Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America 9780812206180

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface. Reading and the Search for Oneness
Introduction. The Fantasy of Communion
Chapter 1. Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading
Chapter 2. Books and the Dead
Chapter 3. Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre
Chapter 4. Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative
Chapter 5. “The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner
Epilogue. No End in Sight
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Bodies and Books

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Bodies and Books

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Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America

Gillian Silverman

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y L VA N I A P R E S S

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Silverman, Gillian D., 1967– Bodies and books : reading and the fantasy of communion in nineteenth-century America / Gillian Silverman. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. American literature—19th Century—History and criticism. 2. Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. 3. Interpersonal relations in literature. 4. Books and reading—Psychological aspects. 5. Books and reading— United States—History—19th century. 6. Authors and readers—United States—History—19th century I. Title. PS217.I52S55 2012 810.9'353—dc23 2011046743

To my mother, Doris K. Silverman, and in loving memory of my father, Lloyd Howard Silverman

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Contents

h Preface

Reading and the Search for Oneness ix Introduction

The Fantasy of Communion 1 Chapter 1

Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading 22 Chapter 2

Books and the Dead 51 Chapter 3

Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the AuthorReader Bond in Melville’s Pierre 83 Chapter 4

Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative 104

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Contents Chapter 5

“The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner 124 Epilogue

No End in Sight 148 Notes 157 Bibliography 197 Index 219 Acknowledgments 225

Preface

h Reading and the Search for Oneness This is no book, Who touches this, touches a man, (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860)

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n Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman articulated a theory of reading that would be satirically celebrated in an advertisement for the gay-positive magazine, The Advocate, a little over a hundred years later. According to this vision, reading is a physical experience—involving, above all, the sensory perception of touch—that leads to a deep spiritual and erotic connection, either between author and reader (as in Whitman’s example) or between readers of the same text (as in the cheeky Advocate ad shown in Figure 1). This study investigates this fantasy of communion as it developed and played out in nineteenth-century American literature and letters. I suggest that reading in this period could be a way of envisioning bodily intimacy with desired subjects. It facilitated unfamiliar forms of social intercourse, allowing readers to imagine physical contact and merger with populations who were absent or otherwise inaccessible. The profound communion that I place at the center of nineteenth-century reading practices is a far cry from the diffuse, anonymous “communities” that critics often associate with reading—Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities,” Michael Warner’s abstract reading “public,” and so forth.1 As the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century subjects attest, reading was most important not because it created broad affili-

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Figure 1. Advocate subscription advertisement, 1973. This image can be found in Scott Herring, “Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the PostStonewall Emergence of Anti-Urbanism,” American Quarterly 59, 2 ( June 2007): 341–72. Courtesy of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

ations along national or demographic lines, but because it promoted a heightened connection to a specific other. Readers described individual authors and their fellow readers in intimate and exclusive terms; they likened the experience of engaging a common text to Holy Communion, involving both shared consciousness and bodily merger. This fantasy of consubstantiality2 challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of

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corporeal integrity—the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision the reader not as a liberal subject— pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation—but rather as a being in self-diffusing touch with objects in her psychic and phenomenal world.

h Reading is more than a private traffic with printed matter. It is an engagement achieved through the imagination, across a distance; a tightly knit affair between a speaker and a listener; a survivor’s gesture of reconnaissance and affection toward the past. Reading is mourning—a community forming around a likeness, around a death or a fall. —Wayne Koestenbaum3

In some important ways, this project began thirty years ago, in 1982. At that time, my father, a psychologist, published a book titled The Search for Oneness. He and his cowriters, Frank Lachmann and Robert Milich, argued that unconscious “symbiotic-like” wishes and fantasies—that is, unconscious fantasies that are directed toward a state of oneness with another person—can have adaptive potential. Because they tap into early experiences of mother-infant intimacy, when the infant felt protected and emotionally bolstered by the mother’s supportive presence, oneness fantasies in later life can ameliorate anxieties and even promote enhanced performance. Of course, such fantasies can also trigger maladaptive behavior particularly when they invoke an overwhelming or engulfing (rather than a gratifying) maternal presence. But for the most part, and at least in populations with strong ego boundaries, unconscious fantasies of oneness tend to alleviate pathologies and create healthier psychic states. To demonstrate these claims, my father’s team conducted a series of empirical experiments designed to test the effectiveness of a subliminally administered “oneness stimulus.” In these studies, two groups of schizophrenics were asked to look into a tachistoscope where they viewed a message lasting four milliseconds. The message appeared as a flash of light and could therefore register only on an unconscious level, if at all. The control group received a placebo stimulus of relatively neutral import: “People are Walking.” The experimental group received a stimulus designed to activate symbiotic wishes: “Mommy and I are One.” In support of their hypothesis, the research team found that the group exposed to the oneness stimulus showed considerable increases in adaptive behavior.

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Later studies indicated that subliminal stimulation of oneness fantasies could also have a positive effect on more general populations, contributing to weight loss, reduced anxiety, diminution of phobias, decreased addictions (especially to alcohol and cigarettes), enhanced proficiency in reading and test-taking, and general happiness and well-being. Four years after the publication of The Search for Oneness, in 1986, my father died unexpectedly in a drowning accident that left my family crushed and bereft. He was fifty-six years old, still in the early stages of what he imagined as a long career as a researcher and clinician. I was nineteen when my father died, a sophomore in college and only beginning a course in reading that would change my way of seeing the world and ultimately send me to graduate school for a degree in literature. His death had the effect of plunging me all the more soundly into my studies, and as I read, a curious ritual ensued. I imagined my father as fellow reader, sharing my outrage over a preposterous theoretical claim or bonding with me in response to a mutually appreciated authorial sensibility. Likewise, he became my idealized audience when I wrote, his projected responses conditioning my authorial decisions. In other words, textuality—the imagined dynamics around reading and writing—was the primary vehicle through which I restored my father’s presence. The ease with which I took up these practices no doubt resulted from the countless hours my father and I had spent reading together, time during which I acquired a refined sense of his readerly inclinations and dislikes. Even before this, I knew my father best as a man of language, a lover of puns, verbal pranks, and neologisms. My earliest memories are of competitive nightly games of hangman, and of a tune my father used to sing that we called “The Alphabet Love Song” (“A you’re Adorable, B you’re so Beautiful, C you’re a Cutie full of Charm . . .”). But while playful, my father’s interest in language always had a psychological dimension, stemming as it did from Freud’s recognition that wordplay was crucial to the unconscious mind. I was around twelve years old when he suggested to me that an anxious dream about a bear might be related to shameful feelings about my changing body, particularly in its naked—or bare—form. Our relationship, then, was deeply mediated by both narrative and psychoanalysis. Perhaps for this reason, reading in the wake of his death became a means of imaginatively forging contact with my father, a practice that did much to counteract what were otherwise solitary episodes with books. At the time, I was only dimly aware that I was partaking in a strange ritual of communion.

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Only in retrospect (and with the help of reading in psychoanalysis) was it clear that I was using books as a way of uniting with my father, making reading into a kind of grief work. The irony, of course, was that such a practice had its origins in my father’s own academic interests. That is, through reading I was participating in a variant of the oneness fantasy that he understood as so essential to psychic life. Years and years later, my experience of communion through books became the basis for this study. In it, I argue that reading and authorship can be acts of intimacy, ways of establishing a therapeutic experience of merger or union with an inaccessible other. Although my focus in this book is on the nineteenth century, the culmination of my own narrative came this year, when, for the first time, I read my father’s book, The Search for Oneness, in full. This experience did much to confirm many of my observations about nineteenth-century readers—their sense that reading could create shared consciousness, that books, despite their inanimate status, could seem uncannily alive or “breathing,” even their fantasy that in touching the material book, they were somehow making physical contact with a beloved author or fellow reader. To be sure, in reading my father’s book, there were also moments of painful disidentification, of critique and even irritation (especially from a twenty-firstcentury feminist perspective). These reactions complicated, while never fully undermining, the experience of reader-author communion, which was also, in this case, an instance of daughter-father oneness. That I read my father’s book while completing my own only enhanced these identificatory relays, allowing me to imagine my father’s rejoinders to my writing alongside my own readerly responses to his. These fantasies of reciprocal reader relations transformed my understanding of academic work and made the completion of this study an act of intimacy as much as scholarship. This book, then, is dedicated to the memory of my father and to my mother (whose equally profound influence deserves a preface of its own), with love and gratitude.

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Introduction

h The Fantasy of Communion S

ometime in the 1840s, Massachusetts resident Sarah E. Edgarton paid a visit to her intimate childhood friend Luella J. B. Case and left behind a book of poetry by William Wordsworth. This Wordsworth volume took on special significance for Case, who suffered from an acute sense of loneliness following the departure of her friend. In a letter to Edgarton written shortly after the visit, Case elaborates: in the evening feeling very lonesome, and also being visited by some mournful reminiscences of our old home, and “lang syne,” I went involuntarily to the volume of Wordsworth, hoping to find something like companionship in passages marked with your pencil . . . [In] impatiently turning it over to find some traces of yourself, I accidentally met with that one as delicate, and affectionate, in its revealings as the heart that dictated it. I cannot thank you, for words seem to me inadequate to express the sense I feel of your . . . affection. . . . I shall most certainly read, and love it, for the sake of the donor and as certainly fancy there is something of a communion between us when reading your favorite passages.1

In these remarkable lines, Wordsworth’s poetry becomes the medium through which two readers, separated by distance, unite. While Case first picks up her friend’s book in quest of “companionship,” what she ultimately achieves is “communion”—a deep sense of psychic bonding with Edgarton brought on by the experience of reading and appreciating a common text. Hers is a desire not

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for abstract or intellectual fellowship, but rather for sentient experiential contact, signaled in part by Case’s confession that she turned to the Wordsworth volume, impatiently looking for “some traces of yourself.” Edgarton’s pencil markings are the metonymic extensions of her writing hand, and Case suggests that this trace of materiality is as significant as the mutually appreciated language of Wordsworth in producing a felt connection between the two women. Indeed, there is some ambiguity in Case’s description of finally hitting on “that one as delicate and affectionate in its revealings as the heart that dictated it.” Does she mean by “that one” Edgarton’s markings or Wordsworth’s poem? One presumes the latter, but Case’s italicization of these words links them to the “yourself” (i.e., Edgarton) in the previous sentence. The ambiguity here is precisely the point. The Wordsworth poem has become so inseparable from Edgarton’s felt presence that reading it gives way to Case’s intimate apperception of her friend (“the sense I feel of your . . . affection”). This study argues that the ability of reading to produce experiences of mental and bodily contact was typical of nineteenth-century American life. Reading, and particularly book reading, could precipitate fantasies of communion—between reader and author, between reader and character, and (as in Case’s example above) between like-minded readers. In using the word “communion” I mean to emphasize the intimate and exclusive nature of the imagined bond that reading engendered. In contrast to the more abstracted term “community” (about which, more later), “communion” suggests psychic unity, rootedness, confidentiality, and kinship.2 It is a word that implies not simply association but mutuality and oneness. This connection was often felt on or with the body, and the word “communion” also conveys the physical aspect of the imagined bond—the sense of indwelling or bodily incorporation that reading could create. As nineteenth-century philosopher Noah Porter put it, “Every book which [attentive] persons read enters into the structure of their being—it is taken up and assimilated into the very substance of their living selves.”3 While Porter described the book itself as the object of bodily assimilation here, more often readers characterized this consubstantiality in terms of physical incorporation of an author, as is apparent in Herman Melville’s response to reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection Mosses from an Old Manse: “already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”4 Melville’s repeated references to the “soul” are articulated alongside more corporeal

The Fantasy of Communion

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images of amplification and discharge (“dropped,” “expands,” “deepens,” “shoots”), making communion in reading at once a spiritual and carnal project. As Melville’s comments suggest, the sense of intimate bodily contact brought on by reading could have a distinct erotic component.5 This could manifest itself not only in relation to the figure of the author, but in the mutual experience of two readers. Consider, for example, Margaret Fuller’s description of reading in her “Autobiographical Romance” published in 1840. Fuller, in the throes of an infatuation with a young woman from Liverpool, describes a brief separation she was forced to endure when her beloved momentarily left her to greet some visitors: “She went into another room to receive them and I took up her book. It was Guy Mannering, then lately published, and the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen. I opened where her mark lay, and read merely with the feeling of continuing our mutual existence by passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been.”6 As with Case, for Fuller the activity of reading a shared text gives way to a powerful sense of merged subjectivity or what she calls “mutual existence.” The erotic implications of this are highlighted through Fuller’s language of virginal encounter (“It was . . . the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen”), her innuendos of invasiveness and compromised privacy (“I opened where her mark lay”), and, most significantly, her description of reading as a comingling of body parts (“passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been”). Indeed, the intensity of this description of reading is notable in part because it seems to exceed Fuller’s descriptions of her actual encounters with her beloved, descriptions that appear somewhat attenuated and sentimentalized.7 In Fuller’s account, then, reading creates an alternative space to that of lived social relations, one in which fantasies of bodily contact with love objects can be realized more fully. These objects might include same-sex individuals (as with Fuller and Melville above), but also the racially other, the geographically distant, and even the dead. No doubt there is a Romantic sensibility to these descriptions. The intimate communion that nineteenth-century readers report resembles the spiritual affinity between subjects articulated by Romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic; indeed, in this context it is significant that the texts I have cited as evoking these reactions in readers (Wordsworth’s poetry, Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel Guy Mannering) are themselves classic examples of the genre. And yet, I hesitate to conflate the merger articulated in the instances above with the Romantic sublime, because the latter, especially in its American incarnations, tends to take on an abstract universalism distinct from the imagined specificity

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of contact that I am identifying with the work of reading. In Emerson’s famous “transparent eye-ball” section of the essay “Nature,” he writes, “I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”8 While this is clearly a variant of the oneness fantasy I invoked earlier, its emphasis is so all-inclusive that it tends to ignore and even denigrate the specificity of the other; by contrast, in the strain of reading I am highlighting it is precisely the exclusivity of the bond (in Emerson’s language, “the name of the nearest friend”) that is valued. When Fuller picks up Guy Mannering, she uses the historical romance as a way of reinstating her singular connection with her beloved, turning absence into presence. In this way, reading had a psychologically adaptive function. Through her engagement with the book, a reader like Fuller was able to remain intimately connected with another reader who was otherwise elusive (either through distance, death, or social prohibition). The book’s portability aided this process, since it meant that the reader could quite literally carry with her the ideational and material traces of a beloved fellow reader. In psychoanalytic terms, then, reading was a kind of grief work, a way of internalizing the absent loved one. When a relationship is shattered due to death or abandonment, writes Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the libido of the bereaved is not simply removed from the object and redirected. Rather, the ego forms an “identification” with the abandoned object, and aspects of the other get incorporated into the self. “Thus,” in Freud’s famous formulation, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”9 Translated into the terms of this study, books could be a way of preserving the inaccessible love object. Through reading mutually valued language and physically engaging the same material text (if not the actual copy belonging to the beloved, then a simulacrum thereof ), the reader incorporated into herself aspects of the other, thereby keeping that other psychically present.10 This grief work could be directed not only at fellow readers but at a book’s author and characters as well. After all, reading entails intimacies and renunciations that are often out of the reader’s control. Characters may die or be left undeveloped, and a book’s ending can entail a painful separation. But by returning to the book at will (rereading passages, coddling the material object, and so forth), a reader could attenuate and manage the loss, by imaginatively taking the author or protagonist into herself.11 This incorporation of the other is significant not least for the ways it trans-

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forms the reader. For Freud, identification is accompanied by an altering of the ego. The self in taking in alterity always partially disavows and reorients its own subjectivity.12 Self-psychologist Heinz Kohut uses the phrase “transmuting internalization” in order to get at the profound refashioning of the self that identification entails.13 For many post-Freudians, such a process troubles the very idea of identity. As Diana Fuss has written, “Identification is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable.”14 It is in this strange play of coherence and diffusion that we must likewise locate the reader. Reading’s uncanny effect, in other words, is that it produces the experience of wholeness even as it insists on the self ’s own partial divestiture.15 For this reason, reading is never simply an act of appropriation, never simply an incorporation that leaves the reader untouched. Indeed, the real danger that most nineteenth-century readers and cultural authorities perceived was not that the reader would be unaffected by the book, but that the book might act too forcefully on the reader, subordinating her rational faculties and transforming her into a consenting replica of the authorial mind. And yet, even as nineteenth-century readers acknowledged this troubling loss of autonomy, they also reveled in the feelings of oneness with the author that accompanied the fantasy. It would be easy to denigrate this vision of likeness as less “democratic” and more coercive than an acceptance of difference, and to argue that we should therefore be wary of the desire for similitude that could attend the practice of reading.16 But as Marianne Noble reminds us in her study of the productive uses of masochism, “To repudiate a fantasy because it differs from an ideal desire is to refuse full aliveness”; it is a rejection of “human complexity and human weirdness.”17 It also risks reinforcing the value modernist aesthetics places on experiences of defamiliarization—encounters with the alien art object—at the expense of a more therapeutic understanding of art.18 In other words, condemning symbiotic wishes as merely experiments in narcissism fails to recognize the rich role they could play in a subject’s psychic life, both in assuaging feelings of isolation and in forging new vistas of relationality. Of course, the fantasies of communion that I have begun to describe were not exclusive to nineteenth-century America. On the contrary, as my psychoanalytic orientation (as well as the contemporary examples in my preface and epilogue) suggests, the ability of books to create imagined experiences of contact for the isolated individual is a transhistorical feature of the technology.

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Introduction

But what distinguishes the nineteenth century within the larger history of the book is the prominence of this fantasy, as measured by its incorporation into the letters and literature of the time. These documents are shot through with the language of loss and the dream of reconnection through books. Thus while the psychic relations I am identifying transcend their specific context, it is still possible to speak of the nineteenth century as a period in which these dynamics took on particular historical force.19 No doubt this phenomenon was motivated in part by the immense dislocation of the period. The economic vicissitudes and “great uprooting” of families and communities that accompanied what Charles Sellers has designated “the market revolution” created a vast middle class characterized by fragmentation and social stratification.20 Pressed by the relentless forces of urban and industrial growth, inundated by norms of discipline and self-repression, and increasingly isolated in the nuclear household, the American bourgeoisie partially consoled themselves by turning to the acceptable leisure activity of reading, where they experienced dimensions of wholeness and attachment in psychic form. In this context, the book emerged as at once a symptom of, and a correction to, the anxieties associated with modernity: in its mass production and distribution, the book contributed to the dizzying sense of proliferation and excess wrought by industrial change; yet, related to in a singular and profound way, the book could also assuage precisely these feelings of unanchored insecurity. The psychic stability created through reading should not be understood as a weak substitute for real community, as some historians of the book have claimed.21 On the contrary, given the tremendous restrictions placed on faceto-face interactions in the nineteenth-century public sphere—where forms of behavior from mingling with strangers to dining with friends were extensively dictated22—we might understand reading as providing an alternative route to intimacy. It could be a way of imaginatively skirting regimented or compulsory interactions while constituting new and potentially more vital relations, especially across proscribed social fields. It could enable unfamiliar or illicit forms of social intercourse, avenues for imagined contact with individuals who were otherwise unreachable. In so doing, reading offered a different mode of being in the world, one less constrained by norms of privacy, propriety, and individuation.23 The paradox of the book, then, is that it was through its private engagement (often in the insular setting of the bourgeois home) that readers experienced profound forms of self-diffusion, imagining themselves as interwoven or conjoined with distant others. Historically tied to the emergence of the privatized

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liberal subject, the book nonetheless offered its nineteenth-century readers an alternative model of identity—a sense of wholeness based not in autonomy and terminal existence but in accretion, correspondence, and extensivity.24

h I have been claiming that books in the nineteenth century were significant for the way they aided the psychic life of readers, positioning them in intimate even bodily relation to imagined others and thereby helping to assuage an isolated or fragmented sense of self. But this mentalist or symbolic aspect of reading is only part of the story. As historians of the book have established, reading is also a material practice, in which books are shared, read aloud, torn, scribbled on, cradled in the lap, and so forth. Here I am referencing the book’s curious dual status: “On the one hand, the story I am reading does not exist except in my head; on the other, the book is an external stimulus.”25 As an external stimulus, the book interfaces physically with the reader, affecting the body with its weight, texture, size, and smell. Perhaps, then, the sense of cohabitation produced by reading is not simply an imagined phenomenon; it is also produced by the sensual reality of the book itself. Readers have a voluptuous relation to books, and in handling these texts, they initiate the fantasy of touching and being touched by those people affiliated with a book’s narrative world, particularly the author or a fellow reader. Luella J. B. Case (with whom I opened this introduction) demonstrates this in her account of “turning . . . over” the pages of Edgarton’s Wordsworth volume in the hopes of finding “some traces of yourself.” In this context, recall, too, Whitman’s lines, quoted in the preface: “This is no book / Who touches this, touches a man . . . / It is I you hold, and who holds you / I spring from the pages into your arms.” For Whitman the tactile dimension of the book (experienced both through his own touch and the proleptically fantasized touch of his reader) creates the conditions through which self and other establish a mutual “hold” on one another. The material book is thus essential for the erotic communion between author and reader, even as it creates a bond between the two that is imagined as direct and unmediated (“This is no book”).26 This emphasis on the sensual aspect of reading is at odds with scholarship that insists on the book’s denuded materiality. Elaine Scarry, for example, claims that, unlike other aesthetic forms like painting, music or sculpture, Verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features . . . consist of monotonous small black

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Introduction marks on a white page. It has no acoustical features. Its tactile features are limited to the weight of its pages, their smooth surfaces, and their exquisitely thin edges. The attributes it has that are directly apprehensible by perception are, then, meager in number. More important, these attributes are utterly irrelevant, sometimes even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel seeks to produce.27

Such an account denies the interactive dimensions of the book, the way it can engage a range of bodily modalities, particularly the tactile and proprioceptive, aspects stressed by book historians.28 Nineteenth-century writer Anna Warner, for example, describes her sister Susan lying in bed on Christmas Eve with a book-filled stocking: “she would fumble and feel and guess; spinning out the delightful mystery. What could these sharp corners be? . . . Searching further as the daylight came on; trying to read titles, imagining colours. Lying back then again in bed to muse and wonder.”29 Surely this description speaks to sensory satisfactions in book possession that exceed that of pure cognition and that may not, for all we know, be “antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel seeks to produce.” Indeed, Warner’s language attests to the impossibility of separating ideation from the body’s physical engagement and responses. Susan interacts with her books across a number of nondiscrete sensory and interpretive planes—feeling sharp corners, reading titles, lying back, imagining colors. Reading for her is a process of “spinning out the delightful mystery”— a mystery that includes the book’s content but also its unique materiality and unpredictable synesthetic effects. Warner’s description allows us to recognize that reading is never merely a cognitive experience, or, stated in more phenomenological terms, understanding is always gleaned from concrete existence, a lived response to objects in the world. Even before a reader makes sense of a book, she engages in what Heidegger calls “pre-understanding,” an intuitive apprehension made possible by one’s existence in time and space. By this reasoning, knowledge is not an act of isolated ideation but rather a dimension of being-in-the-world (Dasein), a situated response to interconnected objects and our own place among them.30 Knowledge is thus always subjective, insofar as it arises out of a particular lived experience: understanding is always someone’s understanding. At the same time, consciousness is never abstracted or ideal, but rather organized around and inspired by specific objects; or as Husserl might put it, consciousness is

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always consciousness of something.31 (Hence the mandate of phenomenology to focus on concrete phenomena, to return to “things in themselves.”) This dual emphasis on situated subjectivity and material objects (separable on the plane of analysis but always unified experientially) inspired later phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to focus on the body as the site of perception: “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’”32 Consciousness here is not reducible to Cartesian “cogito”; rather, it is a lived phenomenon of the body-subject, a consequence of one’s incarnate subjectivity and interactions with the life-world (Lebenswelt). These claims concerning the embodied nature of consciousness have been developed further by cognitive scientists and linguists, who have demonstrated the links between thinking and the neural-skeletal system. The research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example, has revealed that “reason is not a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.” The authors give the example of “neural modeling,” which “can show in detail one aspect of what it means for the mind to be embodied: how particular configurations of neurons, operating according to principles of neural computation, compute what we experience as rational inferences.”33 Neuroscientists have reinforced these claims by demonstrating that the act of perceptual cognition serves to stimulate the frontal cortex—the part of the brain associated with planning and coordinating motor behaviors. For example, simply watching another person pick up a pen activates those regions of the brain associated with holding and grasping. Cognition, then, “involves not just the rule-based manipulation of abstract symbols, but also the reenactment of perceptual and motor experiences.”34 Even more relevant for my study have been data suggesting that reading produces similar changes in the brain. In multiple experiments, researchers have found that reading phrases describing object-directed actions (like kicking a ball) stimulates regions of the frontal cortex much in the same way accomplished by both observation and direct experience.35 In other words, reading evokes specific perceptual and motor responses that prepare the subject for interacting with concepts as if they were real objects in the world. This is the case when individuals are exposed to longer narratives, too. In a 2009 study, for example, a team of researchers measured brain activity in subjects reading a

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Introduction

1,500–word short story. They found that changes in a character’s spatial location (e.g., moving from one room to another) resulted in the stimulation of that part of the reader’s brain responsible for navigating spatial environments; changes in a character’s interactions with an object (e.g., picking up a candy) were associated with activation in precentral and parietal areas of the reader’s brain associated with grasping and hand movements.36 The implications of these experiments in embodied language comprehension are rich, for they suggest, first, that the reader experiences the actions of the text on a physiological level; and, second, that reading precipitates an emulated response such that author and reader are doubles of one another—converging through the shared identification each has with the protagonist. Communion in reading, then, is not just imagined, but a neurological reality. Studies exposing both the sensual aspects of the book and the neurophysical qualities of cognition are necessary correctives to “a long tradition that imagines reading as a disembodied, intellectual, and frequently spiritual experience.”37 They encourage us to think in nondualistic terms about mind and body, and perhaps even about body and book. Here the work of Merleau-Ponty is especially relevant. In his last unfinished manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty attempted to free his research from any vestige of Cartesian dualism by positing that body and world are necessarily interwoven and coextensive.38 His example of the “double sensation” (something initially explored in Phenomenology of Perception) demonstrates this idea. By “double sensation” Merleau-Ponty means the complex experience produced when one part of our body touches another. When the right hand touches the left, for example, it has the “double sensation” of being both the subject and the object of touch: “When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of touching and being touched.”39 Such a phenomenon demonstrates the reversibility of active and passive roles, the ability of subjects to slip into objects and vice versa. As Elizabeth Grosz glosses it, “the double sensation makes it clear . . . that the subject is implicated in its objects and its objects are at least partially constitutive of the subject.”40 This has important ramifications for reading, where identification with an author, character, or fellow reader may already inspire a sense of shared consciousness: To touch a book is also to be touched by that book, to feel the book touching back, and this sensation, in blurring the distinction between subject and object, necessarily destabilizes the boundaries of the discrete self.

