in The Nun, that threatened to distort and disorder the soul. Indeed he preferred the bracing realism of “natural” and “real” physical desire to the frustrated love of Romantic swooning.
Accordingly Wessenberg saved his sharpest moral criticism for novels focused on frustrated and unconsummated passion outside of marriage. The popularity of Johanna Schopenhauer’s 1824 novel, Gabriele, was one example of literature in this style. The protagonist of the story enters into a loveless marriage to please her father, while remaining deeply in love with another man. This popular plot of frustrated love stuck Wessenberg as morally distorting. Responding to Gabriele, he expressed concerns about the depiction of love:
The most alluring, enticing deceptions of this relationship, based in the ignorance and misrecognition of nature, only serve to increase the dreadful unhappiness produced by the roguish Eros or love that exists outside the moral constraints that govern sexual urges. With forbidden love between two persons of the opposite sex, there is certainly also spiritual love [Seelenliebe]. Yet when have a girl or a young woman, an ardent youth or man sought only the soul of his beloved? The lessons of a chaste, ideal love … as consolation and substitution for all the suffering caused by an unhappy marriage … are among the most dangerous.68
Here we see Wessenberg’s attention to the proper cultivation of love, which might be achieved with the proper choice of novels. “Roguish Eros” requires cultivation and constraints, but the real problems are the illusions and false expectations that lead to a misrecognition of the realities of sexual love. Cultivating a taste for purely spiritual love, such novels distort reality, produce false expectations, and lead to “dreadful unhappiness.” Wessenberg advanced a surprising argument: the realities of sexual love, even in their rawness, are less immoral than strict virtue that leads to illusions and despair when faced with reality. From an unexpected corner we get an argument for de-repression on grounds that realism, even about sexual love, is preferable to virtuous illusions.
Wessenberg was especially critical of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel focused squarely on the unruly emotions (unrequited love, empathy, sorrow) of the protagonist. In Werther, he wrote, “love is elevated to an enraptured madness,” and the hopelessness of this love led to desperation and suicide. In the end Werther created inner disorder; the damage did not take place in the world of actions but in the space of souls: “What does Werther leave in the heart of the reader, except wretched melancholy? It only introduces discordant tones; it never resolves them.” The best thing about the book, Wessenberg concluded, was that it provided a “true mirror of the illnesses of the imagination that held sway in that era.”69
Good novels, by contrast, would act as “medicine for the soul” (Seelische Arznei). They would bolster the impulses of reason and intellect, providing traction against the dangerous impulses of imagination and fantasy. Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, for example, provided a warning about methods of seduction and painted a portrait of feminine virtue. Wessenberg also applauded Germaine de Stael’s novel Johanna, as “on the whole, it springs forth with vitality and clarity that all worthy happiness [Glückseligkeit] is based on inner unity and purity of heart.”70
Wessenberg’s vision of morality was rooted not in the performance of Sitten, or the external forms of manners and customs. Instead morality was found inside the often hidden folds of the human heart, which (depending on shape and substance) might result in happiness or despair. It mattered little if the individual had mastered the external forms of civilized behavior; more important, from Wessenberg’s perspective, was the state of the soul. By defining morality in these terms, he mirrored a shift taking place in early nineteenth-century German thought, expressed in the literature of German Romanticism and in the emerging human and medical sciences.
A similar shift emerged (somewhat awkwardly) in the work of police and censors who appointed themselves guardians of the vulnerable souls of inexperienced readers. In the process they produced a task for themselves that was practically impossible: regulating invisible spaces and mental effects rather than concrete actions. The opportunities for resistance were, of course, limitless. Yet this was a moral model that made sense within a specifically German cultural context. Inner life had been invested with meaning through forms of pietist practice (or, as some would have it, Schwärmerisch enthusiasm), philosophical engagement with the nature of inner life by philosophers like Kant and Herder in the late eighteenth century, a tradition of Romantic literature that constituted and explored emotional states, and a tradition of legal reform the defined Gluckseligkeit as one of its explicit goals. For a few decades in the early nineteenth century, it was neither the sexual content of the text nor the transgression of public mores that defined a text as obszön but the danger it posed to open, gullible, excitable hearts and minds.
SUMMARY: INNER LIFE AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHORITY
For Wessenberg, disorders of interior states were not separate from the politics of authority. He linked two disparate developments, pietist Schwärmerei and the effects of the French Revolution, by arguing that in both cases people were swept up in waves of emotion that caused them to detach from reason and external authority. In the case of pietism belief in direct revelation of the word of God through the cultivation of an “inner church” allowed the individual to bypass the authority of religious leaders. The Schwärmer was characterized by the desire to penetrate the secrets of the supernatural world, an attempt to distinguish oneself from the common crowd, disdain for others coupled with an overvaluation of fellow believers, and a failure to recognize authority outside oneself: “The Schwärmer spurns all other leadership as false, preferring his imagination; he places the sanctity and propriety he attributes to himself above all other sources of authority.”71 Thus the cultivation of interiority and the painstaking preparation of the inner church led the believer to separate from the outer world and to retreat into the autonomous space of the mind. This retreat from external authority, coupled with a rejection of reason, left the individual without a moral compass and without the necessary traction to resist the convincing (and often nefarious) arguments of others. Pointing to the etymology of the word Schwärmen, “to swarm” like bees, Wessenberg suggested that the individual separated form external authority and reason could be easily manipulated.
He identified a similar movement away from reason and toward emotionalism in the period following the French Revolution: “After the feverish anger of the Revolution had completed its cycle and man had regained his senses, a perception arose that reason had exercised a destructive influence on religion, and this in turn produced suspicion concerning reason.” Reason was rejected and “feeling” was embraced, giving way to “the emergence of many groups of mystical Pietists who—no matter how divergent in the details of religious practice—were united in their suspicion of reason.”72 To “fall away from reason” was also to fall away from a reliable source of authority,