CHAPTER 1

      Inventing Fragile Readers

       The Origins of Secular Obscenity Law, 1788–1830

      A police record has always been the object of a certain reserve, of which we have difficulty understanding that it amply transcends the guild of historians.

      —JACQUES LACAN, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”

      It has never been more necessary to shape and consolidate the inner form of character than now, when external circumstances and habits are threatened by the terrible power of universal upheaval.

      —WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT (1797), quoted in James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866

      In his 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of Novels, the reform-minded Catholic theologian and author Ignatz von Wessenberg expressed his concerns about pleasurable reading in terms of a carefully articulated topography of inner life. He found himself particularly absorbed with the vicissitudes of human fantasy: “It is something wonderful, amiable, and blissful to have clean, crystal-clear, untainted Fantasy. Through it, the mind views everything in the proper light, imparting moderation to fear and terror, and soothing one’s tendencies and desires.” Wessenberg was an influential administrator of the Catholic diocese in Constanz from 1802 to 1827 and a respected author. In his vision of a mind inhabited by the impulses of reason, intellect, imagination, and fantasy, he suggested that fantasy took pride of place, guaranteeing order if “clean and clear” but also capable of creating tremendous disorder. He explained, “Nothing is more wretched than perverse, disarranged, overgrown and polluted images of wickedness, nothing worse than Fantasy pregnant with baseness.” In the struggle to regulate the mind, two impulses—fantasy and imagination—were deemed capable of counteracting all other impulses, including reason. “Where Fantasy has ruled, Reason can no longer show its face. What else is madness but a breakdown of the Imagination?”¹

      In Wessenberg’s view, mental disequilibrium did not originate with an organic defect, a chemical imbalance, or the repression of human instincts. People’s minds were instead distorted by external stimulation that overwhelmed reason, leaving them vulnerable to disturbing visions and mental derangement: “How many lay sick in the hospital without the least inkling that they are exchanging phantoms for phantoms and dreams for other dreams?”² For Wessenberg, solitary reading of secular texts, in this case the novel, was an act that created, shaped, and revealed inner life. Reading created an autonomous world of invisible responses that manifested themselves in external behavior. Novel reading opened up new possibilities for the cultivation of the self, but it also represented a serious threat to inner equilibrium and, by extension, to external behavior.

      Wessenberg was not alone in his attempt to understand the nature of inner life. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century Romantic authors, early practitioners of psychology and psychiatry, theologians, and phrenologists were also busy exploring the uncharted spaces of the mind and soul. While they did not agree on the answers, they asked similar questions. What constituted the shape and substance of inner life? How was it cultivated or distorted? What were the causes (and potential cures) for mental distress and inner turmoil? How did the shape of inner life translate into actions and behavior in the world? Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Wessenberg and his contemporaries existed in a world in which human creativity, imagination, and excitability were linked to world-shattering events. He insisted that genres associated with fantasy and pleasure should not to be dismissed as trivial: “Even if [the novel] is seen only as the pasture of fantasy, or if reduced to a means of relaxation (allowing the reader to regain the energy released and depleted through work), or to entertainment, or to amusement—even from this perspective, [the genre] appears to be of decisive importance.”³

      Wessenberg suggested that the study of inner life was best pursued through a careful investigation of popular reading habits, in particular the novel—a genre, he explained, that simultaneously shaped and revealed the inner life of an emerging middle-class reader. While reading was not new to the middle classes (German Protestantism had long linked literacy and religious practice) and eighteenth-century middle-class culture stressed the importance of reading as a source of cultivation and edification, it nonetheless struck Wessenberg that something was changing. It seemed that more people were reading than ever before and that they were reading for pleasure rather than edification, alone rather than in groups, and extensively rather than intensively. Women, he believed, were particularly voracious consumers of these new forms of entertainment. “How many small locales exist,” he asked, “in which a new novel does not appear every month—indeed every week—to meet the needs of the female inhabitant of a house, even among the lower classes?” Once they had the novels in their hands, he speculated, they looked for solitude—a particularly dangerous state. Women’s mental topography also made them particularly vulnerable to the magic of these new commodities: “In the case of the female sex, there exists in the inner world [Seele] a stronger tendency toward tender, enthusiastic [schwärmerisch] abandon.”⁴ Schwärmerei, a term that implies flights of enthusiasm, fanaticism, or a falling away from reason, was used liberally in the early nineteenth century as a form of cultural derision. The concept was used in a variety of contexts: in the eighteenth century the term described religious enthusiasm (its original usage); later it was used to describe nonreligious states of heightened emotionalism and “swooning.” In the wake of the French Revolution the term was appropriated to describe political enthusiasm and swooning, or “politische Schwärmerei.” In the age of German Romanticism and the “Storm and Stress” literary movements we often associate with men, Wessenberg thought that the reading habits of semi-educated women and the cult of sensibility attributed to Romantic men were of a piece.⁵ Reading the wrong books, and thus stirring up fantasy and imagination, created inner disorder; once disordered, the mind could rarely be put right. Wessenberg described a world filled with the dangers of schwärmerisch enthusiasm for revolutionary politics, religious mysticism, Romantic fiction, and emotional abandon. At the same time, novel reading opened up possibilities. Because inner life was marked by reading, the novel could play a positive role in the shaping of inner life, rendering men and women empathetic, imaginative, and mutually comprehensible. The novel was also an instrument for the study of inner life; it provided an external record of invisible fantasies and thus allowed people to study an otherwise invisible world of thoughts and impulses.

      Wessenberg’s investigation into the mental effects of novel reading provides a starting point for the topic that concerns us in this chapter: the meaning of obscenity and related terms in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This vision of a vulnerable and mutable inner life introduces us to German culture at the moment that it gave birth to a body of laws, police ordinances, and material practices that, taken together, provided an early understanding of obscenity. Like Wessenberg, censors and police understood “obscene and immoral publications” as texts that were capable of transforming readers’ minds. They imagined minds (and readers) that were fragile, easily marked, and linked to actions in the world. It was these assumptions rather than a simple policy of repression that animated the practice of censoring texts on grounds that they were immoral