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Reading books, then, insofar as it involves a tactile dimension, can give rise to a sense of merged materiality with the book itself, an important corollary to the imagined somatic bonding with another that I am claiming reading also engenders. Indeed, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of the mutual imbrication of the body’s “leaves” and those of the physical world, establishing a metaphor particularly appropriate for the material book.41 While all reading might engender this sense of physical cohabitation, the book seems particularly appropriate for this function: its bound heftiness and soft, hidden interior approximate the human condition, while its anthropomorphized qualities (spine, header, footnotes, etc.) create a plane for imagined bodily equivalence. Our engagement with the book, then, can involve identifications with the book as object, and not simply with its author or characters. The bodily correspondences and material interactions of reader and text blur the boundaries between the two, establishing a continuity between (in Mark Amsler’s words) “the skin of the page and the reading body.”42 This meeting of subject and object in the world of matter (or what Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh”43) creates an openended process of contact, overlap, and reversibility, such that the book becomes an object coextensive with the reader’s situated and experiential sense of self. Indeed, to carry this point further, we might understand the book as part of the “body image” of the reader. First articulated by neuropsychologists in the early twentieth century, the term “body image” refers to the psychophysiological conception that we carry with us about our bodies. It is an image forged out of the subject’s mental and visceral self-perception, his/her interpersonal relations, as well as his/her contact with the material world.44 According to Austrian psychiatrist Paul Schilder, body image is not stable, nor is it clearly boundaried. On the contrary, it “can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and can take other parts into itself.”45 Schilder gives the following example: “When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick has, in fact, become a part of the body-image . . . part of the bony system of the body.”46 Schilder includes other examples (the feather at the tip of a woman’s hat, a mask) that speak to the “plasticity of the body-image,” its ability to blur the distinction between self and world.47 What is crucial here is not the size or shape of the object in question, but its capacity for integration, its use as a medium through which the body operates and (through that operation) perceives itself as whole or complete. Books, I am arguing, can constitute a part of this body image, achieving what neurologists call “incorporation,” and machine theorists call “intimacy,” with

12

Introduction

their readers.48 Reading precipitates both the experience of shared consciousness (usually with an author or a fellow reader) and a bodily engagement with the book’s materiality, and this combination serves to expand the reader’s sense of self, creating a reading body without clear boundaries, a subject who inhabits a space “beyond the body proper.”49 This way of relating to the material book was central to accounts of reading in the nineteenth century, as is apparent in Noah Porter’s 1870 study, Books and Reading, Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? In a chapter called “The Library,” for example, Porter, a minister and academic philosopher, writes of the profound physical intimacy between a reader and his books: It is often a wonder to the fastidious observer or the careful housekeeper, who looks at books with the bodily eye, why in an expensive and luxurious library there is often carefully preserved some shelf of these worthless and battered volumes which they would consign to the paper maker or the flames. They little know what precious memories are stored upon that shelf and gather about each of those soiled and damaged books. But the books which most vividly bring back to the owner his youthful self will be those few favorite authors, which he longed so earnestly to possess when he first conceived the idea of forming a library of his own. . . . How often did he go into the bookshop and gaze upon and handle the much coveted volume! . . . What fresh and fervid associations are wakened within him as the identical volumes are taken in hand which twenty or forty years before he carried home without weariness and installed upon his empty shelves with such positive delight. Upon these shelves they still remain. . . . Other shelves testify to later passages in his life’s progress; . . . In one division stand the sophists who weakened the faith of the owner in the fixed principles and the severe moralities of his childhood’s faith. In another the wise teachers who recovered him from these sophistries and bewilderments. The field of the intellectual activities and the objects of the prevailing tastes of one decade of his life are here. Those of another are there.50

For Porter, the personal library tracks the reader’s own growth, allowing him to locate on the shelves the writers who influenced him, in positive and negative ways. In perusing the shelves of his private library, the collector thus

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traces with satisfaction his development and self-definition.51 And yet, even as this activity creates a sense of growth and differentiation in the reader, it also highlights the correspondences between reader and book, the way the latter is imagined as a reflection and extension of the former. The young man hasn’t simply incorporated the content of his books through reading; rather, the books have incorporated him and stand as material representations of his existence (“The prevailing tastes of one decade of his life are here. Those of another are there”). Porter reinforces this uncanny sense that the book has appropriated its reader by referencing the collector’s life in textual terms—the volumes on the shelves “testify to . . . passages in his life’s progress.”52 A reliquary of sorts, the book contains the life of its reader, integrating that life within its own narrative. But if the book on the shelf is in some sense a receptacle of a reader’s past, it is also, by Porter’s account, easily reincorporated into the body image of its owner. Once the collector takes “in hand” the very volumes he would “gaze upon and handle” in his youth, he experiences a continuity both with his earlier reading self and with the material text he engages. The “soiled and damaged books,” in other words, reunite the mature reader with his former presence, even as they also produce a correspondence of subject/object being—the books’ leather bindings, like the skin of the older reader, are vulnerable to decay. Porter’s concluding remarks reinforce these parallels: As the eye of the industrious reader runs along the shelves of his library in an hour of musing, it can read upon them the successive passages that make up the history of his life. In view of facts like these it is not in the least surprising that so many have cleaved to their libraries with so fond an affection and have learned to conceive of them as parts of themselves, as in a sense visible and tangible embodiments of their own being.53

The uncanniness of these lines is again the result of the strange juxtaposition of bodies (and their parts) with books—the “eye” that “runs along the shelves” as if independently, the “passages” that belong not to the books, but rather to “the history of [the reader’s] life.” When Porter concludes by suggesting that readers “have learned to conceive of [their books] as parts of themselves,” he invokes an image of the book as prosthetic, at once a foreign object and an integral part of the reading subject. It can readily be taken in hand, and when it is, it creates a sense of wholeness in the reader, conjuring up both the influence of the author

14

Introduction

and an earlier self, made discernible through the well-worn pages. As a “visible and tangible embodiment” of its owner, the library calls into question the assumption that subjects and objects, bodies and books, exist independently of each other. Perhaps we might think of the book-bearing reader as anticipating the cyborg, that boundary-crossing figure that Donna Haraway credits with confounding the distinction between humans and technology.54 By Porter’s account, the reader resides physically in his book, which is itself an extension of the reader’s own body; the two are woven inextricably together in the world of matter.

h In positing the book as psychologically and physically tessellated in the life of its reader, this study intersects with the work of book historians who deny the transcendent status of the (literary) text, a status that dates back to formalist New Criticism and that has continued in the scholarship of classical bibliography, which is concerned with the physical aspects of the finished book.55 Rather than seeing the book either as a self-sufficient and stable organization of linguistic signs (the formalist approach) or as a complete and static material object (the approach characteristic of classical bibliography), book historians have emphasized the complex sociohistorical processes that occur both before and after book production: authorial struggles, editorial decisions, print-shop policies, circulation practices, reader reactions, and so forth. These processes necessarily involve the contributions and interactions of a series of players, and it is for this reason that Natalie Zemon Davis characterizes the book as, above all, “a carrier of relationships.”56 Those interested in the particular relationships forged at the site of reception have rightly stressed that the reader does not represent the final stop of the “communications circuit,” since books continue to play a socially dynamic role even once they are purchased by individuals.57 But while these scholars have recognized the important relational aspect of reading, they have generally discussed this in terms of “community” rather than what I am calling “communion.” Their approaches tend to take one of two forms. First, they have emphasized reading as a social act, often involving public gestures of articulation (reading out loud), circulation (book lending and borrowing among friends and family), and face-to-face contact (book groups, reading societies, etc.) In this scholarship, reading becomes important as a way to forge bonds with proximate others. Such an understanding has been crucial in defying earlier notions of reading as a largely private or autonomous

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activity—what Alan Kennedy calls “a solitary affair, involving one person and a book.”58 It has been, moreover, an important corrective to text-based studies, celebrating, instead, actual readers and the social and political solidarity they create through their shared interest in books. And yet, this scholarship, while of great value, tends to ignore the individual’s psychophysiological relation to the book in favor of more empirical evidence: library records, transcripts from book groups, and so forth. Relatedly, it tends to emphasize actual group bonds over imagined forms of association. The second approach, by contrast, does focus on internalized or symbolic forms of sociality, but it generally understands reading as creating expansive and impersonal “community” rather than more intimate relations. Benedict Anderson, for example, writes about the ability of reading to forge “imagined communities”—large anonymous group formations that cohere especially along national lines. Anderson gives the example of reading the newspaper—an everyday act that triggers a sense of national belonging: “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” Anderson concludes: “Community in anonymity . . . is the hallmark of modern nations.”59 Michael Warner has argued similarly that reading in early republican America was “impersonal” because it involved “an awareness of the potentially limitless others who may also be reading. For that reason, it becomes possible to imagine oneself, in the act of reading, becoming part of an arena of the national people that cannot be realized except through such mediating imaginings.”60 Even when not articulated in national terms, the “imagined communities” associated with reading tend to be understood as remote and impersonal. Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities,” for example, is predicated on the idea that groups of individuals, while personally unknown to one another, are informally aligned through shared interpretive strategies.61 But as I have tried to indicate above, the creation of impersonal community was hardly the most significant aspect of nineteenth-century reading practices. The letters, diaries, and novels of nineteenth-century subjects attest that reading forged imagined bonds that were intense, intimate, and highly exclusive. The result was not “community in anonymity” but rather a heightened connection to a specific other (usually an author or a fellow reader) because of the experience of sharing a common text. Instead of seeing reading as resulting in attenuated forms of association—what Ronald Zboray describes as an “illusory,

16

Introduction

print-oriented connectedness that could pose as community”62—I suggest that reading, in certain instances, could become more vital and personally fulfilling than actual face-to-face interaction. That is, for a segment of nineteenthcentury readers, the book could supersede actual social relations as the primary locus of affective experience and the preferred medium of libidinal exchange. Focusing on the deep interpersonal bonds engendered by reading means rethinking the polarized discourse of freedom and constraint often associated with scholarship on reception. Much early criticism in this field was dedicated to heralding alternatively the role of the reader or that of the text in the creation of meaning. Thus Michael Riffaterre, Georges Poulet, and Wolfgang Iser emphasize the limits imposed on the activities of the reader by the text or by the dominant cultural traditions in which reading occurs. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and David Bleich, by contrast, all argue for the relative autonomy and creativity of the reader in relation to text and context.63 Critics attempting to mediate between these positions have staked out a middle ground, arguing, as Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier do, that “texts are always communicated to their readers in forms . . . that constrain them but do not destroy their freedom.”64 But as these lines illustrate, even in forging a compromise position, book historians tend to imagine relations between author and reader as fundamentally antagonistic. For H. J. Jackson, for example, the “experience of reading always involves an element of contest or struggle, and an oscillation between surrender and resistance.”65 Chartier, writing elsewhere, argues against “the absolute efficacy of the text tyrannically to dictate the meaning of the work to the reader.” He asks: “How can we consider at one and the same time the irreducible freedom of readers and the constraints meant to curb this freedom?”66 Although Chartier is correct to insist that a text’s origins (its author, the dimensions of its publication, etc.) limit while never fully determining a reader’s understanding, he errs, I think, in imagining readers as primarily invested in liberation from these limits. Indeed, such an understanding is very much a product of our present cultural moment, in which “resistant readings” herald the triumph of subversive politics and minority identities. To “poach” or “appropriate” meaning in this context is to wrest it away from the author or the established tradition of reception and, in so doing, invest the (otherwise dispossessed) reader with agency and significance. Much of the work we do as scholars and teachers is bound up in this understanding of reading; our creative contribution hinges on our ability to differentiate ourselves from the text and its prior receptions, to offer something

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bold and original that frees the book—and ourselves—from its problematic origins. But while this approach to reading is often deeply satisfying as an academic exercise, it seems removed from the kinds of symbiotic experiences of pleasure that nonacademic readers (even the most elite) often associate with the book. At fifteen years of age, Susan Sontag wrote of reading the journals of André Gide: “Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! Thus I do not think: ‘How marvelously lucid this is!’—but: ‘Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!’”67 Sontag’s rejection of judgment (“How marvelously lucid this is!”) in favor of the language of mutual experience (“I cannot grow this fast!”) suggests the limitations of critique and resistance as models for understanding the activity of reading. Because accounts of reading in the nineteenth century are largely free of this liberationist approach, they are a particularly rich archive to mine for an alternative account of reading as communion.68 To be clear, I am not suggesting that reading during this period always resulted in an adaptive psychophysiological sense of oneness. Certainly, merger with an author held the capacity to overwhelm the reader, leading to a sense of dissolution that could be more threatening than fortifying. At other moments, readers could be alienated from texts, especially those they perceived as confusing or fallacious. By their own accounts, critical judgment was crucial at these times to stave off the injurious influence of the author. But even when readers experienced cognitive dissonance with their books, they tended to articulate this through the rhetoric of loss rather than interpretive resistance and identity formation. Writing to her friend Lucy Osgood in 1847, Lydia Maria Child comments: Newman’s book on The Soul seemed to me a very admirable work. The Phases of Faith pleased me by the honesty of its confessions, and I read it with all the eagerness we all so naturally feel to arrive at the inmost spiritual secrets of another soul; but the conclusion left me very uncomfortable. It seemed as the collegian said in his theme, “to land me in the great ocean of eternity.” I had traveled so far, and so confidently, with him, to arrive—nowhere!69

Here, Child specifies that she initially approached Newman’s text with the dream of affinity—“with all the eagerness we all so naturally feel to arrive at the inmost spiritual secrets of another soul.” But in the end, identification with the

18

Introduction

authorial mind proved impossible—“the conclusion left me very uncomfortable.” This dissonance leads to a feeling of profound isolation, figured as emotional and physical displacement—a sense of being “nowhere.” Indeed, Child’s experience of having landed (and here she ironically quotes Newman’s oneness metaphor to register her disidentification) “in the great ocean of eternity” suggests that the failed author-reader connection is akin to a kind of death for each. Newman’s book becomes a radical instantiation of the nineteenth-century “dead letter,” a text which failing to reach its audience leaves both in a state of isolated oblivion.70 It is hard to square such an account with the triumphalist narrative of reader resistance as articulated in the contemporary academy. I also do not mean to suggest that identity plays no role in reading, or that all nineteenth-century readers read in exactly the same way. On the contrary, many fine studies have demonstrated how reading both impacts and is shaped by the categories of gender, race, class, nation, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.71 And yet, this emphasis on “difference” obscures the extent to which reading can be motivated not by opposition and hierarchy, but instead by a fantasy of harmonious union both with others and with the material world. Leo Bersani has argued that the “prioritizing of difference . . . as a foundational relational structure” emerges from an understanding of desire as motivated by lack. When we imagine that the ego wants only that which it does not have, that it is poised between lack and possession, then we can only think of relationality as turning on difference. This precludes for Bersani a concept of desire that is motivated by “the extensibility of sameness,” the possibility that all being moves toward, corresponds with itself outside of itself. . . . We love, in other words, inaccurate replications of ourselves.  .  .  . This is not the envy of narcissistic enclosure.  .  . . It is rather an expression of the security humans can feel when they embrace difference as the supplemental benefit of a universal replication and solidarity of being.72

Following Bersani’s logic, I am suggesting that reading, like love, is an activity “in which the individuating boundaries that separate subjects .  .  . are erased.”73 The aspiration for many readers, both in the nineteenth century and today, is to overcome identitarian differences—not “to read as a woman” or “to read as an African American” but rather to read as a human in intimate and self-diffusing touch with another subjectivity and with the object-world.

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h In what follows, I examine the book’s status as a technology of intimacy, able to affirm the ideal of oneness for a large cross-section of nineteenthcentury subjects. Chapter 1 attempts to situate this understanding of the book in relation to antebellum urban-industrial changes, particularly those of the railroad. If trains ushered in a new emphasis on velocity and efficiency, they also inspired a particular approach to reading, likewise characterized by productivity and time management. These values are especially apparent in the conduct manuals on reading that were published in vast quantities throughout the nineteenth century. Here reading emerges as an instrumentalist activity, bound to market temporality and bourgeois notions of self-improvement. Alongside this model, however, appears an alternative account of reading, one expressed in diaries, letters, and literary works, but also occasionally in the conduct manuals themselves. In these reports, reading takes on a wayward quality, important for the way it thwarts imperatives for utility and progress. For wayward readers, the aim of reading is not self-improvement, and the time of reading is not evenly paced and future bound. Such atemporality reconfigures a reader’s sense of the world and her relations within it. In particular, it makes possible new intimacies with the author, who is no longer imagined as chronologically and spatially removed. The nature of this author-reader intimacy is the subject of Chapter 2. Here I take issue with those book historians who claim that “friendship” constituted the dominant metaphor of nineteenth-century book possession. Such a metaphor situates the book as compensation for real social relations. In the absence of face-to-face dynamics, the logic goes, readers created companionship out of “cold type.” I argue against this critical assessment by insisting that readers did not model their relations with books on real-life social interactions. Rather, insofar as reading could produce a mutual ensoulment with an author who was inaccessible and most likely dead, it belonged to the realm of the paranormal. Indeed, descriptions of reading as ecstatic communion were part of a larger metaphysical tradition, one that privileged the intuitive powers of the mind and theories of correspondence or harmony between disunited peoples. The reports of these readers, I conclude, allow us to rethink the critical assumptions that govern contemporary studies in reception. Specifically, they suggest that the “death of the author” is important not for its theoretical implications about the reader’s liberation, but as a tragic

20

Introduction

reality that could be countermanded by the practice of reading and the sensual forms of oneness it inspired. Having established that the “death of the author” is greatly exaggerated (at least in theoretical terms), I turn to three prominent authors in Chapters 3–5 in order to probe the fantasy of author-reader communion from another vantage point. I have chosen to highlight Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Susan Warner in these chapters for a number of interrelated reasons. First, all of these writers were also prodigious readers, whose letters and journals explicitly theorize the activity of reading. Moreover, their literary works contain scenes of authorship and reading that function as mises en abyme. First coined by André Gide in 1893, the mise en abyme is a figure of internal duplication that serves to comment on the greater narrative, and particularly on its production and reception.74 Thus Melville’s descriptions of his eponymous protagonist’s authorial attempts in Pierre (1852) work as a way of reflecting on Melville’s own vexed relation to writing and to the literary marketplace. Likewise, Warner’s descriptions of the reading habits of Ellen Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World (1850) partially reveal Warner’s vision of reception for her own novels. When positioned in dialogue with other cultural texts, these mises en abyme provide greater insight into the different forms that fantasies of readerly communion could take.75 Finally, Melville, Douglass, and Warner are at the center of this study because they envisioned their own textual practices as avenues for pursuing intimacies and experiences not readily available to them in the physical world. Melville, I will argue, organized his intense feelings for Hawthorne around the dynamics of writing for each other and reading one another’s work; Douglass envisioned communion in literacy as a means of achieving an otherwise elusive cross-racial bond; and Warner found sensuous gratification through her books, thereby circumventing social prescriptions on proper female etiquette. While I do not mean to suggest that these writers abandoned face-to-face relations in favor of virtual ones (on the contrary, social interactions continued to be key, especially for the abolitionist project of Frederick Douglass), I argue that the imagined world of textual relations was an important sphere for negotiating experiences of loss and for pursuing illicit or extranormative associations. Positing reading and authorship as fundamentally fusional enterprises means rethinking the relationship between nineteenth-century literary culture and individualism. If, in other words, writers like Melville and Douglass valued reading as a means toward achieving decentered intercorporeal experience, then

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we need to reassess the critical and political traditions that have aligned them— along with the very practices of authorship and reading they engaged in—with notions of privacy, autonomy, and selfhood. This seems particularly pressing at the moment, since much of the public discourse around electronic communication augurs the disappearance of the private self as we know it. According to this logic, the Internet has spawned a culture of rapid skimming and frenzied sharing that threatens to eradicate profound thinking and even interiority itself. But what if the idea of the isolated deep reader was itself a fiction belied by the reader’s search for oneness? The epilogue of this study takes up this question. It suggests that digital technologies have transformed the physical experience of reading, while sustaining the fantasy of connectedness that is the legacy of nineteenth-century book practices. Rather than bemoaning the current moment for its tendency to destroy the individual, then, we might see it as part of a longer tradition in which reading was valued precisely for its ability to undo the self, to replace, however briefly, the acquisitive project of identity formation with a vision of the self permeated with and inseparable from its objects.

Chapter 1

h Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading O

n 15 September 1841, Julia A. Parker, twenty-three years old and a prolific reader and diarist, inscribed her journal with the following: Read “Stephens’s Travels in Central America.” How happy I am while reading a book like this. I have lived to-day only with the past. I envy the author the terrible dangers he passed; for what comparison do they bear with the satisfaction and interest one must feel in exploring the time-worn monuments of a people who have ceased to exist, and who have no place on the page of history.1

Parker’s description of reading as having “lived to-day only with the past” captures the book’s ability to remove a reader from linear chronology, to create, in Jay Fliegelman’s words, “the presence of the past in the present.”2 As Parker attests, part of what this kind of temporal dislocation enables is a sense of deep intimacy with a book’s author, a mutuality experienced as an erasure of the chasm between writing and its reception. Although she initially characterizes her reaction to John L. Stephens as “envy,” what emerges looks much more like identification, since both she and Stephens are engaged in the same exploration of “time-worn monuments.” That is, her reading allows her to live “with the past” in a way that replicates the author’s own ancient discoveries. Interestingly, these discoveries are also figured outside of official time, involving a people “who have no place on the page of history.” In exiting her present world to study lives that are otherwise unrecorded, Parker achieves a mutuality with Stephens that is intensified and made more satisfying because of its location off the grid.

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Such a description of reading limns the practice as remote and confidential, a private affair between reader and author, removed from official chronologies and record-keeping. In spending the day wholly immersed in an obsolescent past, Parker momentarily skirts the temporal realities and quotidian demands of her own middle-class existence. Her reading has a wayward or vagrant quality—its pleasures are associated with recursive movement and self-forgetting. To describe an engagement with books in this way is to divert from the instrumentalist rhetoric that often accompanied nineteenth-century prescriptions for reading. Here reading is characterized as ordered and rational, propelled by what William Alcott calls “the love of progress—the desire of improvement— the never-ending hunger and thirst after righteousness.”3 For Alcott and other cultural authorities, appropriate or dutiful reading emphasized mastery, productive accumulation, and efficient time management. This growth-oriented conception of reading is a far cry from Parker’s fantasy of retrospective escape. In this chapter, I suggest that Parker’s and Alcott’s descriptions of reading may be understood as two very different reactions to transformations in print culture. The first part of the nineteenth century was characterized by disorienting new technologies and tremendous output, which affected the ways books were both produced and consumed. Alcott’s instrumentalist approach represents one attempt to make reading meaningful at a time of profound media transition. The reading practices he embraced featured prominently in conduct manuals dating between 1830 and 1890, where anxieties about reading often clustered around two specific themes: the frantic, accelerated pace of reading, and the prominence of the body (rather than the mind) while reading. Such concerns, articulated at the onset of modernity, reflected a preoccupation with both mechanized velocity and the incipient stages of a consumer society. Conduct manuals addressed these fears by encouraging readers to control the speed with which they approached their books and to excise the body from the reading process. In this way, they attempted to transform reading from an irrational consumer practice to a productive activity, as regular and predictable as the railroad. In dialogue with this understanding of reading, a contrasting model emerged in the diaries, letters, and literary works of nineteenth-century subjects like Julia Parker, and also occasionally in the conduct manuals themselves. In these accounts, reading eschews an instrumentalist focus on accounting and productivity; it makes use of an alternative conception of time distinct from the rhetoric of linearity and progress associated with the railroad and other

24

Chapter 1

technologies of commercial modernity. Here, readers cede control over books, preferring to imagine themselves as fused with, rather than masters of, their reading material. Such reading, moreover, turns to the body as a site of engagement, replacing producerist directives with consumer pleasures. In so doing, wayward reading reconfigures the world in more sensual terms, assisting in the formation of intimate bonds in the lives of readers. To be clear, I am not suggesting that reading manuals reflected only the instrumentalist account of reading, and that everyday subjects always articulated a contestatory narrative. On the contrary, many ordinary readers embraced books as a source of productive self-improvement, and reading manuals often proffered a contradictory account, wherein erratic or “desultory” (to borrow the word of a British authority) approaches to reading were valued.4 As this chapter and the next will make clear, prescriptive advice on reading was often expressed in deeply ambivalent terms, in a language that argued for the functionality of books while relishing the strange intimacy that accompanied the textual encounter. I also do not mean to suggest that one of these approaches thwarted print capitalism while the other accelerated it. On the contrary, both contributed to the privatization of reading, and both worked to expand and consolidate the market for print. To the extent that I am adopting a schematic model, then, I mean rather to highlight the different psychological effects of these approaches to reading, the way they authorized and activated different subject positions for their audiences. “Railroad reading” (as I call it) located satisfaction primarily in systematization and mastery of material; the encounter with alterity was usually an occasion to synthesize and reaffirm the self. “Wayward reading,” on the other hand, testified to the value of self-forgetting and to the gratifications of imagined contact with another. I insist on the importance of this latter approach so as to recognize its relevance to readers in the nineteenth century and the therapeutic role that it continues to play today.

Reading and Dark Prognostications As historians of the book have widely established, the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in print and reading. By now, the advancements are well documented. The Fourdrinier brothers’ innovations in paper production around 1803 meant that cheap, machine-made paper was soon readily available.5 The 1830s saw the development of the penny press, and the 1840s marked the mass circulation of serialized fiction, mostly through distribution

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of affordable weekly periodicals, like the eight-page story paper.6 By the 1850s the rapid rotary press (patented by Richard Hoe in 1847) produced inexpensive books on an unprecedented scale, making this decade “the biggest boom American book publishing had ever known.”7 Bill Katz has estimated that the value of books manufactured in America between 1820 and 1860 increased from $2.5 million to over $13 million.8 Effective distribution of these books and other printed material was enabled by the development of the regional railroad, along with the regularization of coastal transportation.9 Literacy rates, which had always benefited from the American Protestant tradition of sola scriptura, skyrocketed during this period. Census data suggest that as much as 90 percent of the adult white population could read and write by 1850.10 The precipitate advance in literacy was to the result of a variety of factors, from the socioeducational (the spread of common schools and the growing popularity of libraries at mid-century) to the religious (the rise of evangelical Christian movements with their emphasis on private and group interface with the Word) to the economic (the upturn in market activity necessitating a minimally literate bourgeoisie) to the technological (advances in domestic lighting and in corrective eyewear).11 These transformations along with new opportunities for leisure and the increasing cultural prestige associated with books all served to create a culture of reading in which books and literacy became, in the words of one historian, “a necessity of life.”12 But these developments also prompted anxieties about the number of books in circulation and the ways readers were approaching these materials. In response, manuals on reading cropped up by the hundreds. Taking their cue from earlier British authorities who railed against the dangers of print culture,13 these handbooks bore prescriptive titles—On the Right Use of Books (1878), Hints on Reading (1839), What To Read and How To Read (1870), Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1832)—and issued dire warnings regarding the state of modern publishing. Commentators bemoaned the “mighty flood of unsavory literature,” characterizing its consequences as “Evil, and evil, and evil again.”14 The Reverend Edwin Hubbell Chapin, who authored several conduct manuals, many including advice on reading, was especially inclined to such eschatological pronouncements. He decried the mass of new texts “which have leaped from the press like the frogs of Egypt, swarming in our streets and houses, our kitchens and bed-chambers.” Most of them, he insisted, “are unmitigated trash, the froth of superficial thinking, the scum of diseased sentiment.”15 Sounding a note equally dire, W. P. Atkinson asked, “In this wide ocean . . . of modern

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knowledge, how shall we save ourselves from being lost?”16 Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding have written that apocalyptic discourse is a “mode of attention . . . and voice . . . [that] has come to inhabit and structure modern American life.” Its idiom of imminent cataclysm is associated with transformation and particularly with “rapid social and cultural change.”17 Thus, for all its religious resonance, apocalypticism tends to characterize modernity; its dystopic visions and Manichaean orientation serve as both warning of and compensation for a new, chaotic, and disorienting existence. In this context, conduct manuals, themselves a product of new print and distribution capabilities, offered consolation and direction, even as they contributed to an increasingly unnavigable world of print. The rhetoric of apocalyptic modernity was used to characterize not only the vast amounts of literature that were issuing forth from the press, but the manner in which this literature was being consumed. Authorities reviled the tendency to approach multiple books in “snatches” or “mere fragments”18 and warned that there is nothing more pernicious than a “habit of continuous, systemless, objectless reading.”19 These comments speak to two related concerns. First, it was feared that readers were reading too widely and without a plan or course of study in mind. According to the Earl of Iddesleigh, the goal is “always to read with an object, and that a worthy object.”20 American writer J. B. Braithwaite seconds this sentiment, commenting that for the many “kindred evils” associated with reading “there is no remedy more efficacious than a sound and healthy PURPOSE, rightly directed, and steadily maintained.”21 Second, systemless reading referred to the tendency to skim, what one commentator called the “superficial, careless, nonappropriate skipping habit that incapacitates the mind for assimilating and digesting what it reads.”22 The insistence on programmatic reading thus spoke to a paradoxical fear that readers were at once doing too much and too little, infinitely expanding the field of their consumption while diminishing their attention and focus. Such a state is captured by Braithwaite: [Some] allow their moments of leisure to be wasted in a kind of “busy idleness;” they look over a great variety of books, but for want of settled diligence, their unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry, are attended with no satisfactory result. While there is a yet larger class of listless triflers, who give way to lounging and indolent habits of mind, wholly unworthy of intelligent and responsible beings.23

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Braithwaite’s image of the reader as engaged in “a kind of ‘busy idleness’”— at once assiduously occupied and nonproductive—speaks to the contradictory vision of a modern subject, both over- and underemployed. Her “unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry” are symptomatic of a restless spirit, always moving but never arriving, and thus “attended with no satisfactory result.” Lost among her “great variety of books,” she is at once undisciplined and morally suspect, characterized by an eroticized ennui, or “lounging and indolent habits of mind.” Given this depiction, it is not surprising that commentators put forward “the much-needed lesson of concentration” as a way of countering this “dissipated” (in the sense of both scattered and wanton) approach to reading.24 As book historians have pointed out, characterizations of reading as fragmentary, compulsive, dissolute, and deroutinized speak to larger anxieties about the effects of modernity.25 New technologies of the nineteenth century from the train to the telegraph created a world of fleeting sensations and perceptions that altered both individual sensibility and mass consciousness.26 Reading was affected by these transformations: according to advice manuals, the mass production of books and newspapers in conjunction with new possibilities for mechanized acceleration reconfigured the manner in which subjects read. As William Alcott put it in 1850, “this busy age seems altogether unfavorable to much reflection.” He identifies “Steamboats, railroads, and electro-magnetic telegraphs” as particularly thwarting “the operations of the mind.”27 Lydia Howard Sigourney adds, “This is emphatically the age of book-making and miscellaneous reading. Profound thought is becoming somewhat obsolete. The rapidity with which space is traversed, and wealth accumulated, the many exciting objects which arrest attention in our new, and wide country, indispose the mind to the old habits of patient investigation, and solitary study.”28 For Sigourney and Alcott, the fear is that modernity is altering reading habits, creating a public incapable of profound and continuous textual engagement—a concern that is, as Karin Littau points out, echoed by contemporary critics of the Internet.29 Especially troubling for nineteenth-century authorities was the emphasis on novelty, as is evident in James Freeman Clarke’s excoriation of the periodical press: The newspaper creates and feeds the appetite for news. When we read it, it is not to find what is true, what is important, what we must consider and reflect upon, what we must carry away and remember, but what is new. When any very curious or important

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For Clarke this “What next?” is an index of the compulsiveness and insatiability that characterizes reading in the modern world. The interrogative form of this motto implicitly demands continuous and unabated response; syntactically, it stands as a lack that invites infinite retort and supplementation. In this way, newspapers both fulfill and give rise to readers’ cravings for constant stimulation.31 Even more deleterious than the drive for novelty was the speed associated with modern reading. Commentators described the minds of readers as “roaming . . . without restraint” and warned of the “vain desire to keep pace with the literature of the age.”32 Often the speed of reading was articulated in relation to the instruments of industrial modernity itself. One writer, for example, contrasts a newer form of accelerated reading with an older model of slow, intensive study in the following way: I would liken the one to a journey by railway, the other to a journey on horseback. The railway will take you more rapidly to your journey’s end, and by its aid you will get over much more ground in the day; but you will lose the variety of the walk up the hill, the occasional divergence from the hard road, and the opportunities for examining the country through which you are passing, which the horseman enjoys. The business man will prefer the train, which will carry him quickly to his bank or his warehouse, but he will miss many things which the other will have seen and profited by.33

Here modern reading is aligned not only with the “rapid” speed of the train but also with the urban degeneration of the “business man” who cares only that he be transported “quickly to his bank or his warehouse.” By contrast, the figure of the slow and deliberate reader is likened to the horseback rider, who enjoys all the “variety” and “divergence” that the natural world has to offer. In contending that the former “will miss many things which the other will have . . . profited by,” this commentator insists that the value of reading cannot be measured by market terms alone. The train was an especially apt metaphor to speak of the accelerated pace of

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reading, not only because the railway was responsible for the enhanced distribution of printed matter, but because as a vehicle of rapid transport, the train symbolized much of what was fleeting and ephemeral in modern life. Nathaniel Hawthorne captures this in his 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. When Clifford and Hepzibah—the story’s older aristocratic protagonists— board a railway car they are “swept away with it, as by the suction of fate itself ”: looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude;—the next, a village had grown up around them;—a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its agelong rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.34

This sense of “unfix[ity]” in which hitherto permanent structures are suddenly “set adrift from their foundations” is an apt characterization of the modern condition in which permanence or “age-long rest” seems a nicety of the past. Traveling at “whirlwind speed,” the train is like a time machine, capable of showcasing the evolution of humanity, the development and elimination of entire generations: “At one moment . . . a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more and it had vanished.” Meanwhile, within the train itself, passengers with no connection to one another bump and jostle familiarly, making the railway car a fit symbol for the crowded anonymity of modern urban life. Clifford and Hepzibah marvel at the idea that there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp.  .  .  . New people continually entered. Old acquaintances .  .  . continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life itself!35

At once part of and symbolic of the drive toward human progress—the “inevitable movement onward”—the train is, in Hawthorne’s estimation, a

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powerful and ineluctable force. (Indeed, when Clifford and Hepzibah finally disembark, exhausted, it is with the knowledge that they are leaving behind the modern world, choosing their ghostly past and their decaying house over “life itself.”) The train’s connection to the phenomenon of reading is evident in Hawthorne’s text as well. Clifford and Hepzibah’s fellow passengers include those who have “plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphletnovels, and were keeping company with dukes and earls.”36 The “plunge” into fiction here, and the sudden exposure to the new and the foreign that reading engenders, are, of course, an analogue to railway life itself. Both, in other words, involve immersion in strange “scenery,” novel “adventures,” and unknown “company.” While Hawthorne’s vision of accelerated modernity is, at least in this particular scene, fairly optimistic, for many writers the pace of modern life and its effects on reading augured something far more dire. Edwin Hubbell Chapin mixes awe with dystopic prognostications in his account of the electric speed of book consumption. “A woman takes up her pen to delineate a great social wrong,” he writes, perhaps in reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “and the story becomes as the lightning that shines from one end of the heaven to the other. . . . The press cannot send it out fast enough. From hand to hand, from land to land, it leaps like sparks of electricity.”37 He continues more ominously: No organ of intellectual and moral influence . . . is in our day more prominent than the Press . . . whether its form be that of book or journal. . . . Sending its influence far beyond the reach of the human voice, and into the most private hours, it gathers to itself all the facilities of the age. Its productions, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder.38

Here, books garner both the force of techno-industrialism (“the facilities of the age”) and the power of the natural world (“silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder”), becoming in the process an unstoppable supramortal force. They send their “influence far beyond the reach of the human voice,” thereby upending traditional social ties and face-to-face communication. Still worse, the accelerated industrial speed at which they travel transgresses on sacred time or “the most private hours.” Chapin concludes by asking “what . . . great evil is blended with this wonderful agency?”39 His account anticipates the anxieties articulated by modern

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theorists of temporality. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, has commented that the hallmark of modernity is an accelerated temporality and, with it, a sense of the future as dark and unknown, because stripped of its constancy.40 For Brian Massumi the modern subject is the “falling” subject, “defined by the condition of groundlessness,” brought on by the ever-increasing velocity and instability of bourgeois consumer culture.41 While these contemporary theorists blame more advanced forms of technology for this decline, Chapin and other nineteenthcentury cultural custodians placed books and periodicals at the center of their apocalyptic vision. In warning of the “headlong speed with which mere knowledge is now pursued all round us,”42 these commentators imagined reading as spiraling and ungrounded, rapidly steering society toward cataclysm. Social commentators warned that this frenzied state had dire implications for the physical health of readers, particularly women, for whom fast reading could result in accelerated maturation. In his medical treatise, On Diseases Peculiar to Women, Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge warns that too much reading of “novels, romances, plays,” can cause “undue excitation” and thus “hasten the development of the nervous system and the phenomena of puberty.” These same “excitants,” he adds, can do damage to the older woman as well. If not carefully regulated, they “will often break down the powers of life, and thus give rise to the whole tribe of dyspeptic and irritable disorders.” Chief among these is “irritable uterus,” which can be exacerbated with “any exertion, even of the upper extremities, in holding a book.”43 While women were the primary targets of these physiological assessments, men, too, were imagined as suffering bodily for their reading practices. One American commentator linked excessive reading in men with “mental imbecility” while another questioned how many “full grown men” have grown “enervated, dwarfish, deformed, or crippled” through the practice.44 Anxieties about the physiologically debilitating effects of reading were tied to a larger discourse in which cultural commentators invoked the body to register a reader’s negative engagement with books. This is especially apparent in the metaphor of ingestion, which likened inappropriate reading to “swallowing” or “devouring” texts.45 Edwin Chapin, for example, rails against the “book-worm, who feasts upon libraries . . . who shuts himself up only to read, read, read . . . [He] is, perhaps, one of the most useless men in the world. His head is stored with a mass of crude and undigested knowledge, which does no good to himself nor to any one else.”46 Chapin presents us with the familiar paradox of the modern reader at once diligent and underemployed, whose efforts at continual study (“read, read, read”) are merely a register of his idleness (“most useless”).

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His propensity toward wasteful and nonproductive activity is articulated effectively through metaphors of the body—he gluttonously “feasts upon libraries” only to amass “crude and undigested knowledge.” Such a reader is guilty of sacrificing rational enjoyment for crass sensual pleasure. He has, in Kelly Mays’s formulation, “confused the proper hierarchical relation between body and mind.”47 Janice Radway has written that metaphors of reading-as-eating have the effect of imagining readers (and especially female readers, for whom these metaphors were most often in place) as passive consumers of mass culture rather than active, sense-making agents. Such rhetoric, she claims, “was marshalled to characterize this process by which large numbers of users bought, in a dual sense, the ideas of others.”48 More recently, critics have challenged Radway’s position as a denial of biology. By understanding reading only in terms of perception, comprehension, and sense-making, they argue, she has deprived the practice of its sensual aspects and in the process denied her historical readers their materiality. Retaining or resuscitating the eating metaphor is thus crucial for rounding out our understanding of the noncognitive or sensual aspects of reading, and thus for rematerializing the abstracted body of the reader.49 The problem with this intervention, however, is that it fails to account for the variable meaning of the ingestion metaphor for the different populations who mobilized it. While everyday readers may have invoked this metaphor as a way of commenting on the physical delights of book consumption, cultural authorities rarely deployed it in the same way. For them, “devouring” books was indeed a statement about the cognitive failure of readers. “Injudicious reading is just as likely to produce mental debility as indiscriminate loading of the stomach is likely to produce dyspepsia,” wrote one; “and let us never forget that a healthy and vigorous mind, though its fare be scanty and homely, is far preferable to a pampered and sickly one.”50 It is difficult to understand this as a celebratory statement about the physicality of reading, since references to the body serve only to reinforce the “mental debility” that is the writer’s primary concern. The eating metaphor was usually deployed in conduct manuals precisely as a way of talking about the necessity to read mindfully, that is, to read in a way that eliminated the body and its associations with passion, carnality, and desire. Even when writers spoke of “wholesome” and “healthy” reading, it was with an eye toward emphasizing the perceptive acuity that accompanies such a diet. Moreover, the reading-as-eating metaphor was a way of denigrating not only bad readers but also the mass-produced texts they “consumed,” since images of uncontrolled ingestion were usually paired with admonitions concerning the

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deluge of trash issuing forth from the press. Radway is thus correct in locating in this metaphor a condemnation both of passive readers and of mass culture, both of which are referenced negatively by the term “consumption.”51 Apocalyptic tirades on the indiscriminate ingestion of books were a way of warning against an emerging consumer society of readers gone wild.

Reading and the Mandate for Self-Improvement What was the cure for reckless, compulsive ingestion of books? As I have already suggested above, conduct manuals tried to redress this condition by turning reading into a productive (rather than a consuming) activity, in which the body was regulated or better yet eliminated altogether, and the pace of reading was routinized and controlled. This involved embracing a rhetoric of self-improvement, in which books were promoted as the gateway to moral development, religious uplift, and intellectual advance. Books should “inform the mind, refine the taste and improve the heart,” wrote the Rev. Edwin Hubbell Chapin in 1840, “and we may be both wiser and better for the perusal.”52 These twin imperatives—to be “wiser and better”—constituted the majority rationale for reading. Books, when used well, worked to “cultivate the intellect,” but even more importantly, they created “moral character,” defined by one writer as “the love of beauty, goodness and truth . . . a sense of duty and honor.”53 Lydia Howard Sigourney echoed this assessment. Reading, she claimed, could do much to “cultivate the intellect,” but “This is not enough. It must also strengthen the moral principles, and regulate the affections.”54 What is stressed time and again in these accounts is the utility of reading, its serviceability in creating a more virtuous and better-informed citizenry. Even fiction, the most distrusted of genres, was generally sanctioned for its functional contributions.55 Chapin, for example, approved novels because they advanced “a keener insight into men and manners, a more graphic knowledge of the past, a more vivid sense of our relations to humanity, and of the claims of duty.”56 Of course, contemporary commentators did not deny the pleasures of books. Indeed, they often waxed effusive about the “profound delight in a course of reading.”57 But these satisfactions were generally understood as ancillary to the primary goal of self-improvement, and, indeed, too much pleasure was often a sign that the “duties” of reading were being neglected.58 Dutiful reading was typically articulated in two ways—through metaphors of ideation and systematization. First, readers were expected to read actively, that is, to make use of their minds while reading and to “reflect” on their reading material

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assiduously. In an interview meant to act as a model for young readers, Henry Ward Beecher claimed, “Reading with me incites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas.”59 Cultural custodians echoed Beecher’s method, insisting that reading always be accompanied by thoughtful scrutiny. “Reading in a hasty and cursory manner, without exercising your own thoughts upon what you read, induces a bad habit of mind,” writes Harvey Newcomb in How to Be a Lady.60 He adds, “THINK AS YOU READ.—Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water; but examine them, and see whether they carry conviction to your own mind; and if they do, think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind.”61 Newcomb’s language is significant, because here he actively replaces the discourse of gustation (“Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water”) with that of cerebral introspection. His prescriptions for readers still rely on a metaphor of absorption (“think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind”), but it is one that is largely free of the baser corporeal appetites (eating, drinking, swallowing). Similarly, in the interview referenced above, Henry Ward Beecher’s book practices are referred to as “moral hygienic reading,” a description remarkable for the way it attempts to divest the reading process of all bodily adulteration.62 Newcomb’s characterization of reading as an active, assimilative exercise in which new information is slowly absorbed by a controlling agent was the standard for appropriate reading—a way of dealing with the tricky problem of a book’s influence. “An author should be valued, not so much for what he has thought for us, as for what he has enabled us to think,” writes an anonymous author in 1866, thereby emphasizing the necessity of readerly preeminence.63 This approach to books was infinitely preferred over what commentators described as “the mechanical exercise of reading,”64 a mode of intake in which the mind automatically processes material without questioning its merits or integrating it with previously arrived-at truths. Such a depiction likens readers to machines, suggesting that in rapidly consuming books they have become cogs in the modern industrial complex rather than controlling agents set apart from it.65 Referencing this phenomenon, Chapin differentiates between “the acquisition of knowledge” and the “development of the faculties.” To engage in the first is “merely to learn by rote, to cram the memory with a collection of facts,” while the second means to “to draw out the mind so that it may know how to use facts, so that it may become greater than those facts.”66 There are “mere encyclopedias from whom you can get any fact upon any subject,” he adds later, “but those

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facts are packed up in their minds as dry items; they have been preserved, not planted there.”67 In invoking the metaphor of industrial assembly (“packed up . . . as dry items . . . preserved, not planted”) and contrasting it to a more agricultural vision, Chapin connects bad reading to a mechanistic market process in which readers sacrifice their command over their reading material instead of controlling its organic growth and assimilation. Worse still than mechanical reading was the state of absorption that particularly characterized forays into fiction. Here the mind didn’t simply memorize material by a rote, unthinking process; it surrendered itself entirely to the book. Or, to state this slightly differently, the mind ceased to be the active, absorbing agent and, instead, was itself absorbed by foreign and often threatening material. “The reader must master the book, instead of the book mastering him,” wrote an anonymous authority in 1866; “otherwise he forfeits his own mental individuality, his freedom of mental action.”68 Nina Baym has suggested that while novels were expected to rouse interest and emotions in the reader, too much of this amounted to a “possession” that threatened to subordinate the reader’s control. Baym cites an 1838 review of the novel Richard Hurdis in The Knickerbocker, which bemoaned that the “object of novelists in general . . . appears to be to seize the public mind, and hold it with a sort of enchantment; a fascination which arises from the power which a master will exercise over the volition of inferior spirits, leading them captive, and exciting them with the stimulus they love most.”69 I will be investigating this phenomenon of the author as enchanter or mesmerist in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that the remedy for this kind of authorial takeover (in novels as well as other texts) was, again, mindful exertion on the part of the reader. As the contemporary critic J. Brooks Bouson puts it, “If to read is to feel temporarily merged with and carried away by a text, to criticize is to be ‘back in one’s own mind,’ to act ‘upon the work rather than being acted upon.’”70 The second prescription for dutiful, productive reading was systematization, a process that, as mentioned earlier, referred both to reading continuously (rather than skipping or skimming) and to reading with a plan or regimen in mind. “The main reason for the ill success of our reading and our education,” wrote W. P. Atkinson, “is because they lack point, lack system, lack concentration.” Atkinson was not advocating that people read less, but that they come at their studies methodically, a point that he articulated through (mixed) metaphors of concentration: “we must not dissipate our forces. It is the bad farmer who just scratches the surface of too many acres; the good general who fights it out on the same line.”71 Other writers focused on the issue of temporality,

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insisting that readers approach books “with the utmost economy of time.”72 Significantly, economizing here often involved slowing the pace of reading, a paradox not lost on the advice writers themselves: “there are endless subjects which you may be pursuing while you seem to be aimlessly turning over the leaves of one book after another, and to be wasting time which you are, in fact, employing most profitably as well as most diligently.”73 Here, slow reading, while bearing the appearance of “wasting time,” is in fact far more productive than the “busy idleness” characteristic of modernity. This purposeful approach to reading is captured by Lydia Maria Child in an 1819 letter to her brother: I am aware that I have been too indolent in examining the systems of great writers; that I have not enough cultivated habits of thought and reflection upon any subject. The consequence is, my imagination has ripened before my judgment; I have quickness of perception, without profoundness of thought; I can at one glance take in a subject as displayed by another, but I am incapable of investigation.74

Child’s letter evidences the internalization of the self-improving model of reading, particularly its emphasis on “habits of thought and reflection.” It also betrays a more general suspicion about celerity, since her “quickness of perception” and her ability to “at one glance take in a subject” are understood as deterrents for the more appropriate activities of “profound. . . . thought” and “investigation.” What is significant in these and earlier descriptions is the way the crisis of reading is redressed through a turn toward instrumental efficiency, what Max Weber has called “the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture.”75 As indicated earlier, the plague of new books is blamed on overzealous production on the part of the printing press, that “great engine of civilization.”76 With the advent of so many new texts, readers find they must skim and skip to get through them all, and this accelerated pace of reading comes to mirror the frantic chronometry of capitalist modernity itself. Such a crisis is resolved not through a rejection of the market altogether, but through an appropriation of its instrumental and bureaucratizing logic. This is evident in the calls for “supremacy and efficiency” in reading, its characterization as “a discipline . . . an efficiency of all our mental powers.”77 Stated slightly differently, authors of reading manuals were not calling for a return to an older model of reading, what Rolf Engelsing has famously characterized as an “intensive” paradigm in which individuals read only a few religious

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texts closely.78 On the contrary, these authors clearly sanctioned an extensive variety of secular books. But by emphasizing system, method, and time management, they were importing a particular conception of rational instrumentality specific to the industrial age. They rejected the phenomenon of “mechanical reading” with its associations with machine culture, but at the same time their emphasis on “fixing the attention . . . ; of detecting and uniting . . . ; of comparing, analyzing, constructing”79 indicates that reading could be subject to modern processes of order and management, mobilized in the name of a superior, goal-oriented end. This “end,” of course, was the creation of the middle-class subject. As Thomas Augst has written in relation to the mercantile libraries of the mid-nineteenth century, “books were the medium of individual development in a civilization organized around the forces of market capitalism: one could become a responsible ethical agent in economic and public life only through the process of reading.”80 Thus, despite the fact that reading was primarily situated as a leisure activity—something generally pursued outside the limits of the paid work day—there was a consistent effort on the part of cultural custodians to align it with notions of productivity and work. If discontinuous reading is redressed through an increased systematization of readers and reading practices, a similar reconfiguration goes on in relation to time, which must also be subject to market discipline. Advice manuals may begin by invoking a frenzied chronometry as a way of signaling modernityinspired apocalyptic anxieties, but ultimately this is replaced with a controlled vision of the time of reading, one carefully calibrated by clock, timetable, and calendar.81 “Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves,” advises Eliza Ware Farrar in The Young Lady’s Friend. “If the minutes were counted, that are daily wasted in idle reverie and still idler talk . . . they would soon amount to hours, and prove sufficient for the acquisition of . . . some useful science.” By “scrutinizing her appropriation of every hour in the day,” and “by turning all the odd minutes to account,” the young lady learns “a spirit of order and method” in all her occupations, including reading.82 “There is time enough, in a well-ordered day for everything that a young lady ought to do. . . nothing need be left undone for want of time; if only you know how to economize. . . and are resolute to perform all that you can.”83 Farrar thus suggests that reading be subject to the same forms of routinized efficiency that characterized America’s burgeoning markets. Rational and ordered, its pace becomes a figure for the teleological, productive movement of modern society, or what Lee Edelman calls “the promise of sequence as the royal road to consequence.”84

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The relationship between the prescribed time of reading and the controlled linear progress of modernity is evident if we return to the trope of the train. As already mentioned, the train could stand as a metaphor for tremendous power and inevitable forward movement. In Hawthorne’s words, it conveyed “The idea of terrible energy,” “the swiftness of the passing moment.”85 But the train was also, of course, a figure for discipline, a meaning that it carries homonymically—to “train” as to develop the habits, thoughts, or behavior by regular instruction. Indeed, the significance of the train for modernity was principally that it could combine tremendous force with precision and predictability, harnessing all the energy of nineteenth-century techno-industrialism in a controlled and systematic way.86 Such is evident in Herman Melville’s description of the train in Moby-Dick: the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour.87

Although Melville invokes the “iron Leviathan” here as an analogue to that other natural Leviathan, whose direction and “probable rate of progression” can likewise be accurately predicted by the discerning whaleman, in fact, Moby-Dick’s notorious resistance to pursuit, ownership, and dissection (both metaphysical and actual) would seem to suggest that the great whale cannot be controlled by a civilizing force bent on rational calibration and possession. The “iron Leviathan” or train, by contrast, stands as a figure for the triumph of instrumentalism in modern society. It could thus function as an appropriate metaphor for a certain kind of productive reading whose hallmarks were also “supremacy and efficiency.”88 In exploiting this metaphor, cultural authorities emphasized that train travel provided a crucial opportunity for reading. Collections such as Reading for the Railroad (1848) were published explicitly for the traveler “in want of employment for his time and his thoughts.”89 Hamilton W. Mabie, another conduct advisor, also extolled the benefits of reading when traveling: Always have a book at hand, and, whether the opportunity brings you two hours or ten minutes, use it to the full. . . . Every life has

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pauses between its activities. The time spent in local travel in streetcars and ferries is a golden opportunity, if one will only resolutely make the most of it. It is not long spaces of time but the single purpose that turns every moment to account that makes great and fruitful acquisitions possible.90

Here the effects of modernity on reading are recalibrated. No longer is reading comparable to the fragmented, impressionistic blur produced by accelerated travel. Rather, this travel now provides the opportunity for regulation and control in one’s reading practices. In particular, the time associated with travel (heretofore accelerated and apocalyptic) can be systematized and disciplined so that every interval, from “two hours” to “ten minutes” can be used “to the full.” Foreshortened and fractured time can be made productive if it, too, submits to rational ordering. It is “the single purpose that turns every moment to account.” Thus reading on the railroad (or in street-cars and ferries) is an activity capable of exploiting all the disciplinary force of market capitalism for its own use. In Mabie’s account, books are valuable as a means toward self-improvement, a way of making “great and fruitful acquisitions possible.” Indeed, even when he writes of the joys of “mental traveling,”91 it is always with an eye toward how this can consolidate (rather than disorient) the self. In another passage, for example, he ties the movement of the railroad to the imaginary transport of books, emphasizing the acquisitive benefits of both kinds of travel: To sit in a railway car, and by opening the pages of a book to transport one’s self in a second into the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici at Florence, is the modern version of Aladdin’s lamp, and makes one master of treasures more rare and lustrous than those which adorned the palaces of Bagdad.92

In this “modern version of Aladdin’s lamp,” the reader mentally visits foreign parts (“the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici”) even as he makes physical progress toward a more realistic destination. Railroad reading thus provides the illusion of unfettered travel, while actually participating in highly regulated movement. It engages the reader in imaginary flight, while assuring that he always stays on course. As “master of treasures,” Mabie’s ideal reader thus appropriates the book, without getting lost in it. As we shall see, however, other nineteenth-century readers played out the

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potential of Mabie’s vision to more dramatic ends. In their accounts, reading is aligned not with ideation and time management, but with a wayward, deroutinized, and sensual subjectivity. It makes use of cognition, but it also engages the body, so as to remain persistently consumptive, despite rational producerist imperatives. At its most extreme, such reading reconfigures time by imagining author and reader as merged and thereby collectively resisting the chronological expanse that separates the act of writing and its reception. This is a vision of reading that relies less on principles of appropriation and self-improvement, bending instead toward the promise of diffusion and merger.

“And the Hours Were Seconds” I begin with an excerpt from the journals of Susan Warner. Warner, best known as the author of The Wide, Wide World (1850), began keeping a diary at age twelve, mostly as a way to account for her days and to rid herself of her most persistent bugbear—idleness. Thus many of her journals keep careful record of her minutest activities, as is evident in this entry, provided in full, from 29 May 1832: After breakfast I made my bed; then from 40 minutes after 8, to half past 9, sewed. Watched the little bird on her nest till 25 minutes past ten. From half past 10 till 25 minutes past 11 played on the piano. Did nothing very particular till 5 minutes past 1, at which time I sat down to read Rollin, but I do not know when I left off. From 4 to 10 minutes past 5, I painted. While I was painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark came in.93

Warner’s painstaking chronicle of her movements is remarkable; even the trifling activities of watching a bird on its nest and doing “nothing very particular” are recorded in exacting detail. It is crucial, then, that reading seems to be the lone activity that resists such temporal calibration. It disrupts her selfscrutiny, creating a zone of unaccountability (“I do not know when I left off ”). Importantly, Warner is absorbed not in a sentimental novel or a penny paper, but in the work of Charles Rollin, an eighteenth-century French historian. To be sure, reading history often has the paradoxical effect of causing Warner to forget time, as is evident in this entry recorded eight months later:

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I learnt my Latin before 12 o’clock this morning. I did nothing very useful after that, until 1 o’clock, at which time I sat down to practise. I was thus occupied until 2 o’clock. I after wards took up history, but instead of beginning at the pages for the day, I spent some time in looking at other parts of it. At last however, I recollected myself, but did not quite finish it before dinner.94

Here, as above, Warner’s own sense of self-improvement and progress are in lock-step with the advancement of time (“morning,” “12 o’clock,” “1 o’clock,” “2 o’clock”). Indeed, even when she recognizes that she “did nothing very useful,” it is within an acknowledged and limited temporal frame (“until 1 o’clock”). But the sequential and forward-moving momentum of Warner’s day is arrested by her engagement with a history book—itself, ironically, the symbol of a progressivist logic. Rather than “beginning at the pages for the day” (that is, beginning at the beginning, history-like), Warner’s reading is stalled, recursive, indulgent, and retrospective—at least until she has “recollected” herself and returned to linear time and its associated routines (“before dinner”). Hers is a textual engagement characterized by spatial dislocation (“looking at other parts”) and atemporal pacing. Despite her attempts to funnel the time of reading toward instrumental ends—self-improvement, acquisition of knowledge—she finds herself lost in the book, her efforts at mastery replaced by a self unrecollected. Warner’s characterization of reading as self-forgetting invokes the “rewiring of the senses” that queer theorists have posited as one of the effects of alternative chronometry.95 To engage in practices that circumvent (if only imaginatively) the linear flow of time is to experience one’s self and one’s body in new and different ways.96 M. Carey Thomas offers another example of this phenomenon. Thomas, who would later in her life go on to become dean and then president of Bryn Mawr College, describes returning from a vacation in the Adirondacks in August of 1878. Almost immediately, she heads to the mercantile library, where she does nothing but read for four days: “And the hours were seconds. I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst. It was like treading on air. It is the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you.”97 Thomas’s description is noteworthy in part because it invokes that brand of reading condemned by nineteenth-century advice manuals—a reading characterized by acceleration (“the hours were seconds”) and insatiety rendered in

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physiological terms (“I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst”). Thomas, then, is that female reader whose frantic engagement with books betokens the triumph of modern consumer society. That she willingly describes her reading this way is perhaps evidence that readers could reproduce the dire discourse of advice manuals in their own accounts of reading. And yet, her words also complicate or, at the very least, flesh out this apocalyptic narrative. The pleasure she registers in reading (“It is the purest happiness”) suggests that her insatiety is deeply satisfying, a lack that rests content with never being filled. In this way it is not reducible to the tormented addiction of James Freeman Clarke’s newspaper reader whose motto is “What next?” Something similar is conveyed in Thomas’s phrase, “It was like treading on air,” a description of reading significant because it straddles the borders of materiality and spirituality, the corpus and cognition. To walk or step in a medium that is pure ethereality is to partake of a movement without progress, a corollary, perhaps, to being “thirsty with an unquenchable thirst.” These descriptions limn the reading subject as removed from sequential activity (forward movement) or causal predictability (ingestion followed by satiation). They suggest a type of reading that is neither commensurate with accelerated modernity nor capable of being rerouted into efficiency. Indeed, Thomas’s final characterization of her time in the mercantile library as “the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you” suggests that reading has a holy dimension, remote from the acquisitive and competitive orientation of daily life. Warner and Thomas are examples of what I am calling “wayward readers,” readers whose engagement with books leads them away from rather than toward measurable ends. Their reading is not easily aligned with directives for productivity. Rather, it remains stubbornly figured as consumption (as evidenced by Thomas’s ingestion metaphor) and thereby tied to the body, albeit a body reconfigured by a new experience of temporality. As yet, however, I have not commented on the consequences of wayward reading, its ability not simply to skirt instrumentalism but to remake the world and one’s relations within it. To do so, I turn first to Mary Austin’s autobiography Earth Horizon and then, finally, to the writing of Henry David Thoreau.

“The Feel of the Author Behind the Book” Although published in 1932, Earth Horizon is in many ways an account of nineteenth-century reading practices. Austin’s favorite books from adolescence—

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including Queechy, The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, Beluah, St. Elmo, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin—read like a hit list of mid-century domestic fiction. Her memories of these novels are often accompanied by exact recordings of when and where her reading took place. Yet despite this attention to detail, she often characterizes reading as a felt phenomenon that resists the claims of cognition, as in this description of encountering Tennyson in her fourth year at school, in 1876: “You hadn’t supposed up to that time that poetry had been expected to mean anything in particular. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ you had chosen for its glittering figures, its smoothly swinging movement of rhyme and meter.”98 Of reading Paradise Lost in the winter of her twelfth year, she offers a similar account, this time writing in her preferred third person voice: “Through Milton, the magic of words carried Mary swimmingly much of the way. . . . But she kept forgetting the sequences of the story, mazed by the magic of the verse” (105). Still again, in reference to her reading during the 1880s: “She could recite whole pages of ‘Laus Veneris,’ not really knowing what it was about, but captivated by the swinging rhythm” (165). In each of these descriptions, Austin emphasizes the failure of comprehension and the neglect of plot in favor of a reading process that is marked by convolution, iteration, and belatedness. Her preferred spatial model is not the “sequence of the story” (since it is that which she consistently forgets) but the repetitive and meandering figure of the “maze.” Indeed, Austin’s own use of alliteration in these descriptions (“smoothly swinging,” “mazed by the magic”) works to emphasize the emotive over the perceptive and to create a sense of elongated or deferred temporality. Thus what arises is a curious contrast between Austin’s own placement of her reading in linear time (the fourth year at school, the winter of her twelfth year, the 1880s) and the ability of that reading to create an alternative chronometry—a “swinging movement” not reducible to “sequence.” This sense of altered temporality is at its most profound in Austin’s account of reading a geology textbook, Old Red Sandstone (1841), introduced to her in the eighth grade through the auspices of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle: the title had a calling sound; there was, for the child, a promise in it of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors, for lack of which she was for years, after her father’s death, a little sick at heart. I remember the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts, the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth—I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my

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Chapter 1 favorite seat in the cherry tree which stood to the left of the door of the yellow house as you came out. I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape of Rinaker’s Hill, the Branch, the old rock quarry, unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map—the earth itself became transparent, molten, glowing. (104)

The intensity of the experience is signaled in part through Austin’s reversion to the first person voice, as if the memory is too powerful to accommodate the distanced objectivity of third person narration. What the “I” of her account remembers is a series of vivid details, both empirical– “the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts”—and numinous—“the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth.” This fusing of the actual and the mystical continues in the sentences that follow, where Austin locates the coordinates of her physical bearings (“I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree”) and undoes these through her descriptions of spatial transformation (“I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape . . . unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map”). Here, as in her descriptions of poetry above, reading is accompanied by a curious pairing of precise temporal-spatial measurement and the utter destruction of these, so that the reading subject feels herself both familiarly located and lost in space, uncannily situated between “Rinaker’s Hill” and a newly made earth, “transparent, molten, glowing.” This is a decisively more radical articulation of what Hamilton W. Mabie describes as “mental traveling.” His was a transport without disorientation, in which the reader remained in control of his new environs. Austin, by contrast, conjures up a world in which the book remakes the reader, thoroughly reconfiguring her sense of self and place. Austin intensifies this feeling of dislocation by fusing the materiality of the geology textbook with that of her immediate vicinity, as if Old Red Sandstone and the “rock quarry” that surrounds her are somehow coextensive. The book, in other words, appears not just about the earth, but of it, deeply entwined with her physical environs. She describes the title as issuing “a calling sound,” thereby suggesting the book’s complicity with primordial nature. And she speaks of the book’s “promise . . . of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors,” a promise made good by the fact that Austin reads it in the open air. Most striking, however, is the way the text’s unfolding is metonymically linked to the transformations she experiences in physical space, in which her “familiar land-

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scape” is “unfolded.” Austin’s reading, in other words, establishes a connection between narrative disclosure and spatial dis-closure, a theme reiterated in her final account of the book: ”Old Red Sandstone” disappeared from the family bookshelves about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school, but the sense of the unfolding earth never left her. There are moments still, when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico, when the first geological pages of the past begin to open and turn, when they are illuminated by such self-generated light as first shone from the chapters of “Old Red Sandstone.” (104–5)

Despite the fact that Old Red Sandstone is given away, Austin retains her memory of the book’s unfolding and, with it, “the sense of the unfolding earth.” Indeed, the connection between the open book and the open earth is so powerful, Austin confesses, that even now, “when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico,” the memory of reading transforms her surroundings, so that the “geological pages of the past begin to open and turn.” The ability of the earth to become book-like (the “geological pages of the past”) and the book to become earth-like (the “self-generated light” that “shone from the chapters”) attests to the deep imbrication of text and context, the capacity of reading to alter the grounds of understanding. Austin’s account, in other words, speaks to the transformative power of reading, not as a source of individual self-improvement, but rather as a catalyst for a regenerated relationship to one’s surroundings. Old Red Sandstone leaves the bookshelf in normative chronology—“about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school”—but the memory of its reading allows Austin to play with the coordinates of time and space, conjuring up and losing herself within the mountainous terrain the book describes. By Austin’s account, this kind of imaginative activity was crucial in relieving her isolation, in creating a sense of connection to forces and people beyond herself. Reared by a remote, indifferent mother, largely unsympathetic to Austin’s intellectual ambitions, she saw books as the only evidence that she was not alone in her curiosity and aesthetic appreciations, “that there were people in the world to whom these things were not strange, but exciting and natural” (132). More

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particularly, Austin praises books for providing her a sense of correspondence and intimacy with other objects. After reading Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book “associated in her mind with her father’s reading,” Austin describes how Mary had wanted just to turn and savor the work in her mind, make it real for herself that there were buildings in the world like that, strange and lovely whorls and intricate lacings and vinelike twistings of forms in stone; that you could go to them; that she herself might go there sometime. (132)

Austin’s dual desire for authenticity and for connection creates the effect of a reader imbricated in the structures she reads about—her descriptions of wanting to “turn . . . the work in her mind” read as an analogue to the “vinelike twistings of forms in stone.” Her reading not only assuages her loneliness, it also provides her with what Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call “inaccurate selfreplications,” forms that correspond to the self without being absolutely reducible to it.99 It thereby allows her to achieve a profound connection with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world, what Austin elsewhere describes as “a continuing experience of wholeness” (283). In the introduction to Earth Horizon, she writes, “It has always been a profound realization of my life that there was a pattern under it. . . . It was to appreciation of this inherency of design that I came as a child, reassured of its authenticity; felt it hovering in advance of moving to envelop me in its activities, advising and illuminating” (vii). To be “envelop[ed]” by a pattern or design is, for Austin, to be cloaked, willingly, by sentient forces greater than the self, to experience “the totality which is called Nature” (vii). It is this sense of nonsubjugating fusion that reading books like Old Red Sandstone and The Seven Lamps of Architecture seems to generate. The unfolding of the narrative creates an unfurling of environs, so that the self is set adrift among the elements. In the process, unitary identity gives way to a sense of collaborative merging with author, text, ancestral forces, and material earth.100 Austin’s vision of communion was, of course, inflected by her deep immersion in Native American tradition. Reading for her facilitated a connection not simply to an individual but to the specific landscape in and about which she read (the mountains of New Mexico, the architecture of Venice). In this way, she is a fascinating, albeit perhaps not altogether typical, model of the phenomenon of readerly communion I am outlining. More to the point is the example

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of Henry David Thoreau, who, like Austin, imagined the activity of reading as radically remaking time and space, but with more interpersonal consequences. In the section of Walden (1854) entitled “Reading,” Thoreau begins by differentiating the exalted activity of scholarship from the more prosaic occupations of “accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity,” “founding a family or a state,” and “acquiring fame even.” The former, he insists, deals with “truth,” and, in taking this up, “we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.” Reading, then, is significant because of its removal from the quotidian world of contingency, a point reinforced in his next sentences: The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.101

Here Thoreau suggests that reading belongs to an alternative chronometry divorced from linear or progressive time. The temporal lapse between when an author writes, or, in Thoreau’s language, “raises a corner of the veil,” and when a reader reads is imperceptible—“no time has elapsed.” The writer’s revelation, even if it happened centuries ago, is made simultaneous with the reader’s discovery: “I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did.” Why is this? Because at the moment of reading, reader and writer are fused and inseparable: “It was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.” In other words, it is the reader who ultimately enables and makes real the author’s initial discoveries, a variation of Maurice Blanchot’s radical reader response position—“What is a book that no one reads? Something that has not yet been written.”102 Likewise, in perusing the ancient book, the reader is inhabited by the subjectivity of the author who “reviews” his original discoveries through the reader’s own eyes. The result is a profound imbrication of the two beings, so that writer and reader exist in one another (“I in him,” “he in me”), and the time between them is suspended—“neither past, present, nor future.” That Thoreau describes this alternative temporality as “really improv[ing]” suggests his interest in aligning reading with a form of productivity not reducible to traditional notions of progress.

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Thoreau’s account of the curious bodily fusion between reader and author recalls Austin’s description of her forays into Old Red Sandstone—“the feel of the author behind the book.” Both are examples of what Annamarie Jagose has called the “transformed relationalities” that are made possible and necessary by rethinking temporality.103 In other words, if reading brings with it new ways of understanding time and space, it also, in the process, suggests new relationships between readers and the players associated with a book’s narrative world (author, character, fellow reader, etc.). For Thoreau, the book thus creates an intimacy unlike that found in any other art form: A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.104

What is significant about the “written word,” the book, as distinct from painting and sculpture, is its relationship to the material body of its reader. It is not, as is the case of the visual arts, viewed abstractly from afar, but rather “breathed from all human lips . . . carved out of the breath of life itself.” Thoreau is not unaware of the paradox of the book’s reception: On the one hand, it is easily reproduced and disseminated and thus “more universal than any other work of art.” On the other hand, its ability to be grasped and spoken aloud renders it an intimate part of the reader’s bodily experience. It is thus capable of both reaching the masses and physically engaging with the individual, a point that anticipates Walter Benjamin’s claims some eighty years later about the art form in the age of mechanical reproduction.105 In breathing the words of a book, we are, in effect, sharing the originating breath of the author, and it is this physical intimacy between reader and writer that serves to suspend or distort the chronological time between them. When Thoreau writes “The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech,” he describes a book’s trajectory not exactly through time but, asequentially, across it—the “becomes” signaling a transmutation from “thought” to “speech” that is less historical than spectral. I have been arguing that reading in the nineteenth century could create new modes of perception, feeling, and identification. Thus, alongside the discourse

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of improvement that issued forth from conduct books and that was readily taken up by readers, there existed another narrative embraced by both cultural authorities and everyday subjects—an alternative to the emphasis on realized potential, measurable gains, and ineluctable progress. Anne-Lise François has described this latter rhetoric as an embrace of “uncounted experience,” “freeing desire from the demands of goal-oriented action.”106 For Susan Warner, M. Carey Thomas, Mary Austin, and Henry David Thoreau, reading involved satisfactions that were not always tied to the advancement of knowledge or the productive realization of the self. It was a practice that was not necessarily plot-driven, indeed, not even propelled by a desire for comprehension or understanding. It engaged the mind but also a wider conception of self that included both spirit and body. It was often voracious and yet could rest content with partiality and noncompletion. It was marked by a sense of recursivity, belatedness, dislocation, and convolution, all of which challenged its placement in normative temporal and spatial frames. Finally, in the case of Austin and Thoreau, it was characterized by a bodily intimacy with the book itself or with a figure associated with the book’s narrative world. It bears repeating that such a reading experience was not simply an effect of the novel—the genre most often associated with imaginative flight and the vitiation of normative experience. On the contrary, history, geology, and classical philosophy (in the case of Thoreau) were equally capable of producing this nonunitary sense of being in the world. As I mentioned in the introduction to this study, it is tempting to align this kind of reading with a Romantic sensibility, for indeed the two have much in common. This is especially evident in the language of immediacy, personal transformation, and spiritual longing that accompanies the accounts of Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, each of whom can easily be placed within an American Romantic tradition. All three align reading with a desire to exit the predictabilities of their everyday existence, to partake of “experience disengaged . . . exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it”—the premier attribute that Henry James ascribed to the romance.107 In this way, the alternative time connected with reading is a version of the “transport” associated with the Romantic sublime. And yet, there are also important differences. The commitment to “totality” characteristic of many strains of Romantic writing— what one critic describes as the “possible-impossible expansion of the self to a seamless identification with the universe”108—seems more abstract and allembracing than the specificity of connection to another that I have discussed in this chapter. Even with Austin, the desire for merger was directed at a particular

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landscape rather than at the universe in general. For many Romantic writers (especially in the American transcendentalist context), the interest is in the “currents of Universal Being”109 and the speaker’s place among these. Thus when this writing celebrates the oneness of the world, it is often with an eye toward how this makes possible a renewal or coalescence of the self. The visions of reading articulated by Warner, Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, on the other hand, do not speak to self-realization so much as they offer possibilities for removal and self-forgetting. To be sure, each of these thinkers associates reading with power, but it is hardly themselves who are emboldened by this activity. Warner’s account of a self un-recollected and Austin’s description of being “mazed by the magic” of books invoke less Thomas De Quincey’s Romantic vision of a reader “ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder,”110 than of a reader scattered and nomadic. Likewise, when Thoreau describes how “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil .  .  . ; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,” he invokes an attitude toward books that is marked not by acquisition and ascension but by deference, deferral, and diffusion. Such an attitude suggests an important resistance to the logic of self-formation associated with some strains of Romantic exploration. As Bersani and Dutoit put it, “We cannot dominate a space in which we are disseminated.”111 Thoreau’s “trembling robe” is a powerful figure for both the suspended time and the erotic intimacy he associates with reading. First “raised” by the philosopher, it “remains raised” for the contemporary audience. It evidences both the erasure of chronological time—“No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed”—and the intimate merging of writer and reader, who are joined by the simultaneous “gaze” they direct beneath the garment. For Thoreau, then, reading is significant for the ways it eradicates the distance between author and reader, leaving the two in a libidinally inflected state of mutual existence. To read in this scenario is to insist on sensual proximity in the face of natural deterrents— to circumvent time, geography, and even death itself. As the next chapter will elaborate, Thoreau was not alone in this conception. Many nineteenth-century subjects valued reading both as a model for achieving contact with the dead and as a way of reconfiguring separation as mutual presence. But why was this mutuality so satisfying to nineteenth-century subjects? What were its limits? And to what extent did it threaten the autonomy of readers? The pleasures, dangers, and ambiguities of author-reader communion are the subject of the following pages.

Chapter 2

h Books and the Dead For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. — John Milton, Areopagitica

T

he concept of a book as alive most likely originated with the Bible— “a living and breathing human expression of the thoughts of Jesus Christ”1—although as this chapter will explore, the idea soon came to characterize more secular texts. Lecturing in 1856, the British clergyman F. D. Maurice criticizes those who would understand popular books as “dead things in stiff bindings.” He counters that “there is a living and productive power in them.”2 Echoing this claim, the American author Lydia Maria Child declares about the novel John Brent by Theodore Winthrop: “How all-alive the book is! Glowing and effervescing, like champagne poured out in the sunshine!”3 Child’s comparison of the novel to alcohol is quite different from the drinking metaphors examined in the previous chapter; here, the figure works to represent the book not as a depraving agent, but as a vital force, “glowing and effervescing” as if imbued with life. Although occasionally, the book’s animation manifests itself independently, more often its cause is the haunting presence of the author, whose “soul” is, in Milton’s formulation above, “preserve[d] as in a vial.” According to the Universalist minister Edwin Hubbell Chapin, books are “like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away.”4 Noah Porter adds that books “recall the history and achievements of the forgotten past. Every volume suggests a living

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author who thought and toiled in history.”5 Books, then, are the repository of ghosts, belonging (in Friedrich Kittler’s words) to the “realm of the dead,” but reanimated through the act of reading.6 This animate quality of books meant that they were often envisioned as interlocutors, capable of dialoguing with their readers. William J. Gilmore and Matthias Rothe have both demonstrated that, beginning in the eighteenth century, reading was increasingly understood as “recreating an author’s words” and imagining that author as “talking to the reader.”7 According to Rothe, in eighteenth-century western Europe, books were consistently figured as dynamic and conversational, partly in an effort to combat the perception that reading fell short of actual human relations. In this context, books were extolled for their orality (Mündlichkeit)—that is, their ability to mimic the author’s speaking voice.8 Although today we are taught to differentiate among the speaker, the narrator, the focalizer, and the actual author, this was not the convention in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To quote Maurice on this point: “there is a man who writes; and when you get acquainted with that man you get acquainted with the book.”9 Barbara Hochman explains that such an approach to reading made use of “an interpretive convention that involved taking for granted the imaginative unity of author and text. . . . [S]ince the words of a book were presumed to express the ideas and the character of a particular person, the sense of authorial presence was felt to be a natural and benign pleasure of reading.”10 This is apparent in a letter written by Elizabeth Dwight in 1846 in which she claimed that reading Thomas Arnold (a British educator and historian) “puts you so in mind of him at every sentence.”11 Lydia Maria Child expressed something similar in an 1862 letter in which she stated that in reading the novel John Brent, “a portion of [the author’s] vivacious and beautiful mind has been transmitted to me through the pages of his book.”12 How should we understand this intimate, conversational orientation toward reading? Contemporary critics have argued that such a stance suggests the metaphor of companionship: the book as friend. This notion is confirmed by the titles of several nineteenth-century books and periodicals—Friends in Council, The Friendship of Books, The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, The Young Lady’s Friend, The Token of Friendship, The Mother’s Friend, The Friend, or Advocate of Truth, The Sailors’ Magazine and Seaman’s Friend, The Home Friend, The Youth’s Friend, and so forth. The comments of nineteenthcentury readers echo this companionate understanding of reading. For Harriet

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Beecher Stowe, “a book once read was read daily, becoming ever dearer, as an old friend.”13 In a journal entry of 1837, Julia A. Parker describes spending a very pleasant winter “with my books .  .  . what very kind friends they are.”14 Lydia Maria Child writes her confidant Sarah Shaw that while she initially took an interest in the author Theodore Winthrop “because he was a dear friend of yours,” after reading his book, “I feel as if he were my friend,—as if I had known and loved him.”15 Given these comments, it is hardly surprising that contemporary critics have characterized the book-as-friend metaphor as the preeminent trope of nineteenth-century reading practices.16 Ronald Zboray has added that while nineteenth-century subjects consistently talked about books in intimate terms, the reality of their existence indicates otherwise: “While the book-asfriend metaphor alluded to flesh-and-blood companionship, it could never represent true human bonding—with all its joys but also its trials, responsibilities, burdens and restraints. . . . Books as friends were compliant, undemanding, unintrusive, and good for making resolutions, but they were also lifeless and cold unless animated by social intervention.”17 In the remainder of this chapter I argue that the book-as-friend metaphor, while sometimes in evidence in nineteenth-century descriptions of reading, only partially captures the range of relations available between reader and text. Moreover, whereas Zboray emphasizes the failure of reading to measure up to face-to-face relations, this chapter attempts to convey the heightened intensity and ecstatic communion that reading could engender. If we are to take nineteenth-century subjects at their word, the junction of souls that accompanied the practice of reading was often more satisfying and transformative than the connection produced by actual social interactions. To the extent that the book-as-friend metaphor models itself on face-to-face relations, it is an inadequate descriptor of the experience of reading. Friendship, after all, relies on mutual presence; the friend, even if geographically removed, is understood as a living reality, accessible by railway, post, or otherwise. But the book’s most salient feature is its ability to conjure up an author who is absent, inaccessible, and, very likely, dead. Contact with that author resembles less friendship than spirit mediation, and it is for this reason that descriptions of reading often have a clairvoyant quality. Indeed, as I shall demonstrate, they are part of a larger nineteenth-century metaphysical tradition that was characterized by a preoccupation with the power of the mind, by theories of correspondence, by an interest in dynamic movement and energy flow, and by a yearning for solace and healing.18 For nineteenth-century subjects, the goal in reading

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was not merely companionate society but physical and spiritual communion on a paranormal plane. William Ellory Channing captures something of this intensity in his escalating description of reading: “In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.”19 This image of mutual ensoulment lies at the heart of nineteenth-century ideas about reading. The book, as a technology of intimacy, could bind time and distance, allowing individuals the experience of merger, a way of mitigating the pain of discrete existence in nineteenth-century industrial America. Of course, such a fused state could also be threatening, and it is for this reason that authors are occasionally depicted as mesmeric figures engaged in possession or takeover. Communion with an author, in other words, could sometimes take the form of a violent self-annihilation in which the reader was occupied entirely by the sentiments of an all-controlling writer. Conversely, readers were also capable of commandeering the work of the author, interpreting it so singularly that it was stripped of its intentional impulse. By and large, however, nineteenth-century readers and cultural authorities who wrote about reading resisted both these models, preferring to imagine reading as creating a union of spirits that did not amount to either absolute effacement (of the reader) or absolute appropriation (of the authorial voice). Nineteenth-century reading thus offers an important corrective to modern criticism, whose agonistic orientation is signaled through tropes of struggle and dissolution—“the resistant reader,” “the death of the author,” etc. Indeed, for nineteenth-century subjects, “the death of the author” was more literal tragedy than figurative ideal; it did not signal the reader’s liberation but was rather an occasion for bereavement and necromantic reunion.

“The Most Intimate Intercourse” If friendship does not constitute an adequate metaphor for understanding readers’ relations with books, how might the dynamic be characterized? American author and statesman William Wirt offers a helpful place to begin. In his early work, The British Spy (1804), Wirt delivers some thoughts about the power of eloquent language. Although he uses the speeches of famous orators as evidence, he specifies that his judgments are based not on hearing but on reading these speeches, and thus eloquence for him is less about delivery than about the authorial mind: “In reading an oration it is the mind to which I look. It is the expanse and richness of the conception itself which I regard, and not

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the glittering tinsel wherein it may be attired.”20 Following this caveat, he goes on to describe the intense response produced by this reading: Tell me, then . . . what is this divine eloquence? What, the charm by which the orator binds the senses of his audience—by which he attunes and touches and sweeps the human lyre, with the resistless sway and master hand of a Timotheus? Is not the whole mystery comprehended in one word—SYMPATHY? I mean not merely that tender passion which quavers the lip and fills the eye of the babe when he looks on the sorrows and tears of a mother; but that still more delicate and subtle quality, by which we passively catch the very colours, momentum and strength of the mind, to whose operations we are attending; which converts every speaker to whom we listen, into a Procrustes; and enables him for the moment to stretch or lop our faculties to fit the standard in his own mind?21

Rejecting a definition of sympathy that would align it merely with sentimental domesticity (the tearful “eye of the babe when he looks on the sorrows . . . of a mother”), Wirt turns to the more “delicate and subtle” ability of sympathy to produce a union of beings. In attending to the language and emotions of a speaker, the audience “catch” his physical and affective state (Wirt importantly merges the two) and are thereby rendered an extension of him. Sympathy is thus the means by which two discrete bodies achieve contact and correspondence. The ambivalence of this transaction is conveyed through mixed images drawn from Greek mythology and history. The speaker is a violent Procrustean figure who can “stretch or lop” the faculties of the listener/reader into forced conformity; but he is also the gentle artist or musician, Timotheus, who “attunes and touches and sweeps the human lyre, with the resistless sway and master hand.” Wirt is concerned with the bewitching capacity (or, in his words, “charm”) of speech/writing to affect its audience from a distance, to transform individuals without actually touching them. Quoting Francis Bacon, Wirt writes, “Fascination . . . is the power and act of imagination intensive upon other bodies than the body of the imaginant.”22 In other words, what marks eloquent speech or narrative is its ability to capture other beings (“fascinate” from the Latin fascinare, meaning to enchant or cast a spell) without physical intervention. This is the “magic” of “imaginative” work. Still citing Bacon, Wirt questions the strange

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phenomenon by which “there should be some transmissions and operations from spirit to spirit.” He continues, in his own words: Yet, if there be not something of this secret intercourse . . . , how does it happen that one speaker shall gradually invade and benumb all the faculties of my soul, as if I were handling a torpedo; while another . . . shall arouse me with an electrick shock? How does it happen that the first shall infuse his poor spirit into my system, lethargise my native intellects; and bring down my powers exactly to the level of his own; or that the last shall descend upon me like an angel of light, breathe new energies into my frame, dilate my soul with his own intelligence, exalt me into a new and noble region of thought, snatch me from the earth at pleasure, and rap me to the seventh heaven?23

I will return later in this chapter to the similarities of this vision with mesmerism and other forms of psychic control that dominated nineteenth-century thought. For now, I emphasize only Wirt’s preoccupation with the transfiguring effects of speech/writing. As communications scholar John Durham Peters writes, “Since at least the Scholastics, action at a distance has been a problem in natural philosophy: How can one body influence another without palpably touching it?”24 According to Peters, Bacon (quoted by Wirt above) posited a number of elements that “work at a distance, and not at touch,” including light, sound, heat, and odor, as well as “the affections.”25 Bacon’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century disciples accounted for the transmission of this abstract matter through various metaphors of kineticism—“vibrations,” “flow,” “electricity,” “energy,” “rapping,” etc.26 Wirt himself invokes these processes when he writes of the “electrick shock” that arouses him or the “new energies” that “dilate my soul” and “rap me to the seventh heaven.” Wirt’s account of sympathy in reading, then, highlights the preoccupations of contemporaneous natural philosophers interested in physical transmission and bodily transformation. But what Wirt foregrounds in his remarks above is the relevance of imaginative discourse to these discussions, thereby making literature central to scientific questions concerning “action at a distance.” Wirt’s account of sympathy also implicitly engages with the scholarship of eighteenth-century moral philosophers, particularly those of the Scottish Enlightenment School. Adam Smith begins his influential work The Theory of

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Moral Sentiments (1759) by acknowledging that individuals live discrete existences and engage in particular forms of suffering that cannot be known by others: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected. . . . Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.” 27 However, Smith quickly adds, this isolation and distance between subjects can be remedied through imagination, for “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.” Smith continues: By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.28

According to this fantasy, experiences of joy and affliction need not be restricted to discrete subjects but can permeate neighboring bodies, creating a mutuality of affect that Smith calls “correspondence” or “sympathy.” Such affective sharing points to a particular understanding of psychosomatic experience in the eighteenth century—a perception that feeling is fluid and unboundaried and that individual bodies are capable of transcending (albeit only momentarily) their singularity to “become in some measure the same person” as another.29 David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) also underscored the deep fraternity that sympathy made possible, although he tended to understand this process as a form of associationalism (rather than projective empathy). Because of our physical and intellectual resemblance to others, we “receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments.”30 Imagination plays a role here no less than in Smith, since it is through this faculty that “an idea of a sentiment or passion, may . . . become the very sentiment or passion” itself.31 Indeed, so effective is this process of emotional contagion that sympathy can produce “an equal emotion, as any original affection.”32 In this way Hume reinforces the profound correspondence (always short of absolute identity) between individuals that sympathy makes possible. Although both Smith and Hume invoke the role of the spectator in scenes of sympathy, they also emphasize the importance of narrative elements. Ac-

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cording to Smith, when we meet with a scene of distress, “The first question which we ask is, What has befallen you? Till this be answered . . . our fellowfeeling is not very considerable.”33 Indeed, writes Smith, “general lamentations, which express nothing but the anguish of the sufferer, create rather a curiosity to inquire into his situation, along with some disposition to sympathize with him, than any actual sympathy that is very sensible.”34 Only when the victim recounts the story of his grievances or the “situation which excites it” can fellow-feeling be fully aroused.35 Such a dynamic is evident in fictional accounts of sympathy as well. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for example, Eliza’s entry into the home of Senator and Mary Bird does not incite immediate sympathy so much as curiosity and confusion. It is only after she relates her tale of horror that the audience gathered around her exhibit various signs of affective distress.36 Similarly, when the Senator brings the battered figure of Eliza to the home of “Honest old John Van Trompe,” the latter is at first emotionally unmoved. But once the Senator relates “a few words” of Eliza’s story in private, John is transformed; he declares he has “come nighest to swearin’” and “wiped his eyes with the back of a great, freckled, yellow hand.”37 Fellowfeeling is disseminated in this scenario not only through vision—witnessing the spectacle of suffering—but also through storytelling.38 And of course, the same narrative that functions to elicit sympathy from a story’s characters also works to evoke fellow-feeling in the reader. In other words, the fact that sympathy is dependent on a narrative account of suffering as well as on the imaginative faculties of an audience (the ability to “conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments”) means that it is easily reproducible in the dynamic between reader and text.39 It is no surprise, then, that nineteenth-century readers used the rhetoric of sympathy in characterizing their relations with books. This meant that they did not just depict their books as friends but also described reading as an imaginative projection into an author’s mind. Consider Noah Porter’s sketch in Books and Reading: When we set ourselves to read a book, what do we do? We place ourselves in communication with a living man. We go back with him to the time when he penned the volume. We think over the thoughts which he then thought, we sympathize with the feelings which he experienced, we behold the wondrous creations which his eye, “in fine frenzy rolling,” saw enter his door and live and move

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about him—the men and women, or the spirits of heaven and hell, to which he gave being in his mind then, and which he re-creates in our minds now.40

Porter begins by describing reading as dialogue with an author (“We place ourselves in communication with a living man”), but as he continues, his descriptions escalate in intensity, so that the reader is imagined first as traveling to a distant past (“We go back with him to the time when he penned the volume”) and then as merging with the authorial role (“We think over the thoughts which he then thought . . . we behold the wondrous creations which his eye, ‘in fine frenzy rolling,’ saw”). Porter’s citation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this last line is telling; here, he articulates his own ideas about poetic observation using the words of Shakespeare, thereby evidencing the very fusion of beings he is describing.41 The author’s eye, Shakespeare’s eye, and the eye of the reader all become one here, suggesting a simultaneity of mental and physical experience brought about by the activity of reading. Such a characterization resembles the intersubjective knowledge that contemporary neuroscientists (particularly those interested in mirror neuron systems) have linked with embodied simulation—“a direct grasping of the sense of the actions performed by others and of the emotions and sensations they experience.”42 Understanding in this scenario is based not so much in inference or assumption but rather in experiential knowledge and somatic replication. Nineteenth-century religious figures often spoke of the Bible as the Urtext for this kind of author-reader union, envisioning reading as an incorporation of God. “In all your reading, let that sacred Book . . . have the first place and the deepest attention,” writes Universalist minister Edwin Hubbell Chapin. “Open your soul, and it shall breathe into it a holy influence, and fill all its wants. . . . The more you study it, the deeper will its wonderful truth open to you, and the more closely will its evidences entwine around your soul.”43 Because the Bible is no less than the voice of God, it is He (sometimes figured as the Holy Spirit) that is imagined as what “shall breathe into” or expand the reader.44 In The Duty and Benefit of a Daily Perusal of the Holy Scriptures, Lindley Murray echoes this claim. In approaching the Bible, he writes, “we must recollect that we are peculiarly in the divine presence.” Those who “reverently study” therefore have “the influence of the Holy Spirit” granted to them.45 The shared subjectivity of God and the Christian reader is signaled here through the use of the ontological dative, “a form that makes it possible to speak of one person’s being ‘in’ another,

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as God is in Christ, or Christ is in his disciples.”46 Hence the biblical exhortation, “Do you not recognize that Jesus Christ is in you?” or Rev. Thomas Skinner’s advice to his parishioners concerning the Savior: “Let his mind be fully in you.”47 To understand reading in this way is to imagine Bible study as a kind of Holy Communion. The goal was to assimilate the Bible so completely that it became indistinguishable from the self: “Compare yourselves with the word. See how the Scripture and your hearts agree; how your dial goes with this sun. Are your hearts, as it were, a transcript and counterpart of Scripture? Is the word copied out into your hearts?”48 But if it originated with the Bible, such an understanding of reading as merger with a text and its author soon came to characterize more secular accounts. It is apparent in Noah Porter’s claim that when people read, books “enter into the structure of their being,”49 and in W. P. Atkinson’s insistence that books ought to be placed not simply “about you, but . . . in you” or “in [your] soul.”50 Ordinary readers testified to this experience when they claimed that ideas in books were indistinguishable from their own cogitations: “How often in our readings do we meet with thoughts that seem so like our own . . . and can scarcely persuade ourselves that they were not the product of our own brains?” queries Martha Osborne Barrett in a diary entry of 1854.51 In his own diary entry of 1850, James Hadley writes of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”: “It is wonderfully full and deep, and to many will seem a revelation of their own inward experience.”52 Echoing this sentiment, Tennyson’s confidant John Moore Heath wrote to the poet in 1835 about the “Fair Ship” portion of the poem: “That last verse—Is it not the expression of each voiceless thought?”53 At other moments, authorial prowess was seen as an effective curative to the reader’s own incoherent or inarticulate sentiments: “I wish I had the power to clothe my thoughts in language, but it is only in others’ writings that I find my meaning adequately expressed.”54 Another young woman reiterates this claim in a letter to a friend: “these lines so expressive of my feelings I have borrow’d from a Magazine. I delight to see flow from another pen the sensations I feel but am unable to express.”55 Of course, not all readers confirmed this experience of textual communion. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson could sometimes revel in the power of books “to rattle out the battles of my thoughts,”56 more often he expressed skepticism that reading could bridge individual experience. In his essay “Spiritual Laws” (1841), for example, Emerson characterized the work of Virgil as “a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and read your eyes out, you will never find what I find.”57 Emerson’s doubt about the ability of

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books to produce union (here between readers of the same text) emerges out of a larger distrust of correspondence or sympathy between subjects. “Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact?” he asks in “Experience” (1844). “Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with.”58 Prompted by the death of his son and his sense of the inadequacy of grief work, Emerson’s essay is a meditation on the finality of individual perception and the impossibility of mutual or shared experience: “Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. . . . The soul is not twin-born but the only begotten . . . admitting no co-life.”59 For Emerson, this did not mean that each individual was locked in a solipsistic universe; rather, the absence of correspondence between subjects freed them to pursue a larger fellowship with the universe: “the ends of thought . . . are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears .  .  . where the individual is lost in his source.”60 Nonetheless, this transcendental vision of unity with nature is distinct from the kinds of readerauthor sympathy I have outlined above. The latter rests on a faith in communication, whereas for Emerson, communication is precisely what is in doubt: “the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs . . . : we sit and muse, and are serene, and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction.”61 By Emerson’s logic, interpretive impulses are so singular and unique that communion with a text or another person becomes impossible. Emerson’s insistence on private, individualized experience emerged more fully in the early twentieth century with the work of William James, who maintained that “Each of [our] minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them.  .  .  . Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.”62 James Hadley, a professor of Greek at Yale College in the mid-nineteenth century, likewise anticipates this position. Hadley kept a journal between the years 1843 and 1852 and on 9 May 1850 recorded the following entry: Read some of Hawthorne’s tales. One very striking of a Reverend Mr. Hooper, who shrouded his face in a black crape veil which he never removed through life, to the horror of the community. Tale illustrates what I have often thought of, the secrecy which hides the inmost nature of every man—the necessary isolation of the individual—the impossibility of perfect confidence—“We are each one a centre of repulsion.”63

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Like Emerson and James, Hadley confirms the solitary existence of the individual in relation to those around him. The face “shrouded . . . in a black crape veil” becomes for him a figure for the futility of language, proof of the inability to converse across the chasm of discrete perception. And yet, Hadley’s own experience of reading seems to belie his insistence on “the necessary isolation of the individual—the impossibility of perfect confidence.” Indeed, if Hawthorne’s tale “illustrates what I have often thought of,” then reading becomes the activity that gainsays man’s solipsism, a point reinforced through Hadley’s quoted citation of yet another source (perhaps William Hazlitt) as confirmation of his position.64 Can the reader in deep sympathy with multiple authors really be a “centre of repulsion”? Certainly Hadley feels himself to be alone, and yet, to the extent that Hawthorne and Hazlitt confirm his private experience, his sense of self is expanded and inhabited by the sensibilities of others. Aloneness here wears the aspect of communion rather than of irredeemable isolation. That Hadley makes these observations in reference to Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil” is especially fitting. As Gordon Hutner points out, the tale stages its own drama of sympathy despite its putative emphasis on solitary experience: “at the close, the secret of Parson Hooper’s veil, and his reasons for donning this peculiar habiliment, is understood as a distinctly general one, that on every visage a Black Veil, with each member of the community concealing a sinful secret.”65 The black veil might be understood, then, as a metaphor for the material book in which it appears: positioned in front of the face, it threatens to sequester the self, even as this self finds union with other beings under its “cover.”

Reading and the Spirit World The idea that there were activities that could promote contact and merger with otherwise inaccessible others was not a concept limited to reading. Many intellectual and reform movements of the nineteenth century were devoted to the idea that in an increasingly dislocated and atomistic society, profound contact with another was possible. In this context, Catherine Albanese has documented the rise of metaphysical religion in nineteenth-century America. Concerned, above all, with a realm of experience located beyond the physical or phenomenal plane, metaphysicians embraced the power of the mind and particularly its intuitive or clairvoyant capacities. Such a mind was especially valuable for what it could divine both about other minds and other worlds,

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and it is for this reason that metaphysical religionists valued theories of “correspondence” or “harmonialism,” which posited an organic link between self and other/world. This connection was articulated in a number of ways—as a flow of energy, a universal connecting fluid, a mental sympathy, or simply emotional bonds between people. In any case, such connectiveness was deemed crucial for establishing therapeutic restoration for the individual and cosmic harmony for the universe.66 The mid-century phenomenon of séance spiritualism played into these themes by insisting that even the dead were not removed from communication. A wildly popular movement, spiritualism was pursued not only by masses of Americans, but also by recognized cultural authorities, who claimed that its laws were consonant with both the natural sciences and traditional Christianity.67 Spiritualism’s belief in otherworldly contact and its general optimism were crucial to an age that witnessed an unprecedented surfeit of deaths, particularly of children. The promise of joyful reunion gainsaid the reality of physical separation, suggesting that death was no barrier to meeting and merger. In this way, the discourse of spiritualism resembled that of nineteenth-century reading, since both detailed the relations between the living and the absent, while suggesting that the distance between the two might be overcome. And, as the following pages will make clear, despite the grounding in metaphysical thought characteristic of each, both spiritualism and reading embraced the materiality of the absent other, thereby suggesting the possibility of embodied fusion in the spirit world. Many of the precepts of spiritualism can be glimpsed in The Crown of Thorns (1860), a consolatory essay written by the Universalist minister Edwin Hubbell Chapin. Chapin, as discussed in Chapter 1, was the author of dozens of conduct manuals, but The Crown of Thorns, written in response to the death of his first son, is less prescriptive than succoring in tone. In a chapter entitled “Our Relations to the Departed,” Chapin begins by establishing that the Christian religion reconfigures death or, in his words, “abolishes the idea of its being annihilation, or an end.”68 In the first place, he reasons, the living are forever connected with the departed through their memories of the latter: “We love . . . to call up the images of the dead, to let them hover around us, as real, for the hour, as any living forms. We linger in that communion, with a pleasing melancholy. . . . They live again for us, and we for them” (197). Memory here functions not as a private, internalized process but on a metaphysical plane, as a way to bring together the material world with the world beyond it. Through memory,

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the dead “hover around us” and “live again,” descriptions that attest to the ease with which Chapin’s Christian outlook was reconciled with more occult visions. “The suggestion of rupture holds a latent suggestion of reunion” (200), continues Chapin, indicating that the homecoming usually associated with heaven could be reproduced by the bereaved through the medium of memory. Remembering the dead thus becomes a primitive form of séance. But it is not just mental associations that connect the living to the dead, as Chapin clarifies: We live with them, not only by communion with the past, by images of memory, but by that fine, mysterious bond which links us to all souls, and in which we live with them now and forever. . . . [Life is] but the flow of one continuous stream, mated awhile with flesh, but far more intimately connected with all intelligences in the universe of God. (200–201)

The living are connected to the dead, in other words, through sympathy, here articulated as “that fine, mysterious bond” and the “flow of one continuous stream.” Interestingly, these descriptions of spiritual connection materialize the relation between mourner and deceased, insofar as they are contrasted to the more abstract “images” of memory. Similarly, although Chapin distinguishes the spirit world from that which is “mated awhile with flesh,” his insistence that the former is “more intimately connected” with other forces suggests that there is a sensuality to relations with the dead that is missing from face-to-face dynamics. Such a characterization was typical of metaphysical thought in the nineteenth century; despite its putative emphasis on abstraction—the realm beyond material or phenomenal experience—it often tended to incarnate the spirit world, so that its substantiality rivaled that of actual social relations.69 Chapin’s characterization of the mourner who “loves to call up the images of the dead. . . . , as real, for the hour, as any living forms” resembles, of course, descriptions of reading, that “shadowy realm” (in the words of W. P. Atkinson) where long-dead authors resurrect themselves.70 Indeed, Chapin himself, in another publication, describes books as “the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds—the living organs, through which those who are dead yet speak to us.”71 Similarly, William Ellory Channing writes of books, “They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.”72 In these descriptions books function as (openable) tombs, and

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reading resembles divination, a way of establishing contact with the deceased. Of course, readers took up books by living authors as well, but the phenomenon of achieving common cause with a dead author was, as these descriptions attest, increasingly articulated as the exemplar of the nineteenth-century reading experience.73 In this way, reading was imagined as a paranormal activity, marked by the same kinds of necromancy and ecstatic harmony that characterized midcentury occult practices. Authors, as the archetypes of the reanimated dead, appear to haunt the scene of reading, using books as their medium of communication. Noah Porter captures something of this in claiming that “when [an author] dies . . . he may be also living another immortality on earth, occupying perhaps a wider sphere than when he was in the body—his thoughts quickening the thoughts of others, as if he were present to speak to them, his feelings inspiring the noblest feelings of others.”74 Such a description reflects both the language of spiritualism as well as its optimism and faith in healing. Through contact with a dead author, readers are infused with the latter’s creative inspiration, and thereby regenerated. If descriptions such as these indicate that ideas about reading were informed by the discourse of spiritualism, then the reverse was also true—that is, spiritualist practice was articulated through the trope of reading, a point also reinforced in The Crown of Thorns. In an effort to convey that death does not result in complete rupture between people, Chapin invokes the metaphor of the book, insisting that the relation of the mourner to the deceased is much like that between reader and author: “We take up some wise and virtuous book, and enter into the author’s mind. Seas separate us from him—he knows us not; he never hears our names. But have we not a close relation to him? Is there not a strong bond of spiritual communion between us?” (201). For Chapin, the author’s material inaccessibility is no barrier to the reader’s contact with him. Reading allows subjects to recreate the absent author, and it is for this reason that it forms an appropriate analogue to the grieving process. Chapin, in fact, goes on to argue that the relation between reader and author is potentially more intimate and satisfying than face-to-face dynamics: may not the intercourse we thus have with him be better and truer than any which we could have from actual contact,—from local acquaintance? Then, some icy barrier of etiquette might separate us,—some coldness of temperament upon his part,—some spleen or disease; we might be shocked by some temporary deformity;

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Ironically, Chapin reverses the trope of temperature that modern-day critics usually associate with “cold type.” Here, the real author may disappoint through “some icy barrier of etiquette . . . some coldness of temperament,” but through the book, “we know him, and commune with him most intimately.” Although Chapin articulates this soulful unity in purely virtuous and abstract terms (“noblest thoughts,” “spiritual affinities”), his vision is inflected by an ethos of nonconformity. After all, the “barrier of etiquette” that undergirds “actual contact” between individuals is, by Chapin’s account, precisely what is absent in reading, thereby allowing for more extravagant and unregulated association.75 In the same way, Chapin continues, we might understand relations with the dead as more fulfilling than face-to-face dynamics with the living. For as Chapin lectures, “What are the conditions of our communion with the living—those with whom we come in material contact? The eye, the lip, the hand, are but symbols, interpretations;—behind these it is only spirit that communes with spirit, even in the market or the street” (201). Chapin’s language in this passage performs a similar reversal as above. The parts of the body usually associated with authentic communication (“the eye, the lip, the hand”) are abstracted as mere “symbols” and “interpretations,” while genuine contact is achieved only in the silent meeting of immaterial mind. Contact with the dead, Chapin implies, bypasses the clumsy paraphernalia of the body and ultimately leads to deeper interpersonal bonding: “Nearer . . . than we imagine—close as in mortal contact, and more intimately—may be those whom we, with earthly vision, behold no more” (207–8). And yet, despite Chapin’s attempts to divest this communion of bodily presence (“earthly vision”), there remains always a vestige of materiality to our contact with the dead (captured, in part, through his language of proximity: “near,” “close,” “more intimately”). Chapin reinforces this point in another passage: Christianity has taught us to look away from the ghastly secrets of the sepulchre, and not consider that changing clay as the friend we mourn, but as only the cast-off and mouldering garment. It has

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kindled within us a lively appreciation of the continued existence of those who have gone from us; taught us to feel that the thoughts, the love, the real life of the departed, all, in fact, that communed with us here below, still lives and acts. And our relations to them are the relations which we bear, not to abstractions of memory, to phantoms of by-gone joy, but to spiritual intelligences, whose current of being flows on uninterrupted, with whose current of being our own mingles. (204–5)

Contesting their status as “abstractions of memory,” Chapin insists on the vitality of the dead, their “continued existence” as a “current of being,” capable of mingling with our own. His language grows increasingly sensual as he imagines mourners in ecstatic oneness with departed loved ones: “Possessing as we do this mysterious nature, throbbing with the attraction of the eternal sphere, who shall say that it touches no spiritual confines,—that it has communion only with the beings that we see?” (205). Here, Chapin even alludes to a tactile dimension of mourning—the “touch” that undergirds our contact with the spirit world. Such claims countermand his earlier assertion that physicality exists only in the “sepulchre” or “changing clay.” They create the fantasy that bodies persist in the spirit world and that human contact is all the more authentic for its existence on the paranormal plane. For Chapin, reading and mourning are analogous practices, potentially more intimate than face-to-face interactions and retaining an element of material sensuality, despite the coldness and abstraction associated with both type and spirit. In drawing attention to the dynamics of reading, Chapin teaches nineteenth-century subjects to understand death and to minimize its implications for loss. Stated slightly differently, insofar as reading involved contact with an absent, inaccessible author, it served as a model for grief work. For if physical distance and chronological time are, to cite Chapin again, no obstacle to “that living communion of the spirit” (202), if by reading, we are able to recreate the absent author as a real physical presence, then death, too, becomes a permeable boundary, able to be transcended by the mourner’s love. Chapin’s comments remind us that reading ought not to be regarded as merely compensatory, as an “illusory, print-oriented connectedness that could pass as community.”76 On the contrary, given the formidable proscriptions that characterized actual social relations—where individuals are separated by what Chapin calls “some icy barrier of etiquette”—reading offered a space for unrestrained coupling. Perhaps

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this helps to explain Noah Porter’s statement that “a good book is of more value to the world than a good man” or why Melville insisted that “on a personal interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader.”77 For many in the nineteenth century, books were not the compromised alternative to actually existing relations, but rather a new locus of affective experience, a libidinally charged domain where the antiseptic restrictions placed on nineteenth-century social life no longer obtained.

Mesmeric Influences Although reading, like spiritualism, could foster an image of ecstatic harmony, it was also capable of slipping into something more treacherous. Given the fact that books were not true interlocutors, capable of recognizing and responding to alterity, reading always carried the threat of domination, either in the form of misappropriation of the authorial message or (the more common anxiety) invasion of the reader’s consciousness. Noah Porter writes of the “mysterious influence that dilates [the reader’s] eye and kindles his cheek, and sends madness through his frame.”78 He adds later, “The most confiding friend and enraptured lover are rarely more completely taken captive in thought and feeling, than are the readers of some fascinating writer, who is for the time being in the ascendant.”79 This “ascendant” position was particularly characteristic of novelists, who exercised a “complete control over their readers. . . . No enchantment is so entire as that with which they invest the story which they recite. It is a very glamour which they pour not only over the scenes which they depict, but over the senses of the beholder.”80 Sounding an even more dire note, another commentator writes, “that which attracts and moves the people, is a literary power; sometimes, alas! an evil power—the power of genius burning into the heart its own intense and unholy passion, or fascinating the intellect with its splendid sophistries.” The “bad book” he continues, goes down “from generation to generation, to inject its poison and to leave its scars.”81 What is at stake in these pronouncements is nothing less than the reader’s subjectivity, that which authorial mastery threatens to dissolve. One anonymous commentator warned, “So well aware was Goethe of the potency and the all-subordinating nature of the thought of a great thinker to paralyze the mental action of a reader, that he dared not trust himself to read more than one play of Shakespeare’s in a year, lest he should disturb his own mental equipoise.”82 Similarly, in his diary, James Hadley often described books as exerting

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a force that he, as reader, could not resist: “Late in the evening took up Bulwer’s Night and Morning, which laid hold of me with its charm and kept me up till 1 o’clock.”83 The problem for Hadley resides in the submission of the reader to a single authorial voice, a threat that he locates not simply in fiction: “Biography is excellent reading. But then there should be enough of it, to present all forms of excellence. He who confines himself to a single great life .  .  . swamps his own individuality and makes himself ridiculous.” In other words, autonomy is to be preserved only by resisting the power of the biographer to define all of life by the one he details. Hadley concludes, “it is safer to trust the resultant action of many combined forces than the single influence of one overmastering impulse.”84 Although anxieties about the overwhelming influence of authors can be traced back to the ancients,85 they gained special currency in the nineteenth century, when Americans were increasingly preoccupied with issues of psychic and bodily domination. Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) perhaps contributed to this fascination more than any other thinker. Lecturing in Paris before the arrival of spiritualism on the American scene, Mesmer embraced many of the same metaphysical premises as his spiritualist successors, but with more dangerous implications. According to his theory of animal magnetism, all individuals had within them a magnetic fluid coursing around and through their bodies and connecting them to each other and to the greater universe. Sickness and bodily dysfunction resulted when the flow of this ethereal medium was blocked by an “obstacle.” Mesmer’s remedy consisted in the use of magnets and later merely “passes” of his hands over the body’s “poles.” Such massaging or “mesmerizing” functioned to induce a crisis in the patient (often in the form of seizures or somnambulist trances), which worked to remove pathological symptoms and reestablish the patient’s health.86 The magnetic fluid that existed in and around the body could thus be controlled and regulated by a strong opposing magnetic presence (like that of Mesmer), producing sympathy or “rapport” between doctor and patient. That Mesmer’s clients were usually women contributed to the seductive overtones that came to characterize the discourse of mesmeric unity.87 Following investigations in 1784 by a royal commission (in which Mesmer’s claims for a universal magnetized fluid were examined and discredited), Mesmer left Paris, wandering disconsolate in Europe before dying in relative obscurity in 1815. But thanks to disciples like the Marquis de Puységur and Charles Poyen, Mesmer became a cause célèbre in nineteenth-century America.

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His followers retained Mesmer’s interest in “magnetic attraction” and “influence” while moving away (although never entirely) from his emphasis on fluids. They increasingly focused on somnambulist states—at no time the primary focus for Mesmer himself—and the special connection that resulted between doctor and patient.88 As Robert C. Fuller puts it, “With Puységur magnetic healing took a wholly new direction, one leading straight to the subconscious mind.”89 The turn toward modern psychology was continued by Puységur’s student Charles Poyen, who disseminated this new breed of mesmerism across the Atlantic. Arriving in New England in 1836 and speaking to mass audiences, Poyen succeeded in entrancing volunteers who then performed various clairvoyant wonders—reading the minds of others, diagnosing diseases, communicating with the dead, and so forth. Such displays made for great theater, but for Poyen, this was beside the point. He believed that mesmerism was a science that could promote human happiness, and he augured that such practices would make America “the most perfect nation on earth.”90 His teachings were readily taken up by an American public beleaguered by urban-industrial expansion and attracted to utopian reform movements. But there were also skeptics, who alternately cried humbug and fretted about the mesmerist’s capacity to invade and compromise the integrity of the individual.91 The best-known example of a literary skeptic is, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who famously wrote of “magnetic miracles”: “it seems to me that the sacredness of an individual is violated by it.”92 The House of the Seven Gables (1851) contains multiple scenes of mesmerism, including one in which the virginal Phoebe Pyncheon becomes so enthralled by the storyteller Holgrave that her very breath is regulated by his. Her entranced state mimics not only that of her ancestor, Alice Pyncheon, mesmerized by the wizard Matthew Maule, but also that of Alice’s father, who is captivated by another kind of wizardy. As Hawthorne’s narrator tells us, during his daughter’s seduction Gervayse Pyncheon “had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and sun-streaked vista penetrated . . . remotely into an ancient wood.”93 The rhetoric of absorption and penetration that attends this scene of artistic viewing seems an analogue to the mesmeric activity happening to Alice simultaneously. Indeed, the narrator adds, so ambiguously beguiling was the Claude painting “that it would have been no wonder if [Gervayse Pyncheon’s] fancy had lost itself in the picture’s bewildering depths” (175). While the narrator clarifies that “in truth, the picture was no more to him, at that moment, than the blank wall against which it hung” (175), his very

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comparison of the painting to a “blank wall” reinforces the sense of lost abstraction that can attend artistic contemplation. Art, in other words, is capable of mesmerizing no less than wizards, a point reinforced by the fact that Matthew Maule is himself an artist—described at various points as a “craftsman” (165) or “artisan” (174). Hawthorne would seem to register a deep distrust of artistry here, a skepticism about its capacity either to seduce into acquiescence or to distract into complacency. Hawthorne continues to thematize art’s mesmeric power in the chapter entitled “Governor Pyncheon,” where the narrator addresses the dead corpse of the novel’s most menacing presence, Judge Pyncheon. Although the judge’s expiration has all but been established, the narrator’s language importantly connects his deep repose to a state of magnetism. He is seated with a “fixed gaze” in what seems to be a “profound . . . fit of meditation.” What is more, “His eyes are open,” leaving him vulnerable to some “mischief-maker” who might “peep through these windows into his consciousness” (230). In the pages that follow, the narrator issues a series of mocking commands that further work to reproduce the mesmeric encounter: “Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, now!” (234); “Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!” (243). These authorial injunctions recall Matthew Maule’s own mesmeric directives (“Alice, laugh!” [180]), suggesting that Hawthorne’s narrator is a latter-day Maule and that writing itself is a form of magnetic wizardry.94 What is striking about this episode is that Hawthorne’s attitude toward mesmeric enchantment appears to shift here, with the practice having potential benefits that need to be considered. This change in perspective is signaled, in part, through the narrator’s increased attention to his audience in this chapter. Alongside the imperative commands and second-person observations directed at the judge (“Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day” [237]), the narrator interposes comments to his reader—also addressed as “you.” Remarking on the judge’s curious state of immobility, for example, the narrator insists: “You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible” (230). In hailing the reader and directing him to assume a state of correspondence with the judge—both at that moment with breath held and inaudible—Hawthorne assumes an authorial control directed at both his characters and his readership. Stated slightly differently, in “Governor Pyncheon,” the dead judge becomes the medium through which Hawthorne establishes a sympathy or rapport with his readers. As Matthew Maule magnetized Alice so as to create a medium through which he and Gervayse

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Pyncheon might communicate with the dead, so does Hawthorne, in a macabre rewriting of the nineteenth-century séance, make use of a “mesmerized” judge to establish communication with—and control over—an audience of readers. His rapport with these readers is signaled in this chapter through a marked increase in the use of the first person plural, deployed particularly to signal successful communication—“we understand” (234), “we have all heard” (236), “we . . . may harken” (237), “we discern” (241). In this way, Hawthorne constitutes an audience in complete assent with his own insights and feelings. Thus while Hawthorne claimed to despise the effects of mesmerism, it remains a persistent metaphor for the desired communion between author and reader. This contradictory strain in Hawthorne’s novel—wherein the discourse of mesmerism is sometimes denounced, sometimes accommodated—is also apparent in the advice manuals of Joseph Cook and Hamilton Mabie. As discussed in Chapter 1, cultural authorities like Cook and Mabie emphasized systematization and self-control in reading. And yet, at times the discourse of mesmeric unity also made its way into their texts, complicating their notions of readerly agency. In his essay “How to Preserve the Results of Home Reading,” for example, Cook counsels the following: When one is absorbingly interested in a theme the mind becomes strangely receptive, and draws to itself, as a magnet gathers up iron filings, all information within its reach as to the topic in hand. The best rule for the acquisition and the preservation of information is to make the mind magnetic by acquiring profound interest in a theme. Possibly your intellectual enthusiasm may limit itself to one topic for a long while. A specialist may become lynx-eyed, and yet, by reason of exclusive attention to a single subject, also remain walleyed. Endeavor, therefore, to excite in yourself two enthusiasms, in order that there may be both a north and a south pole in the magnet of your intellect.95

Cook’s advice that readers encourage “both a north and a south pole in the magnet of your intellect” recalls Franz Mesmer’s interest in the “poles” of the human body, freed up by his own magnetic touch. Indeed, the idea that readers should avoid “one topic for a long while” lest they become “wall-eyed,” or dim-sighted, seems a version of the “obstacle” that Mesmer posited as causing pathology in his patients. And yet, in Cook’s estimation it is not the author

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or book that controls the flow of magnetic fluid but the reader herself—she who endeavors to “make the mind magnetic” and “excite . . . enthusiasms.” Cook’s reader is thus both mesmerized patient and magnetic doctor, “strangely receptive” to the influence of the book and yet able to direct the flow of information, “as a magnet gathers up iron fillings.” A similar ambiguity can be glimpsed in the writing of Cook’s colleague Hamilton Mabie. In his essay “The Art of Reading,” Mabie advises readers thus: To get the best results from reading one must give himself up to it. For the time being every object but the printed page must be forgotten. One must be entirely abstracted from his surrounding. This .  .  . involves an amount of mental discipline which one naturally shrinks from. There is, however, the widest difference in results between reading with a mind continually diverted by the things that are going on around one, and reading with a mind intently and absorbingly fixed on the subject in hand.96

The parallels with mesmerism are most obvious when Mabie’s prescriptions are compared to those issued by Joseph Philippe François Deleuze, another disciple of Mesmer with a following in America. In his book Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, translated into the English in 1837, Deleuze instructs the would-be mesmerist to approach his patient in the following way: “Demand of him, in the first place, that he give himself up entirely.”97 The patient, he explains further, must acquire “the habit of concentrating his attention, and of abstracting himself from every thing foreign to the object he has in view.” He must yield himself entirely “to the action of magnetism, without being distracted by other ideas.”98 Both authors, then, insist on complete submission and on removing one’s self from outside influences. And yet for Mabie, giving oneself up to the book means “reading with a mind intently and absorbingly fixed on the subject in hand.” That is, submission paradoxically entails “an amount of mental discipline,” so that the reader remains the ultimate arbiter of his own absorption. The presence of mesmeric discourse within the descriptions of Cook and Mabie testifies to its popularity as a way of understanding and talking about reading in the nineteenth century. Even those authorities who advocated for readerly agency incorporated the language of mesmeric attraction, arguing that magnetic control could reside as much in the disciplined and attentive reader as in the author. Echoing these claims, J. B. Braithwaite criticizes those “listless tri-

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flers” who take up books in a “feeble attempt to think, as it were, by proxy.” The remedy for this, he proclaims, is a “sound and healthy PURPOSE” in reading: “This is the magnet that can discover and gather to itself, even from the dust, the scattered particles within the range of its attraction.”99 Braithwaite’s vision here is of the purposeful reader as “magnet,” creating an aggregate self out of the scattered particles of the book and, perhaps, out of the dead author himself (“even from the dust”), without sacrificing his own autonomy. In this description, the joys of author-reader communion can be had, without any cost to the integrity of the self. Thus, Braithwaite, Mabie, and Cooke do not reject the discourse of mesmeric attraction celebrated by nineteenth-century audiences, but rather deploy it toward their own ends. In their accounts it is the highly trained reader who determines the process by which he becomes fused with the book.

The Death of the Author Modern articulations of the reading experience, especially as generated by the academy, share some of the preoccupations of nineteenth-century readers and cultural commentators, but they also divert from their expressions in significant ways. Georges Poulet begins his well-known 1966 essay, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” by imagining reading as an intrusion into the authorial psyche: [In taking up a book,] I am aware of a rational being, of a consciousness; the consciousness of another, no different from the one I automatically assume in every human being I encounter, except that in this case the consciousness is open to me, welcomes me, lets me look deep inside itself, and even allows me, with unheard-of license, to think what it thinks and feel what it feels.100

For Poulet, books provide access to alterity, since here “consciousness is open to me, welcomes me.” In entering this consciousness, however, the reader also allows the book to enter him. As Peter Schwenger glosses it, “Otherness is no longer outside, in the material pages of the book; it constitutes itself ‘inside’ the reading subject.”101 The result for Poulet is a complete dissolution of the borders between self and text: “You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside.”102 This merged state creates a profound intimacy but also a sense of terror: “As soon as I replace my direct perception of

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reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. . . . I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover.”103 While Poulet stops short of imagining reading as complete loss of consciousness, he maintains that the reader’s autonomy is necessarily compromised by the invading force of the author: “Reading, then, is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me.”104 Poulet presents a vision of authorial ascendancy that renders readers possessed, a characterization that has been reinforced, to varying degrees, by some (psychoanalytically oriented) critics who follow him. Victor Nell writes that implicit in the “spell of storytelling is the narrator’s own sense of power, the awareness that a recalcitrant audience may be bent to one’s will and swayed by one’s moods.”105 William Gass adds that the “purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are that patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has constructed.”106 And Charles Bernheimer adds that “the fusion of the self and other in the act of reading is the result of a temporary spell.”107 Fusion, spell, trance: these are the terms twentieth-century critics, echoing their nineteenth-century forebears, have deployed in characterizing the reading process. They are terms that privilege the authorial mind over and above the creative contribution of the reader, who by and large reflects or recreates the writer’s vision. But they are also terms that invoke the pleasure and sense of deep connection that reading can engender, and it is for this reason that many of these thinkers are psychoanalytic in orientation, imagining reading as reproducing a primal fusion with the mother. Richard Gerrig and David Rapp have argued that reading is best understood in terms of the metaphor of “being transported,” a locution that reinforces both the passive and the therapeutic aspects of the activity.108 Partly in response to this position, other thinkers have emphasized the autonomy of the reader and her creative participation, in addition to pointing out the extra-authorial dimensions of the text (its size, format, font, and so forth) that might influence the reading experience. In her 1932 essay “How Should One Read a Book?” Virginia Woolf articulated an early version of the readerresponse position: “We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our own identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I

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love,’ and we cannot silence him.”109 The whispering “demon” is that internal force that resists the “sink” into complete alterity. That the demon cannot be silenced indicates that reading necessarily involves a degree of differentiation on the part of the reader, who can make independent pronouncements (“I hate, I love”) and also, of course, close the book at will. Woolf ’s description implicitly invokes the concept of aesthetic distance, crucial by Kant’s account for exercising judgment or critique. As J. Brooks Bouson puts it, while the reader may “feel temporarily merged with and carried away by a text . . . the critic distances, reifies, and appropriates.”110 Accordingly, no artistic entrancement is ever complete. There is always a “remnant ego . . . maintaining the individual’s reality orientation.”111 This focus on individual discernment is a far cry from the fusional ideal articulated by Poulet and other psychoanalytically minded scholars. Recognizing these oscillating critical tendencies toward identification and distance, oneness with the author and differentiation from him, Andrew Bennett characterizes reading as “a question of impossible identity.”112 In the last half-century, however, this “impossible identity” has been resolved squarely on the side of differentiation and critique—the triumph of the reader-as-critic. This development can be traced to “the death of the author,” a phenomenon largely initiated by the Anglo-American New Critics.113 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, for example, reacting against the Romantic supposition that art is the reflection of the “impassioned feelings” and “lively sensibility” of the author,114 established the intentional fallacy, whereby the author was merely incidental to the text. Not only were his designs and intentions irrelevant “as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art,” but he himself was no longer the ultimate arbiter of the poem’s meaning. For Wimsatt and Beardsley the poem is “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public.”115 This, of course, is not to deny the originating force of the author. As Cleanth Brooks puts it, “The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and plays and novels are written by men . . . that they are written as expressions of particular personalities and are written from all sorts of motives,” but for Brooks as for others, “the formalist critic is concerned primarily with the work itself ” and not with any biographical impulse behind it.116 Investigation of the author’s life can only cloud one’s understanding of his art, because literature is, in T. S. Eliot’s oft-quoted formulation, “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”117 While the New Critics hardly celebrated the role of the reader (indeed, they

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railed equally against an “affective fallacy” that would privilege individual responses to a literary work), their ideas set the stage for the reader’s resurrection. For once the author is eliminated as the locus of a text’s meaning and existence, it is the reader who must emerge as a central organizing principle. As Roland Barthes explains, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures . . . but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author . . . a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”118 Although Barthes’s liberationist account of the reader (and text) freed from the “limits” imposed by the author has been contested by other scholars (most famously Michel Foucault), his announcement of the “birth of the reader” has been crucial for audience-centered scholarship.119 This criticism has taken a number of different forms but has generally emphasized the triumph of reception practices over the authorial role. It has not only argued for the active participation of readers (something that nineteenth-century authorities likewise emphasized), but also—and this is what is new—it has stressed the struggle inherent in the reading process, in which readers vie with authors for the creation of meaning.120 To give only a few examples from the past forty years, the agonistic orientation of this criticism is recognizable in Harold Bloom’s claims that poets “misread” their forebears to establish creative eminence over them; in Michel de Certeau’s notion of reading as “poaching,” an activity in which the reader “invents in texts something different from what they ‘intended’”; in Judith Fetterly’s insistence that women be “resisting readers” so as to survive in the “masculine wilderness of the American novel”; in Elizabeth McHenry’s characterization of African American reading habits as a strategy for “question[ing] established literary standards and traditional literary values”; and in Brett Farmer’s claim that “gay spectators habitually reorder conventional patterns of textual organization to resist and reject” dominant paradigms.121 These accounts assume, contra Poulet, the absence of authorial superintendence. They imagine (in the words of Cavallo and Chartier) “that reading is not already inscribed in the text; that it is not true that there is no imaginable gap between the meaning assigned to it (by the author of the text or its editor, by criticism, by tradition, etc.) and the use or interpretation that readers may make of it.”122 But they also gainsay this point through their emphasis on readerly resistance. Audience-centered criticism, in other words, begs a question: If the author is really dead, why the profound struggle? Rehabilitating the author may be the first step in rethinking the adversarial stance that has come to characterize contemporary accounts of reading. For as

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Barthes himself wrote, in a line less popularly cited, “The pleasure of the Text also includes the amicable return of the author.”123 While this author-centered approach to reading has fallen out of favor in the contemporary academy,124 it was a mainstay of nineteenth-century intellectual thought, as evidenced in the work of German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his landmark publication Hermeneutics (1819–28), Schleiermacher describes reading (and other forms of communication) as incorporating both grammatical and psychological elements. The first involves decoding “what is said in the context of the language with all its possibilities”; the second, more psychological aspect involves the knowledge that speech/writing emanates from human subjectivity and is therefore a reflection, first and foremost, of a human life.125 Schleiermacher explains that because “Every act of speaking is based on something having been thought,” understanding follows only when the interpreter is able to “grasp the thinking that underlies a given statement” as well as “the subjective element determining the composition of thoughts.”126 Thus to read in this “divinatory” manner is not merely to decode meaning but also to plumb the author’s subjectivity, to recognize his words as a reflection of a complex inner life in process. Although Schleiermacher is often heralded as the founder of hermeneutics, his conception of this practice emphasizes less interpretation or sense-making than what he calls “understanding.” A deeply subjective process, “understanding” makes use of both cognition and feeling, calling upon readers to intuit the personality behind the words on the page, so as to comprehend not simply the message but the “spirit” of the text. Schleiermacher’s method of reading, as Thomas McCarthy has pointed out, implicitly invokes the mechanics of sympathy or imaginative projection.127 “Before the art of hermeneutics can be practiced,” Schleiermacher writes, “the interpreter must put himself both objectively and subjectively in the position of the author.”128 In so doing, the reader is able to “reproduce the whole internal process of an author’s way of combining thoughts” and thereby experiences a wholeness that closes the hermeneutic circle.129 While Schleiermacher has been extensively critiqued by those who object to his Romanticized conception of reading—Hans-Georg Gadamer famously revised “the miracle of understanding” as participation in common meaning rather than the “mysterious communion of souls”130—Schleiermacher’s model remains relevant because of its fantasy of fused subjectivity (more intimate than the notion of “fusion of horizons”). His author-centered scheme helps to explain what creates satisfaction (and not just meaning) in the reading process, and it accords with the sentiments of other nineteenth-century read-

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ers, whose interest in books stemmed from an interest in the “breathing and suffering man” who wrote them.131 For these readers the “death of the author” was an opportunity not for liberation (and the identitarian claims that often accompany it), but rather for intimate union through the act of reading, a way of turning absence into felt presence.

Coda: The Death of the Reader Books, I have been arguing, were a potent realm for intimacy. Despite their distribution to thousands, they were recognized by nineteenth-century readers as deeply personal communications, the touch of which could conjure up the hand of the long-dead author. But relations to books were not merely dyadic, limiting themselves to reader and writer. As Alberto Manguel reminds us, “Implicit in the possession of a book is the history of the book’s previous readings—that is to say, every new reader is affected by what he or she imagines the book to have been in previous hands.”132 It is for this reason that the nineteenth-century British writer Charles Lamb celebrates the “sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance . . . the very odour” of old novels from a circulating library: “How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered. . . . Who would have them a whit less soiled?”133 In Lamb’s estimation, the authenticity of the novel resides as much in the bodily reinscriptions of readers—what he elsewhere describes as the “topography of [a book’s] blots and dog’s-ears, . . . the dirt [it holds from] having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe”—as in the original writing of the author.134 Thus even as the book creates profound understanding between reader and writer, it acquires a further richness—derived less from the hermeneutical operation than from sensual feeling and association—through knowledge of its historical handling. The reader recognizes in the used book the traces of another (the stranger, the friend, even the very reader herself at an earlier moment), and the book becomes revered as a material record of a human past. In this context, the books of dead readers were especially meaningful, and nineteenth-century bereavement literature is awash with images of these relics: “This book was thine—here didst thou read,” bemoans one mourner in a poem.135 “I sate me in her custom’d seat, / But there her book unopen’d lay,” laments another.136 For the bereaved, books belonging to dead loved ones were a material reminder of their absence, a way of marking the physical dif-

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ference that death makes (here apparent in the “unopen’d ” book). Moreover, books, to the extent that they could be re-read by mourners, were also capable of conjuring up the mental activity of the deceased, as is indicated in a phrase from the poem “The Widow’s Home”: “Oft in an open book I trace / Some passage by his taste approved.”137 Ronald Zboray has pointed out that in this way, books and other types of reading material were distinctive for their “near talismanic power.” Nothing else could “illuminate, as the lost and lamented magazine could have, the mental life of the dead.”138 Zboray cites a young woman’s misery that her own father’s books were not available to her as consolation following his death: “How I should have valued them!! I have not one single book that was my father’s, with his name written in it in his own hand, but a hymn book & that I value above price.” Referring to a friend whose lot was different, the young woman, Mary Pierce Poor, continues, “When I heard of Mrs Hall’s carrying home her portion of her father’s books I was too envious. Oh Lucy! my heart is always crying ‘My father oh my father shall I ever see you again?’”139 For Poor, books belonging to her father, particularly those inscribed by his hand and with his name, carry a metonymic link to the deceased, reflecting at once his unique signature and his ideational activity. Indeed, Poor’s final outburst to Lucy, following as it does her expression of anguish regarding her father’s absent books, suggests that the appearance of the material text might substitute for her father’s presence, allowing her to “see” him again. A variation on the spiritualist fantasy discussed earlier, the book here becomes the medium through which a reader accesses not a dead author but a dead reader. A similar vision is articulated by Noah Porter, who, likewise, was outraged that the personal libraries of the dead were not always preserved intact for future generations: It would seem, at least, that the disintegration of a beloved library which has been the outgrowth of a reading life and is itself a transcript of its history might sometimes be delayed a few months longer, out of decent respect to the associations with which it is hallowed.140

For Porter as for Poor, books of the dead retain a sacred connection to their owners, making them preternatural or occult instruments of mourning. Perhaps even more meaningful than the books belonging to the deceased

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were the books read at the moment of their death, since according to nineteenth-century commentators it was not uncommon for individuals to die “with a book in hand.”141 This book was often, of course, the Bible—“Clasp it when dying,” was the advice given by ministers142—but more secular books could also find their way into scenes of dissolution. The writer Anna Warner gives a poignant account of her Aunt Fanny reading stories aloud to her sister Susan during the latter’s final moments: So we sat, for the last time, till the afternoon faded, and it grew too dark to read. . . . The hours had been so sweet! I think there was a general breath of pleasure and regret, as the work was folded, and the book-mark put in place. It has never been moved since then.143

Anna’s description provides a powerful image of the reader arrested by death. The book-mark in its place, “never . . . moved since then,” seems an analogue to the reader’s own immobility, as if death has thrown both reader and text into a state of final repose. But if the unfinished book is a material reminder of the reader’s own physical demise, it also paradoxically suggests her continued existence, the proximity of a reader still in process. To be sure, as Anna reports, in the period following her sister’s death, books became crucial in reinforcing Susan’s presence: “still, unconsciously, I say ‘we,’ and ‘ours.’ And if I write on the fly leaf of a book, it is often the two names together, as they used to be. Only when some sharp earthly wind smites me in the face, then I cry out for joy, that it cannot reach her.”144 Anna’s sense of union with her sister—the unconscious “we” and “ours”—is realized by the dual signature of their names on the book’s fly-leaf. In this act of inscription—less a mark of ownership than a claim of mutual existence—the absent sister rematerializes as coreader. Occupying a realm far from the “sharp earthly wind” that serves as the only reminder of their separation, the sororal bond, rent by death, is reborn in the book. I will revisit the Warner sisters’ complicated relation to mortality and reading in Chapter 5. In the next chapter, I turn instead to the figure of Herman Melville. Like Anna Warner, Melville imagined reading as producing a desired communion between subjects, although for him the operating metaphor for writer-reader fusion was not death but incest. Melville embraced the incestuous union because it provided a figure both for communal experience and for transgressive rupture. It symbolized an eclectic author-reader dynamic, one that chafed against social norms even as it remained deeply invested in affective

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fraternity. Like mourning, then, incest symbolized the book’s promise of impossible union, but in a guise far less likely to meet with popular approval. My focus in the next chapter (and in those that follow) is on the myriad and messy examples of communion in reading as they were taken up by a select group of nineteenth-century American authors and represented in their literature. Examining the letters, journals, and literary works of these figures, I address the range of identifications and incorporations that reading could inspire, emphasizing the idiosyncratic and restorative aspects of textual communion. These aspects are crucial to Melville, Douglass, and Warner, who, in my analysis, all used reading and writing to explore relational dynamics otherwise inaccessible to them in the physical world. In this way, their literacy practices provided them with a rich sphere of fantasy in which to negotiate loss, rethink the boundaries of the self, and pursue the elusive other.

Chapter 3

h Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre

In November 1851, Herman Melville received a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne praising his most recent literary endeavor, Moby-Dick. Shortly thereafter, Melville composed his famous response to his friend. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book,” he confessed; and then continued: Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.1

For Melville, Hawthorne’s understanding of Moby-Dick (or more accurately, Melville’s projection of this understanding) inspired an intense corporeal bond, a connection so profound it resulted in a vision of merged subjectivity (“when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine”). In this fantasy, Hawthorne and he were not discrete individuals but “pieces” of an exalted common being or “Godhead,” joined by a mutuality of sentiment or “fraternity of feeling.” In recent years scholars have read Melville’s intense response to Hawthorne in a (homo)erotic register.2 While not wishing to displace this reading, I would like to suggest that we can arrive at a more complete understanding of this letter’s libidinal force by considering Melville’s larger fantasy of consubstantiality. As discussed in Chapter 2, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral philosophy posited that sympathy

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between individuals could result in the momentary experience of bodily merger. When we use the imagination to “place ourselves in [another’s] situation,” wrote Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.”3 Like Smith, Melville imagined a mental convergence with Hawthorne that led to a fantasy of physical unity. The erotic image of shared lips was one component of a larger sympathetic drama in which the boundaries between self, other, and world were dissolved. “Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours and both in God’s,” Melville continued in this same letter, drawing on a romantic trope to articulate a vision of mutual ensoulment and transcendent interbodily experience.4 But if Melville’s letter expressed the fantasy of consubstantiality, it did so, of course, in specific relation to issues of authorship and audience. Melville experienced writing as a profoundly solitary activity, one that was only offset by the discovery of a sympathetic reader. Although he scorned conventional patrons, “men who go straight from their cradles to their graves & never dream of the queer things going on at the antipodes,”5 he claimed a true devotion to a small group of followers, who both appreciated his work and articulated similar sentiments in their own writing. Hawthorne represented the epitome of this vision, a reader-writer with whom Melville might enjoy an absolute mutuality of feeling.6 Indeed, in the letter of November 1851, Melville wrote of the identification he experienced both in reading Hawthorne’s original letter to him and in envisioning Hawthorne reading the one he was composing in response.7 In an 1850 letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.—author of the sea novel Two Years Before the Mast—Melville confessed a fellowship that was similarly inspired. “My Dear Dana—” Melville began, I thank you very heartily for your friendly letter; and am more pleased than I can well tell, to think that any thing I have written about the sea has at all responded to your own impressions of it. . . . I am specially delighted at the thought, that those strange, congenial feelings, with which after my first voyage, I for the first time read “Two Years Before the Mast,” and while so engaged was, as it were, tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy—that these feelings should be reciprocated by you, in your turn, and be called out by any White Jackets or Redburns of mine [Melville’s 1850 and 1849 novels respectively]—this is indeed delightful to me.8

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Significant here is the way Melville imagines reading and writing as reciprocal activities that give way to an uncanny sense of oneness between participants. Melville invokes a set of dizzying narrative relays between the two men—“your friendly letter,” “any thing I have written about the sea,” “your own impressions of it,” “Two Years Before the Mast,” “White Jackets or Redburns of mine”—in which readers and writers continually reverse positions, affirming and reproducing one another’s experience. In the process they are imagined as psychically and somatically inseparable, “tied & welded . . . by a . . . Siamese link of affectionate sympathy.” This kind of profound author-reader attachment—or what I am calling Melville’s “textual sentimentalism”—is quite at odds with the staunch individualism expressed by Melville at other times. “I . . . prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man’s swing,” he wrote his friend and early editor Evert Duyckinck.9 Perceiving himself a literary maverick, Melville embraced the figure of the heroic artist over what he perceived to be the forces of mediocrity and imitation. He was particularly censorious of the culture of antebellum sentimentality, because he believed it subordinated idiosyncratic character to universal or common feeling. Sentimental discourse tends to function through the recognition of internal homogeneity, the belief that all hearts beat the same. People may appear different, sentimentalism tells us, but those differences mask an equal humanity, a universal capacity for grief and love.10 While for some antebellum writers, sentimentalism’s promise of similitude represented an egalitarian ideal,11 for Melville it tended to augur a stifling conformity. He mocked “agreeable parlor society,” for there “you lose your own sharp individuality” and become part of “that soft social Pantheism, as it were, that rosy melting of all into one, ever prevailing in those drawing rooms.”12 Believing that the sentimental rhetoric of unity was especially damaging to the writer, Melville championed an ethic of autonomy and nonconformity in prose. “Let us boldly contemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and fragrant as the morning,” he wrote in 1850, “and foster all originality, though, at first, it be crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots.”13 And yet, even as Melville extolled authorial iconoclasm, he reveled in the pleasures of mutual textual sensibility— the fellow writer who produced something that resonated with his experience or the reader who understood and appreciated his own authorial musings. Thus while he praised autonomous literary production, he also imagined the writer as spiritually and physically merged with a select sympathetic audience.14 This chapter addresses Melville’s acute desire for literary originality in the

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context of his equally consuming preoccupation with sympathetic, intercorporeal experience. The focus of my discussion will be Melville’s seventh novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), a work committed equally to questions of interpersonal attachment and issues of authorial creativity. Briefly, it is the bizarre story of a young man whose incestuous relation with his sister prompts him to author a profound, original, and ultimately failed book. Melville links incest with original authorship, I argue, and in so doing celebrates both social and aesthetic nonconformity. In the context of antebellum bourgeois culture, where exogamous relations serve to reproduce white middle-class homogeneity, incest, for Melville, paradoxically presents the possibility of newness and rupture. It signals a break from the conventions of sameness and thereby offers a metaphor for literary originality. At the same time, however, incest maintains a relational component, a commitment, perverse in its extremity, to the institution of family. Incest thus negotiates the tricky territory between autonomy and attachment for Melville. It is both an unconventional means of realizing familial kinship and a familial means of producing new and anomalous creations. In this way it harmonizes Melville’s desires as author, providing a figure for a creative process alternately informed by imaginative independence and deep communion with others.

Pierre and the Question of Parody In tying Pierre, at least in part, to a tradition of sentimentalism, I depart from the school of critics who read the novel in the register of parody.15 These scholars have pointed to Pierre’s overblown prose, its hyperbolic rendering of domestic manners, and its exaggerated portrait of genteel magazine culture to argue that the novel was a satiric production, a barbed critique of bourgeois politesse directed against a primarily female readership. A variation of this reading stresses Melville’s strategic sentimentalism. It posits that Pierre’s romanticfamilial plot was meant to engage superficial readers while the deeper elements of the book were aimed at his “true” audience.16 Such interpretations emphasize the writer’s aloofness and his authorial control, imagining Melville as alternatively mocking or hoodwinking a feckless readership. They do not, however, jibe with Melville’s personal correspondence. His 1852 letter to English editor Richard Bentley, for example, promises a “new book . . . very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work.”17

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This comment, along with Melville’s assurance to Sophia Hawthorne that his next book would not be “a bowl of salt water” (a reference to Moby-Dick) but rather “a rural bowl of milk,” more fitted to the tastes of women, seems to indicate that by 1852 Melville was interested in courting a wider audience and that he believed he had hit upon a formula for engaging a diverse body of readers.18 That he blundered is evidenced by the critical and commercial failure of Pierre. Still, if one takes him at his word, Melville would seem to be guilty of deeply misjudging the tastes of his readers but not of deliberately alienating them. The question of how to read Pierre (as sentimental or as a parody of the sentimental) is complicated by the fact that the very categories of sentimentalism and parody can themselves seem indistinguishable. Both feature an intense, exaggerated discourse. In Susan Warner’s best-selling novel, The Wide, Wide World, for example, the heroine breaks into hysterical sobbing 245 times, by one critic’s count.19 Her weeping episodes are performances of sorts, hyperbolic displays of affect rendered in protracted, swelling prose. If Melville meant Pierre as caricature, he would have found it difficult to “out-sentimentalize” masters of the form like Warner.20 Moreover, most contemporary reviewers of Pierre did not recognize it as parody, which perhaps indicates that readers were used to assimilating hyperbole into the sentimental reading experience.21 Indeed, it is unlikely that Pierre’s half-mocking tone would have jarred these readers, since many sentimental novels incorporated humor and self-critique. Both Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for example, poke fun at the bourgeois magazine culture in which they participated; in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe rejects the conventions of the sentimental novel (where “people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it”22), even as she delivers up this genre’s masterwork; and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand features two heroines, one of whom abides by sentimental conventions (crying, fainting, blushing), and the other of whom mocks them.23 These nods to parody had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing sentimental lessons. By incorporating satiric material, in other words, authors could demonstrate a self-consciousness about the sentimental plot while still delivering lessons on affective and relational experience. If sentimentalism often embraces self-mocking humor, and if evidence indicates that nineteenth-century readers were apt to interpret Pierre as a failed sentimental novel rather than as a removed and wholesale critique, why the persistent critical tendency to understand Melville’s intentions as exceptional and hostile? One reason, of course, is that such a reading tends to buttress a percep-

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tion of Melville as transgressive literary pioneer. As Lora Romero comments, “The highly contingent process of defining a classic tradition in part involved distinguishing it from what is not the classic tradition.” Understanding Pierre as parodic rather than sentimental, then, is a way of differentiating Melville from the many women who were purported to be writing sentimental fiction at the same time.24 In particular, reading Pierre as parody tends to reinforce Melville’s reputation as Romantic individualist. By understanding Melville’s interest in interpersonal experience and affinity of feeling only in terms of disavowal, in other words, critics succeed in superimposing unity and reconciling Pierre with the rest of Melville’s putatively individualist oeuvre.25 Reading Pierre as a paean to Romantic individualism, however, is problematic. Certainly parts of Pierre do make use of caricature to indict sentimental bourgeois culture, which Melville lambasted because he believed it promoted servile imitationism. But the image of the sovereign individual and especially that of the isolated author in Pierre do not make for more appealing alternatives. Indeed, as we shall see, these latter visions are invested with the full force of Melville’s antipathy. Tara Penry has written that in Pierre, Melville distinguishes between two kinds of sentimentality: “genuine affect and spurious, self-serving forms of propriety.” The latter Melville rejects as narcissistic and hypocritical, but the former he embraces as important ballast to Romantic solipsism. Pierre, Penry concludes, may at points be read as a celebration of social relatedness over isolated self-scrutiny.26 At other moments, the strength of Melville’s repudiation of sentimental attachment seems itself indicative of Melville’s deep (if vexed) investment in affective relations. One need only look to Freud’s concept of ambivalence to recognize that love may sometimes be accommodated only through manifest antipathy.27 In any case, it is clear that Melville’s disavowal of sentimentalism incorporates as much reverence as repudiation. This simultaneous embrace and repulse is most evident in his treatment of familial relations, to which I now turn.

The Logic of Incest With few exceptions, Pierre was received by Melville’s contemporaries with a mixture of miffed incomprehension and patronizing scorn. “Herman Melville Crazy,” blazed the headline of the New York Day Book. His latest book “appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman.”28 Reviewers were shocked by the incestuous content of the novel, its “hints at that fearfullest

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of all human crimes, which one shrinks from naming.”29 But they were equally offended by Melville’s antics with language, which George Washington Peck described in the American Whig Review as “Word piled upon word, and syllable heaped upon syllable, until the tongue grows as bewildered as the mind.” Peck felt it his “duty” to present some of Melville’s “extraordinary concoctions,” listing twenty-one examples of the author’s “eccentricities of composition” (such as “Flushfulness,” “Uncapitulatable,” “Unemigrating”). Peck was even more discomfited by Melville’s use of “word-combinations,” his tendency to pair language that “We cannot, by any mental processes hitherto discovered, induce our reasoning faculties to accept.” Citing the example of Pierre “stammer[ing] in his attitudes,” Peck contemptuously suggests that perhaps “It was an old-fashioned idea that the disease of stammering was usually confined to the organs of speech. In modern times,” he continues, “. . . we shall no doubt, soon hear of ‘stuttering legs’ and ‘a man with a hesitation in his arm.’ Nor do we see why . . . a man should not have a ‘club tongue’ or ‘bunions upon his conversation’!”30 I have cited this last review at length as an example of how the thematic objections to Melville’s novel could dovetail with the linguistic. Historically, incest has been perceived as a crime of social organization, an improper pairing of individuals who ought, by sacred decree, to remain disassociated.31 In breaching the “limits of poetical propriety” with his unlikely “word-combinations,”32 Melville would seem to recapitulate the crime of incest in his very language: he “allow[s] his mind to run riot amid remote analogies,” and the result is “infelicities of language” and implausible associations.33 Crimes of nature and crimes of writing are inseparable in the Pierre reviews. Melville’s “chaotic state of authorship”34 is, then, another effect of his preoccupation with incestuous themes, his insistence on pairing the unpairable. The contemporary reviews reiterate a point made in Pierre itself—that the problem of incest is in part a problem of language. A brief summary of Pierre may be useful in illustrating this point. The hero of Melville’s novel is the only son of the great Glendinning dynasty and the sole heir to the family name and fortune. Having lost his father at the age of twelve, Pierre lives alone with his mother, a proud beauty who has sworn off all suitors, believing “a reverential and devoted son . . . lover enough” (5). As if to intensify this oedipal drama, Melville adds a further curio. “In the playfulness of their unclouded love,” he writes of Pierre and his mother, “. . . they were wont to call each other brother and sister. Both in public and private this was their usage” (5). Unfortunately, however, the “fictitious title” (7) Pierre lavishes upon his mother hardly com-

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pensates for the absence of a true sister, and Pierre “mourned that so delicious a feeling as fraternal love had been denied him” (7). Save for the tragic fact that “a sister had been omitted from the text,” Pierre’s “scroll of life” is a “sweetly-writ manuscript” (7). Engaged to marry the lovely and virtuous Lucy, he knows only the “undisturbed moral beauty of the world” (65). All this is altered upon the receipt of a letter from Isabel Banford, a swarthy working-class girl, who alleges that Pierre’s father is also her own. Convinced that the claims of an illegitimate daughter would destroy his haughty mother, Pierre opts for “a most singular act of pious imposture, . . . to assume before the world, that by secret rites, Pierre Glendinning was already become the husband of Isabel Banford” (173). Through such a contrivance, Pierre hopes to lend succor to his sister while maintaining the integrity of the Glendinning name. His extraordinary proposal, “namely, the nominal conversion of a sister into a wife,” perhaps had its germ “in the previous conversational conversion of a mother into a sister; for hereby,” the narrator clarifies, Pierre “had habituated his voice and manner to a certain fictitiousness in one of the closest domestic relations of life” (177). As this recapitulation makes clear, incest and imaginative fiction work in tandem for Melville. Pierre’s incestuous activity consists in his bestowing upon his sister the “fictitious title” of wife. This “nominal conversion” is modeled on an earlier transformation: the mother renamed as “sister.” Indeed, in pointing to the continuity of these two fantasies (the fact that the conversion of sister into wife had its germ in the conversion of mother into sister), Melville implies that there is little difference between them. Both are conceived as incestuous because incest here suggests a rewriting of normative familial relationships.35 In Pierre’s other domestic arrangements, a similar logic is at work. For example, when he likens his mother to royalty and refers to himself as “First Lady in waiting to the Dowager Duchess Glendinning” (14), Pierre indulges in a cross-gender and cross-class identification that is structurally similar to his fantasy of incest—a renaming of social relations and a revision of the self in variable and perverse connection to others. Pierre “wishes to uphold the just and true,” writes one angry reviewer, “and to do this he commences by stating a lie—his marriage with Isabel.”36 The crime of incest, then, is as Roland Barthes has written a “transgress[ion of ] the semantic rule.”37 It consists not so much in genital contact between members of the same family, but rather in “stating a lie”—the fictional transformation of mother into sister or sister into wife. “Mother and son, brother and sister are sacred facts” writes

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another reviewer, perhaps by way of emphasizing the dangers of Melville’s fictitious speculations.38 But what was the allure of these speculations for Melville? If, in other words, the incestuous content of Pierre consisted, in part, of reimagined familial relations (the mother as sister; the sister as wife), what was it about such fantasies that proved so appealing? Perhaps a partial answer may be located in the constraining conditions of nineteenth-century American family life. As historians of this period have noted, merchant capitalism and industrial development during the early 1800s contributed to a division of labor and an insularization of the family. Whereas the eighteenth-century household was characterized by an “economic and productive interdependence of all members of a family,” the nineteenth-century household was more rigidly segmented: labor became specialized, men and women took on distinct domestic functions, and children were, by and large, excluded from the economic productivity of the family.39 In this way antebellum bourgeois society lost some of the social fungibility associated with an earlier agrarian period, where roles and interactions were more fluid. Melville’s fantasy of incest in Pierre involved a reimagining of familial relations as shifting and liminal. Thinking of the mother as the sister or of the sister as the wife, in other words, became a way to contest the regimented, compulsory identities that were ossifying around and within the antebellum nuclear family. But to posit incest merely as that which Melville embraced in the face of the repressive Victorian family is to miss the extent to which Melville imagined that family as itself already incestuously configured. For even before Isabel enters the picture, Pierre is destined to marry his sibling. After all, it is Lucy, his betrothed, who most resembles Pierre in appearance, and it is she whom he first calls “sister” (29). The endogamous nature of Lucy and Pierre’s relationship is confirmed near the novel’s end, when Lucy, ever loyal to her lover, resolves to live with Pierre and Isabel both. “Let it seem, as though I were some nunlike cousin immovably vowed to dwell with thee in thy strange exile,” she begs Pierre (310). In agreeing to “let it seem” as though Lucy and he were family, Pierre once again uses a fiction to establish an incestuous relation. If he begins by renaming his sister (Isabel) as his “wife,” he ends by renaming his erstwhile wife (Lucy) as his “sister.” In presenting Pierre as always already incestuous, Melville reveals the contradictions and hypocrisy that subtended Victorian social relations. Although marriage in the nineteenth century was partially understood as a departure from the private world of the immediate family, it was also defined and restricted in

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terms of that family. Popular advice manuals of the antebellum period attest to this thinking. In The Physiology of Marriage, for example, William Alcott writes that “love of the opposite sex . . . is a revival or renewal of the family love, with something superadded. . . . Its leading design is to secure a brother or sister as a help-meet . . . to form a brotherhood or sisterhood for life.”40 Alcott’s recommendations were meant partly to foster respect between marriage partners and partly to deeroticize conjugal relations. An adherent to the “spermatic economy” model of masculine sexuality, wherein lost fluid was thought to deplete a man both physically and intellectually, Alcott counseled libidinal restraint within the bounds of marriage.41 He was still more concerned about the prospect of extramarital sex; and here, again, the antidote was to domesticate social relations, that is, to articulate them within the context of the immediate family. Addressing the prevalence of seduction, Alcott expostulates, “Are we not all of one family? Are we not all brothers and sisters? . . . And are we not bound . . . to be the keepers rather than the seducers or traducers of our brethren?”42 By encouraging men to imagine all women as their sisters, Alcott attempted to channel sexual desire into fraternal protection.43 While Alcott counseled young people to treat the larger society like the immediate family, he simultaneously advised that they understand sibling ties as training grounds for marital relations. In his immensely popular Young Man’s Guide, for example, he encouraged his male readers to study their sisters and mothers for insight into the opposite sex. As escorts and attendants, young men will at once show respect to family members and learn the rituals of courtship.44 Alcott’s contemporary O. S. Fowler was even more direct in his recommendations: Every son, “Behold thy mother!” Make love to her, and her your first sweetheart. Be courteous, gallant, and her knight-errant.  .  .  . Nestle yourself right into her heart, and her into yours. . . . Learn how to court by courting her. No other society will equally sanctify or instruct.45

Fowler believed familial communications were an appropriate gauge of prospective social interactions. “Hence the son who is affectionate to his mother, is generally . . . devoted to his wife.”46 This is the context, then, in which Melville’s narrator writes of Pierre, “He who is sisterless, is a bachelor before his time. For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already lies in the sister”

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(7). Laurie Robertson-Lorant is astute in commenting that in Pierre, Melville “uncovered a family nightmare that was paradigmatic for Victorians.”47 Antebellum sentimental and domestic fiction reinforced the incestuous nature of bourgeois familial relations. Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, for example, both feature heroines who marry their childhood sweethearts, whom they imagine and interpellate as siblings.48 And Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World chronicles the relation between a young girl and the “older brother” who protects, disciplines, and (in an unpublished final chapter) marries her. These novels imagined social relations as familial in an attempt to encourage the sentimental project of unity or commonality of feeling. They projected social cohesion, in other words, by envisioning a world of shared genealogy. Such fantasies, of course, also served the more pernicious function of ensuring biological purity. As social scientist Alfred Henry Huth wrote in 1887, endogamous imperatives grew out of racial pride and xenophobia. They developed “as an endeavor to avoid the contamination of ignoble blood.”49 Marrying a woman who resembled one’s mother or sister guaranteed the exclusion of racialized others and the consolidation of middle-class wealth. Incest stood at the heart of every sentimental family, then, because it promised a continuity of lineage as well as feeling. In Pierre, Melville’s literalization of these conventions turns them on their head. For in marrying his actual sister, Isabel, Pierre joins his stock with a poor girl of foreign extraction. The result is not consolidation of wealth and family but rather poverty, struggle, and dynastic decline. Moreover, marrying Isabel ironically works to disable, not reinforce, the sentimental fantasy of similitude. Pierre may look like his bourgeois counterpart, Lucy, but he in no way resembles his “dark, olive” (46) sister, Isabel, who remains “inscrutable” (141) to him. In Melville’s novel, marrying one’s (real) sister paradoxically becomes a form of exogamy, of affirming difference. The incestuous marriage appeals not because it reinforces the familiar but precisely because it holds the promise of rupture, an escape from the homogeneity of bourgeois union. This was crucial for a thinker like Melville, who claimed “an uncurible distaste for the same.”50 Incest, then, had a complicated valence for Melville. It was both that which he embraced as an alternative to normative familial relations and that which he recognized as already constitutive of the Victorian family. It stood for the logic of homogeneity propagated by Alcott and his followers, but it also signaled, in its literalized form, a move toward difference and disruption. Stated some-

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what differently, Melville recognized that the system of exogamy celebrated by nineteenth-century bourgeois America resulted in social homogeneity and rigid familial roles. In embracing endogamy, Melville ironically created an alternative reality—a vision of family not reducible to sameness and not structured by fixed familial identities. Melville’s fantasy of incest, then, does not constitute a rejection of the family but rather a fantasy of kinship in its ideal form. It is a means of depicting affective connection while simultaneously allowing for rupture and nonconformity. It is precisely this double promise of incest—as that which can provide both unity and difference—that makes it such a powerful trope for Melville and, as we shall see, an especially apt metaphor for authorship and author-reader relations.

Incest and Authorship The themes of incest and authorship arise simultaneously in Melville’s novel, for it is only after Pierre sets up house with his sister that we learn that he is a writer. In his youthful days, Melville’s narrator retrospectively informs us, Pierre had “possessed the poetic nature” (244) and had spent his leisure composing sonnets, poems, acrostics, and anagrams to the great delight of his predominantly female readers. Although well satisfied with his sentimental scribblings at the time, Pierre begins to detest them following his initial meeting with Isabel. This change of heart is rendered in language that links Isabel metaphorically to the world of serious literature. Captivated by his sister’s mournful mysteriousness, Pierre imagines her life “an unraveled plot,” so unlike “the countless tribes of common novels,” with their “false, inverted attempts at systematizing eternally unsystematizable elements” (141). As a tribute to Isabel, Pierre vows to discard the silly novels of his youth and to embrace instead the “profounder emanations of the human mind.” These latter creations, Pierre muses, “never unravel their own intricacies and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate” (141). Pierre’s incestuous relationship thus inspires a kind of writing that is itself conceived in incestuous terms: “abrupt intermergings,” “eternally unsystematizable elements,” “mutilated stumps.” If Melville imagines incest as fiction, as “stating a lie,” then he likewise imagines serious fiction as a kind of incest.51 In articulating this vision of authorship, Melville established the crucial distinction he perceived in American antebellum letters. On the one hand, there

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was truth in writing, here associated with irreconcilable pairings, incest, and degeneration. On the other hand, there was falsifying fiction, here articulated in terms of consistency, bourgeois union, and procreation. It was this latter vision that Melville associated with imitation, and which he ardently wished to resist. Indeed, Melville’s oft-cited lament—“Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother”52—points to traditional familial ties and biological reproduction as Melville’s principal figures for compromised literary production. Just as we are all “sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us,” 53 so are our “common dramas” (141) the product of endless imitative genealogies. Works that end in “wedding-bells,” claims the narrator of Pierre, “do but repeat the same” (141), and though the “world is forever babbling of originality,” real works of original genius are as rare as “a child born solely from one parent” (259). Part of the symbolic allure of incest, then, is that it elides the pernicious logic of reproduction. It does not yield “countless tribes of common novels” but “mutilated stumps” destined for extinction. This reading of incest as anti-imitative is, of course, counterintuitive as well as contrary to critical accounts that attempt to explain the presence of the incest theme in American literature. In these estimations, incest is symbolic of authorial imitation. Exogamous imperatives, the logic goes, thwart the desire for the “same” represented in the parent/ sibling and thus symbolize literary originality.54 For Melville, I am arguing, the reverse is true. Exogamy (at least as it is practiced in middle-class America) is itself hopelessly imitative. It is represented by the conventional marriage and has its counterpart in the “common novel.” The incestuous union, by contrast, stands as a powerful vision of ruptured or mangled procreation and thus of nonimitative prose. Like the incestuous Enceladus of Pierre’s dream, this prose can appear “imperfect” and “distorted” (141, 284), but it nonetheless constitutes an important alternative to genteel, imitative fiction, what Melville scornfully calls “the ever multiplying freshets of new books” (264). Melville’s linking of incest and reproductive malformation (“mutilated stumps”) invokes what nineteenth-century anthropologists termed the “morbid effects” of incest. While consanguine relations were long considered taboo, it was only in the early 1800s that they were injected with “eugenic significance,” that is, perceived as having deleterious consequences for the race.55 By the late antebellum years, debates were raging over the “Pernicious Consequences of Intermarriage between near relations,”56 and incest had transformed from a moral to a medical dilemma. Among the nefarious outcomes associated with incestu-

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ous unions were stillbirth, deformation, albinoism, cretinism, idiocy, epilepsy, insanity, and deaf-mutism.57 Melville could not have been oblivious to these developments, having written about P. T. Barnum’s “lean men, fat women, dwarfs, two-headed cows, amphibious sea-maidens”—many of whom were conjectured to be the freakish results of crossbreeding and incest.58 In characterizing profound fiction in terms of distortion and morbidity, then, Melville draws on the rhetoric of familial decline newly associated with incestuous activity in the nineteenth century. Given this association, it is entirely appropriate that Pierre’s incestuous union with his sister should itself yield a deformed creation—his utterly “bungled” (304) piece of writing.59 This work proves to be wholly unsuccessful with Pierre’s publisher, indicating that an incestuous imagination produces “failure” in the literary marketplace no less than in the natural world. The incest-authorship metaphor, then, was useful to Melville as a way of thinking about writing that is highly original but commercially doomed. Melville believed that, like his incestuous hero Pierre, he himself was destined to produce “those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’”60 “[T]he product is a final hash,” he wrote Hawthorne of his authorial creations, “and all my books are botches.”61 Indeed, in an ironic confirmation that original writing can only yield deformity, Pierre itself was described by more than one of Melville’s contemporaries as issuing “stillborn” from the press.62 Uniquely original and nonimitative literary production is possible, it would seem, but only at the price of malformation and commercial defeat.

Melville and Author-Reader Relations The distinction between procreative (imitative) and incestuous (original) fiction is captured, as I have indicated, in the contrast between Pierre as sentimental scribbler and Pierre as profound author. In his days at Saddle Meadows, while enjoying the company of his mother and his fiancée, Pierre cultivates a poetic sensibility and offers “occasional contributions to magazines and other polite periodicals” (245). The discovery of Isabel however, prompts Pierre to set up house in the city and to embark on his “great, deep book” (341). Pierre’s light verses are associated with his rural home and his prospective marriage; his profound ruminations, by contrast, are linked to urban environs, incest, and degeneration. It would be tempting to link this latter vision with individualism—to see Melville’s embrace of original writing as, in effect, a celebration of autonomy

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and self-reliance. Indeed, such a reading would seem to be supported by the fact that once Pierre begins his great book, he is increasingly removed from all forms of social intercourse. And yet, far from celebrating Pierre at these moments, Melville’s narrator consistently disavows his hero’s solitary adventures: heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing, upbubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of man, and say if here be the place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for (302). . . . Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him?—Unutterable, that a man should be thus! (304)

For Melville, authorial isolation represents a kind of degenerative narcissism. Pierre and the “Apostles” who live in the same housing complex with him falsely imagine that artistic creativity can only be had through seclusion and ascetic practice. Their icy ablutions, meager meals, and flesh-brush scrubbings all result from misplaced notions regarding genius and deprivation. “Ah foolish! to think that by starving thy body, thou shalt fatten thy soul!” Melville’s narrator scolds. “The finest houses are most cared for within” (300). As Pierre partakes in these lonely, self-mortifying rituals, he too is made the subject of ridicule. Indeed, Melville’s narrator seems to grow more antagonistic toward Pierre with the latter’s increasingly solipsistic and self-punishing behavior. As sentimental scribbler, Pierre is surely an object of scorn, but Melville reserves his most pointed contempt for when Pierre appears in authorial solitude. Thus, much like Gulliver among the Houyhnhnm, Pierre in the Church of the Apostles does not provide an ideal for the author but, rather, an opportunity for dissociation and critique. Perhaps the strongest proof of Melville’s disgust for literary isolationism rests in the figure of Plotinus Plinlimmon. This character is Melville’s most nefarious antihero. As Myra Jehlen writes, “In an ambiguous cast of characters, Plinlimmon is unambiguously evil.”63 What, then, do we make of the fact that Plinlimmon is also the character who most embodies the ethos of individualism? Marked by an atmosphere of “non-Benevolence” (290), Plinlimmon is void of the capacity to feel for or to do good toward others. He is thoroughly “inscrutable” (291), seems “to

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have no family or blood ties of any sort” (290), and appears to Pierre as “separate and apart . . . a face by itself ” (291), incapable of “respond[ing] to any other thing” (293). Even more significantly, while Pierre still struggles with “the heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge” (283), Plinlimmon “never was known to open a book” (290). He seems to believe that all written truths are “nothing” to the “transcendently great man in himself ” (283–84). Isolated from social and literary ties alike, Plinlimmon is the novel’s paradigmatic individualist and also its most noxious presence. He stands as a cautionary lesson to Pierre, a warning on the dangers of the too-solitary self. Plinlimmon’s radical isolationism is also evident in his status as author. Although he has renounced both reading and writing, his “verbal things” are occasionally “taken down at random” and disseminated by his disciples (290). These lectures, however, prove entirely inadequate as vehicles of communication. For example, although Pierre reads Plinlimmon’s philosophical tract— “Chronometricals and Horologicals”—he does not comprehend it: “He seemed somehow to derive some general vague inkling concerning it, but the central conceit refused to become clear to him” (209). His confusion occurs in part because Plinlimmon’s lecture is “wholly new” to Pierre and thus unintelligible. As “absurd as it may seem—” Melville’s narrator states, “men are only made to comprehend things which they comprehended before. . . . Things new it is impossible to make them comprehend, by merely talking to them about it” (209). In other words, that which is fully novel loses purchase through its originality; it cannot be understood because it has no foundations in the world of the familiar. Thus, divorced from context and experience, Plinlimmon’s pamphlet cannot resonate with its intended reader. Incapable of generating understanding, much less communion, it leaves Pierre perplexed and untouched. Melville manifests a similar skepticism concerning wholly original or solipsistic thought in a short vignette in The Confidence-Man (1857). Here, a traveler approaches the confidence man of the title and offers a warning about a third party: “I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians, was called a ———” using some unknown word. “A ———! And what is that?” “A ——— is what Proclus, in a little note to his third book on the theology of Plato, defines as ——— ———” coming out with a sentence of Greek.64

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In this exchange, the autonomy of speech breaks down communication altogether. When words are merely derivative of subjective experience and so idiosyncratic as to afford no common ground for understanding, people are simply cut off from one another. If imitative prose is the source of Melville’s scornful derision, self-indulgent original prose represents a threat just as salient—the self-containment of individuals and the complete rupture of interpersonal relations. This isolationism is partially realized at the end of Pierre in the image of the protagonist as secluded artist, as “solitary as at the Pole” (338). Here, Pierre’s writing threatens to become an exercise in narcissistic scrutiny, what Jeffrey Steele has called “a private and ambiguous act of self-reflection.”65 And yet, at the same time, Pierre also voices a profound wish for author-reader connection, a “burning desire to deliver . . . Truth to the world,” to write a book, born of the “universality of thought,” that “the world should hail with surprise and delight” (283). While Plinlimmon refuses all forms of communication (“he would not even write a letter” [290]), Pierre dreams of an authorship capable of translating his own unique experience into a discourse, accessible by all. “I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse,” he tells Isabel. “I will write it, I will write it!” (273). Solipsism in Pierre, then, is countered by what I have been calling “textual sentimentalism”—a desire for interpersonal attachment facilitated by and organized around writing. This vision of narrative communion occurs most frequently between Pierre and Isabel and is first demonstrated in the context of Isabel’s letter to her brother. In an attempt to introduce herself to Pierre and to confess their shared lineage, Isabel pens a letter in which she “blew [her] heart’s shrillest blast” (159). As she writes, she sheds tears on her writing-paper and the result is described as a “strange alloy” (159): the tears “chemically acted upon by the ink, assumed a strange and reddish hue—as if blood . . . had dropped upon the sheet.” Thus, crimson and half ripped, Isabel’s letter is a “fit scroll of a torn, as well as bleeding heart” (64–65). Body and text appear as coextensions of one another, partly because of their enmeshed materiality (the tears of Isabel mingling and transforming the ink of her pen) and partly because in its final form the letter is figured as a metonym for the impassioned heart that inspired its composition. Isabel’s bleeding missive is subsequently delivered to Pierre, whose reaction upon reading it completes Melville’s vision of intensely realized interpersonal communication. Pierre’s hand, “clutching the letter, was pressed against his heart, as if some assassin had stabbed him and fled; and Pierre was now holding

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the dagger in the wound to staunch the outgushing of the blood” (65). Through a hyperliteralized trope of commiseration, hearts meet in bloody communion here, and the boundaries between subjects and objects are sundered. The intercorporeity of Isabel, Pierre, and letter, in other words, suggests that writing can produce not simply a mutuality of experience but a concrescence of being, what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls an encroachment or overlapping of “flesh.”66 Subsequent encounters between Pierre and Isabel bolster this vision of discursively based union. When Isabel recounts her “singular tale” (119) to her brother, the two experience an intense sympathetic merging. “I desire to know all,” Pierre tells his sister, “and yet . . . I feel that I already know the pith of all; that already I feel toward thee the very limit of all” (145). To Pierre, Isabel’s autobiographical narrative is at once dazzlingly enigmatic and uncannily familiar. It leaves him “wonderfully changed” (129) and yet but “corroborate[s] and confirm[s]” (145) that which he already knows. It fuses him not only to her but also to the universe more generally: her “spell seemed one with that Pantheistic master-spell which eternally locks in mystery and in muteness the universal subject world. . . . She seemed molded from fire and air” (151). In other words, Isabel’s narrative produces not individuation but accretion or boundlessness of being, what Geoffrey Sanborn calls “the fraternity of extension, the fraternity without selves.”67 Moreover, this narrative generates Pierre’s own desire for authorial connection, something that he, in turn, realizes with Isabel: “now, that thou art deep down in the gulf of the soul,” she tells her brother following his decision to become a serious author, “—now when thou wouldst be a lunatic to wise men . . . now [do I] begin to comprehend thee. Thy feeling hath long been mine” (274). Isabel, in other words, constitutes the perfect audience for Pierre’s authorial ravings; she is the one subject fully in sympathy with his vision. “Thy hand is the caster’s ladle . . . which holds me entirely fluid,” she tells her brother. “Into thy form and slightest moods of thought, thou pourest me; and I there solidify to that form, and take it on, and thenceforth wear it, till once more thou moldest me anew” (324). If Pierre is an artist, then Isabel constitutes an audience so receptive as to be indistinguishable from both creation and creator. This dynamic between Isabel and Pierre, in which each plays the role both of brilliant storyteller and of engaged audience, recalls Melville’s relations with his select circle of admirers described at the beginning of this chapter. Indeed, Pierre’s fused physicality with his sister—“wind in within my ribs . . . that my one frame may be the continent of two” (333)—seems a version of Melville’s

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experience with Hawthorne—“your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours.” John D. Seelye has suggested that the character of Isabel is in fact inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne and that “The incestuous basis of the love between Pierre and Isabel hints at the unnaturalness of the attraction Melville seems to have felt for Hawthorne.”68 James Creech builds on this reading by claiming that in Pierre, Melville “converted his hero’s primary desire for a male companion into desire for a sister.”69 But reading Isabel only as a thinly disguised figure for Hawthorne threatens to erase the presence of women entirely from Pierre, and with them the domestic and familial relations that inform Melville’s sentimental vision.70 A figure for the convergence of anomaly and kinship, Isabel gestures toward Hawthorne, without correlating entirely with him. She stands instead for a more general fantasy of consubstantiality, informed by both homoerotic attraction and domestic sentimentalism, and realized most fully in the authorreader bond. Positing incest as merely a stand-in for an absent homoerotic dynamic is also problematic because Pierre does in fact feature an intense male friendship—that between the hero and his cousin Glen Stanly. In their youth, Melville writes, these boys had “cherished a much more than cousinly attachment,” reveling “in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes” (216). As with Pierre and Isabel, this bond is expressed and facilitated largely through narrative— “bundles of papers,” “cross-written and crammed with discursive sentimentalities.” These “love-friendship missives” (217) attest to the deep affection between the boys, which “not only flowed along the top margin of [the letters], but here and there, from their subterranean channel, flashed out in bright intervals, through all the succeeding lines” (219). Here again, then, Melville’s interest in affective ties manifests itself through scenes of communication between writers and readers. These scenes suggest that the relationship between Pierre and Glen Stanly expresses not only a homoerotic fantasy but also a vision of author-reader communion. This is borne out by subsequent communications between the two boys, which reiterate the same kinds of epistolary dynamics present between Pierre and Isabel. Although the letters between them grow “curtailed” (218) and “cloying” (220) when Pierre becomes betrothed to Lucy, their transactions are reenergized toward the novel’s end, when Pierre receives from his cousin what can only be described as a poison pen letter. “Thou, Pierre Glendinning, art a villainous and perjured liar,” it begins. “It is the sole object of this letter

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imprintedly to convey the point blank lie to thee; that taken in at thy heart, it may be thense pulsed with thy blood, throughout thy system” (356). This letter at once anticipates and inaugurates Pierre’s actual poisoning in the novel’s final pages, but it is also the very instrument that Pierre uses to kill his cousin. Upon procuring a pistol, Pierre takes the letter and “rammed it home upon the bullets” (359). When Glen Stanly is shot in the following scene, a bullet wrapped in his own writing enters and extinguishes his heart. Poisoned by the writing of Glen Stanly, then, Pierre inserts this same deadly text into the body of his enemy. Like Isabel’s letter, which follows a gruesome trajectory from her own bloody heart to Pierre’s, Glen Stanly’s letter creates a grotesquely realized commonality of experience. In Melville’s perverse sentimental vision, letters serve to universalize sentiments in hypercorporealized ways. Characters do not simply communicate through the medium of the epistle; rather, letters become material extensions of the bodies that write them, aggressively able to transform other subjects into reflections of the composer. In this way, authors and readers achieve a kind of deadly unity, an absolute and indissoluble correspondence of being.71 Melville’s vision of male epistolary transaction here is violent, a far cry from the sentimental love missives Pierre pens to his cousin in their early years. But it also seems a more authentic form of communication, a necessary antidote to the spurious letters that accompany the heterosexual marriage plot. As the foregoing makes clear, incest and homosociality are twin forms for imagining the intensity of author-reader relations, ways of describing the fantasy of intercorporeity and mutual ensoulment at the heart of Melville’s textual sentimentalism. This sympathetic communion is not reducible to an imitative homogeneity. Indeed, both incest and homoeroticism appealed to Melville because both elide the logic of endless iterative reproduction captured in the bourgeois, heterosexual union. Thus, despite the associations of both incest and homosociality with “sameness,” for Melville these paradoxically signify the possibility of newness and rupture. At the same time, these relations also make for intense interpersonal dynamics, ways of imagining subjects bound to one another in deep sympathetic reciprocity. Two years before Melville wrote Pierre, he commented indirectly on the relationship between the creative writer and the sympathetic reader in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Praising Hawthorne’s “great, deep intellect,”72 Melville points to their “coincident sentiment” (1170) or “parity of ideas” (1169), especially on the theme of literary genius. As if to demonstrate their mutuality of thought, Melville alternates between his own language and that of Hawthorne, which

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“so happily expresses” Melville’s feelings that he “cannot but be charmed by the coincidence” (1169). The effect is a curious one: Hawthorne’s words concerning “Master Genius” become blended with Melville’s own, and the theme of literary originality is presented collaboratively. Such an approach dovetails nicely with Melville’s further reflections: a “commanding mind” is not “individually developed in any one man” but is rather “shared by a plurality of men of genius” (1169): “by confessing [one man a literary master], you thereby confess others; you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round” (1165). This “shock of recognition”—a phrase that invokes the identificatory experience associated with sentimentalism—constitutes the ultimate value of writing for Melville. He dreamed of a collective of original thinkers whose innovation would be the occasion for mutual recognition and sympathy.73 Melville’s vision of author-reader connection is, of course, not wholly consonant with the sentimental fantasy of union. For the majority of sentimentalists writing in the antebellum period, sympathy was, at least ideally, a universal. Middle-class readers were encouraged to identify with all creatures and to imagine a world void of difference and disparity. Melville, on the other hand, restricted his conception of identificatory bonding to an elite group of participants, embracing, in his own words, an “aristocracy of feeling.”74 But while by no means identical to the sentimental ideal, Melville’s fantasy of shared authorreader experience resonates with that model. He imagined novels not only as expressions of individual thought but also as vehicles of affective communication—ways to establish a sense of oneness with a small, receptive body of readers. Although Melville generally associated this reader-writer communion with male friendship, in Pierre he offered an alternative scheme. Here, the bond between Isabel and Pierre signals a sympathetic unity achieved through an intense if unconventional familial dynamic. Structurally similar to homosocial connection, then, incest was attractive to Melville because it performed a kind of double work. It showcased individual subjectivity but within a communal context; it privileged interpersonal relations while allowing for the possibility of rupture or idiosyncrasy. It thus allowed Melville to affirm affective unity while resisting the more stultifying effects of sentimentalism’s logic of sameness.

Chapter 4

h Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative

In an oft-quoted passage from his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass describes his reaction to the slave songs he heard in the “dense old woods” of his master’s plantation: “I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.”1 These lines are particularly intriguing for the way they disjoin the categories of knowledge and experience. As a slave living “within the circle” of the institution, Douglass was too steeped in the terrifying daily effects of slavery to comprehend its “deep meaning.” It is only with distance and, as he will importantly add, with education that real insight into these songs occurs. Indeed, Douglass contrasts his compromised understanding of these songs as a slave with the more sophisticated comprehension that literacy has afforded him, by explicitly referencing the intense emotional reaction that accompanies the moment of his autobiographical inscription: “The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek” (24, emphasis added). According to Douglass, the act of writing is linked to understanding and therefore to an appropriate affective response. True enlightenment is only possible, then, when one removes oneself from experiential immediacy—or exits what Douglass calls “the circle”— and acquires the perspective afforded by composition and other educational practices. These lines trouble contemporary readers of the Narrative in part because they seem to suggest the total cognitive impoverishment of slave experience and

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the impossibility of knowledge outside Western systems of literacy. If Douglass can acquire insight into his position only through traditional forms of education (i.e., through learning to read and write), then black subjectivity and consciousness would seem to be utterly dependent on a submission to dominant white Western discourse.2 Moreover, as scholars have pointed out, these lines speak to the painful loss that must accompany this shift toward self-enlightenment. In exiting “the circle,” Douglass must necessarily distance himself from authentic black experience and from a community of peers. This results in what David Van Leer calls Douglass’s “anxiety of ethnicity”: “Frederick Douglass’s dichotomy between participation and knowledge theorizes the narrative irony by which the flight from slavery becomes a flight from culture. . . . The mature narrator’s greater understanding is balanced by a clear nostalgia for the time ‘within the circle’ of the black community. . . . And he experiences the black hermeneutic circle . . . as a measure of his loss of group identity.”3 Thad Ziolkowski has also argued that Douglass’s acquisition of literacy results in a degree of alienation and a necessary distancing from his authentic community of origin: “While ‘within the circle,’ Douglass’s understanding was but nascent; yet having attained the critical distance requisite for appreciation, he is as cast away, without real community, by virtue of the medium of a distancing discourse.”4 But if Douglass’s lines register a loss of authentic black community, they also, I would argue, register a gain of fellowship with his Northern white readers. As subjects who are themselves outside “the circle,” Douglass’s readers are assured at this moment that their extraneous position is no impediment to their insight into slave culture. Indeed, like Douglass, their distance from the experience of slavery may actually contribute to an increased comprehension of the institution. Even more important, these lines suggest an intimate proximity between Douglass and his white readership on account of their mutual exclusion. While he dismisses the mass of Northerners, who are so ignorant of slavery as to misinterpret “singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness” (24), Douglass, like Melville, devotes himself to a select group of sympathetic readers, whom he imagines as psychic and bodily extensions of himself. It is these readers whom he invites to take up the very place in the woods where he first heard the slave songs: “If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation . . . place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul” (24). Douglass imagines the reader here as fellow voyeur—eavesdropping from the same deep

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woods, his soul penetrated by the very sounds that first afflicted Douglass. The result is a fantasy in which reader and narrator occupy identical physical and epistemological ground.5 In this chapter, I propose that Douglass conceived of authorship and reading as ways of achieving imagined bodily communion, particularly, albeit not exclusively, with white populations.6 Such a thesis implicitly challenges those critical accounts that connect Douglass’s burgeoning literacy to his autonomy and narrative authority.7 While I certainly agree that Douglass used authorship as a form of empowerment, a means of wresting control not only from the slave master but also from the white abolitionist, I also contend that this explanation does not exhaust Douglass’s complicated relationship to literacy. Douglass regarded author-reader relations as the antithesis and even the curative to slave relations, because of the former’s commitment to cooperative understanding. In slavery, the master alone controls meaning; by contrast, authorship and reading are collaborative projects in which both parties (author and reader) must acknowledge the contribution of the other. Douglass’s attempts to “master” writing, then, are always tempered with an acknowledgment that authorial control is never the ultimate end of literacy. For if authorship is to be successful, it must always grant presence and recognition to an imagined reader. This reader was, for Douglass, not simply a partner in creating meaning but also a potential source of intimacy and even eroticism. In his Narrative, Douglass alternatively depicts himself as author and as reader, and in both scenarios, he imagines literacy as enabling attachment and intercorporeity between subjects. Writing for him was an embodied practice that served to link him physically to otherwise inaccessible populations, and reading was in turn a way for him to experience a sense of psychic and bodily completion through the discursive contributions of another. In this way Douglass’s literacy practices are not, as most critics have argued, abstract attempts at transcending his corporeality;8 rather, they are ways of insisting on the black body’s material presence as well as imagining its physical interactions across racial lines. I stress this bodily component of literacy because it is precisely this that replaces and supersedes the faceto-face intimacy that Douglass sacrifices by leaving “the circle.” The practices of authorship and reading might logically suggest a more abstracted form of communication, especially when compared to the immediacy of slave singing. And yet, by Douglass’s account, these activities are characterized by an intimacy and presence that rivals those of face-to-face contact. This does not mean that Douglass’s scenes of literacy did not also include aspects of violence or control.

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But as I hope to demonstrate, these elements are consistently tempered by a fantasy of mutuality or author-reader union that appears as the ultimate end of literacy for Douglass.

The Bodily Presence of the Author Importantly, it is Douglass’s white patron, Wendell Phillips, who first articulates this vision of embodied author-reader connection. In his letter addressed to Frederick Douglass and incorporated as prefatory material to the Narrative, Phillips denounces antebellum slave law, particularly that which punishes the aiding and abetting of runaway slaves. He praises “the fearless efforts of those who, trampling the laws and Constitution of the country under their feet, are determined that they will ‘hide the outcast,’” and then continues: Yet is it sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome your [Douglass’s] story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating contrary to the “statute in such case made and provided.” Go on, my dear friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved . . . from the dark prison-house, shall stereotype these free, illegal pulses into statutes. (13)

Drawing on sentimental conventions that imagine the body as the authentic seat of discourse, Phillips articulates a contrast between desiccated legalese (“the statute in such case made and provided”) and the language of experiential embodiment. In the latter, the blood and beat of the heart power the pen, and the result is a printed or “stereotype” language that reflects not the static and literal law but the emotionally charged body, its “throbbing heart” and “free, illegal pulses.” What is particularly fascinating about Phillips’s description, however, is that the “throbbing hearts” that seem to propel writing are those of readers, those “which welcome your story and form your best safeguard in telling it.” In Phillips’s description, Douglass and other fugitives are the authors of a new embodied language (for it is they who will “stereotype these free, illegal pulses into statutes”); this language, however, reflects not their own emotional experience but that of their white audience. What Phillips ultimately articulates, then, is a daringly innovative vision of author-reader relations, a vision in which black authorship is proleptically constituted by the affective responses of white readers.

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In his Narrative, Douglass embraces a similar model, espousing a discourse of embodiment that works to establish correspondence and unity between reader and writer. Douglass does this partly by forcing the reader into an awareness of his own bodily presence as author—that is, by continually highlighting his material existence at the moment of autobiographical inscription. I have already cited one example of this—Douglass’s reference to the act of authorship during his discussion of the slave songs: “The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek” (24, emphasis added). Another example occurs during Douglass’s description of the cold he was forced to endure as a slave: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes” (33, emphasis added). Robert Stepto has pointed out that this syncretic formulation demonstrates Douglass’s “ability to conjoin past and present and to do so with images that not only stand for different periods in his personal history but also, in their fusion, speak of his evolution from slavery to freedom.”9 For Stepto, authorship represents a progressive move (or “evolution”) away from slavery and its focus on the body. By contrast, I would argue that such a statement—like Douglass’s earlier one concerning slave songs—serves to foreground the physical manifestation of the author during the act of writing. Tears and feet become embodied signs of Douglass’s writing self, incapable of being abstracted or intellectualized. They force the reader into an awareness of Douglass’s material presence, not as slave (where the fact of the physical body is most obvious), but as writer. Douglass reinforces this sense of his own bodily presence in the infamous scene involving his Aunt Hester and Captain Anthony. As critics have pointed out, despite the fact that it is Hester who is whipped (and potentially raped) here, Douglass conveys the scene in language that speaks to his own sexualized initiation into slavery: I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heartrending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom [Captain Anthony] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood.  .  .  . I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. . . . It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to

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the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it. (18)

Douglass’s language demonstrates his deep identification with his aunt, the extent to which her punishment is felt by him as a physical reality. Indeed, his comment “It struck me with awful force” indicates the ease with which the blows meant for Hester are incorporated into Douglass’s own bodily experience. Moreover, her sexualized victimization becomes the moment of Douglass’s metaphorical defilement, his entry through “the blood-stained gate” while still “quite a child.” In this way, both are subject to parallel forms of desecration that blur their differences as victim and sympathizing bystander. Hence his comment that he is both “a witness and a participant.” Significantly, here, too, Douglass references the moment of writing (“I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it”), thereby highlighting the connections between the afflicted body’s physical presence and the act of composition. The blank page invoked alongside Hester’s “red blood . . . dripping to the floor” (19) works in the same register as Douglass’s pairing of pen and cracked feet—to emphasize the correlations between physical presence and the materiality of writing. In this way, the written page becomes an extension of Hester/Douglass’s body; it is the “blood-stained gate” through which the reader must pass in the course of being “awakened” to the evils of slavery. If this scene establishes Douglass’s identification with his aunt, it also delineates his separation from her. As Jenny Franchot, Deborah McDowell, Gwen Bergner, and David Van Leer have all argued, Douglass’s account of this scene reveals the differences between male and female slave experience and, indeed, even renders Douglass, in his narration of the events, complicit with the eroticized violence of the white slaveholder.10 Alongside his claims of terror, his fear that “it would be my turn next” (19), Douglass also registers a certain distance from the event: his descriptions of the scene as an “exhibition” or “spectacle” reinforce its theatrical qualities, while suggesting Douglass’s removal from its immediacy.11 We are reminded of the distance between Douglass and his aunt in the former’s final account of the events surrounding the beating: It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it before. I had always lived with my grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was put to raise the children of the younger women.

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Here Douglass assumes a remote or ex-centric stance in relation to the violence of slavery (“I had always lived . . . on the outskirts of the plantation”; “I had therefore been . . . out of the way of the bloody scenes”). Invoking a spatial dynamic similar to that which he adopts in relation to slave singing, he positions himself as already outside “the circle” and thus in a position of proximity with his white readers who are, likewise, without. Douglass and reader take on a quality of mutual voyeurism here—“horror-struck” (in Douglass’s words) by the brutality of the events, but also, through their remove, partaking in what Edmund Burke calls “a delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.”12 Thus the difficulty of locating any clear identificatory pattern in this scene. Douglass’s “wish to commit [his feelings] to words” bespeaks a desire to narrate the deep sympathy he shares with his aunt, and yet the act of composition also establishes an aestheticizing distance that both separates him from Hester and creates a compensating union with his white reader.

The Rejection of Embodiment; or, What’s in an H? The complex identificatory relays between Douglass, his aunt, and the reader take on further significance in relation to this episode’s rewriting. In his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass offers up a similar account of his aunt’s brutal treatment at the hands of his master, Captain Anthony, but in this version, Douglass calls his aunt “Esther,” thereby transposing the initial H to the middle of her name. Scholars have noted this change but have not commented on it, except to postulate that in making the switch, Douglass was relying on the sound of the name as he heard it.13 Such an explanation, however, does not address the reason for the change, since the phonetic transcription of her name would have remained consistent. Why, in other words, would Douglass show a preference for the phonetic spelling in 1855 but not in 1845? What happened in the ten years that intervened between the initial publication of the Narrative and the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom that might prompt such a change? One thing that happened, of course, was the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850. Could the appearance of Hawthorne’s controversial Hester have influenced Douglass’s decision to revise the spelling of his own aunt’s name five years

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later? While conceding the absence of definitive proof, I would like to argue that this is a plausible possibility. Douglass, I propose, likely read The Scarlet Letter and, operating on motives either conscious or unconscious, changed the name of his aunt so as to distance her from Hawthorne’s creation.14 In taking this position, I am arguing for the fundamental intertextuality of literature and the blurring of taxonomic categories like “production” and “response.”15 Authorship, in this context, is not an autonomous enterprise of individual articulation but a constrained and interactive process, dependent on the operation of reading and the archive of existing texts. Each text that is written into existence responds to what Hans Robert Jauss calls “the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, changed, or just reproduced.”16 Douglass’s authorial possibilities, then, are always limited by (if never reducible to) his role as reader. My Bondage and My Freedom is a work that, like all literary creations, necessarily responds to literature already in circulation, as well as public reactions to it. But can we be sure that Douglass actually read The Scarlet Letter or at least had familiarity with its characters and themes? In all likelihood, yes. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the remarkable overlap between white literary culture and black abolitionist circles in the mid-nineteenth century. Douglass’s weekly antislavery paper The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’s Paper), for example, excerpted a selection from Typee and made references to Moby-Dick.17 The same papers that reprinted Douglass’s abolitionist speeches also serialized and reviewed the novels of Melville, Hawthorne, Stowe, and others, bringing black and white authorial figures into discursive proximity.18 And the antislavery feminist movement included women such as Elizabeth Peabody, who had simultaneous ties to black abolitionists like Douglass and white literary figures like her brother-in-law Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom she repeatedly tried to convert to an antislavery position.19 All this is to say that black and white authorial figures were deeply connected by both personal and institutional ties. While separated by various social dicta, they were nevertheless joined by a mutual consciousness of each other’s existence as well as by a Northern reading public receptive to both. To paraphrase Robert K. Wallace, we might understand these literary personae as “compatible but not identical . . . anchored together in neighborly style.”20 In addition, there is reason to suspect that Douglass would have been familiar with Hawthorne’s work in particular. Copies of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables are housed in the library at Douglass’s final home,

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Cedar Hill.21 While the copy of The Scarlet Letter is an 1878 reprint, it is probable that Douglass read an earlier edition of the novel. (Many of the books that Douglass acquired in the antebellum years were consumed by a fire in his Rochester home in 1872. Douglass began a new library when he moved to his Cedar Hill estate in Anacostia, District of Columbia in 1878. His edition of The Scarlet Letter, dating from the same year, may therefore have been one of his first acquisitions.) Literary historical evidence confirms the possibility that Douglass was most likely familiar with Hawthorne’s work. As Richard Brodhead has argued, beginning in the 1850s, Hawthorne’s name became synonymous with the concept of literature as it was institutionalized by nineteenth-century promotional forces. “It was [Hawthorne’s] peculiar distinction to be identified especially intimately with the literary. He became . . . the exquisite author . . . the incarnation and exemplary case of literature in the nineteenth century’s sense of the word.”22 Given Douglass’s voracious reading habits and his investment in the concept of American authorship, it is likely that he was familiar with The Scarlet Letter, the one novel consistently regarded as America’s “best and highest literature.”23 Furthermore, according to Brodhead, Hawthorne more than any other writer guided the literary practices of others. “As early as 1850, . . . other writers began to incorporate him into their writing and reformulate their projects on his plans.”24 Melville’s recasting of Moby-Dick following his contact with Hawthorne is the most obvious example here, but if my suspicions about Hester’s name change in My Bondage and My Freedom are correct, then we might understand Douglass as also part of the “school of Hawthorne,” albeit negatively, insofar as escaping association with Hawthorne was the aim. Douglass’s concerns on this front may have been exacerbated by the uncanny resemblances between his own aunt as he depicts her in the 1845 Narrative and the Hester of Hawthorne’s novel. Besides their nominal similarity, both are depicted as proud, statuesque beauties, Douglass’s aunt being of “noble form and graceful proportions” (19), Hester Prynne exhibiting “natural dignity and force of character.”25 Both, moreover, are associated with illicit sexuality and punishment. Aunt Hester, Douglass writes, “went out one night . . . [and] had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I found, from what [Captain Anthony] said while whipping her was the chief offense” (19). Douglass continues by postulating that had his master “been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt” (4), thereby indirectly indicting Hester for her promiscuity, or at least suggesting the existence of something untoward in her relation

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to Ned. She, like Hester Prynne, is a scarlet woman, whose errant sexuality is subject to punishment by white male authority. Indeed, the punitive apparatus used in relation to both women (each is elevated above ground and subject to a form of public exposure that centers on their bodies) magnifies the resemblance between them.26 And although Hester Prynne’s punishment seemingly lacks the bloody goriness associated with that of Aunt Hester (who “was literally covered with blood” [18]), Patricia Crain has convincingly argued that Hester Prynne’s A is repeatedly connected “with blood-redness and specifically menstrual blood redness.”27 In this way the “rag of scarlet cloth”28 forced upon Hester Prynne finds its analogue in Aunt Hester’s “warm, red blood . . . dripping to the floor” (19). Both are testaments to the woman’s body and the punitive mechanism established around female sexuality. If he noticed them consciously, Douglass must have been perturbed by these similarities. After all, the success of his autobiographies rested on their ability to create sympathy for the victims of slavery, and this project could only be thwarted by the association of his aunt with Hawthorne’s infamous scarlet lady. In changing his aunt’s name to Esther, Douglass distances his literary creation from Hawthorne’s, while also reinforcing her biblical associations. Esther was the second wife of King Ahasuerus, who had originally married the independent and defiant Vashti. A paradigm of domestic and national fidelity, the biblical Esther warns the king of plots against his life and then halts a scheme to exterminate the Jewish people. With the transposition of an “h,” Douglass’s aunt thus metamorphoses from a symbol of adultery to an ideal of heroic female loyalty. As if to reinforce this transformation, Douglass also rewrites his aunt’s story in the 1855 autobiography so as to eradicate any allusions to her promiscuity. Here Hester/Esther does not mysteriously disappear one night to “keep company” with Lloyd’s Ned. Instead, she is actively courted by Ned Roberts, “as fine looking a young man, as she was a woman.”29 Douglass sanctions Hester and Ned’s intentions by writing: “Some slaveholders would have been glad to promote the marriage of two such persons” (175). In this version, the two slaves appear as innocent star-crossed lovers (“It was impossible to keep [them] apart” [175]), while Captain Anthony emerges as the lone sexual predator (“his motives were as abhorrent, as his methods were foolish and contemptible” [176]). Hester/Esther’s decision to flout her master’s directives by continuing to see Ned no longer carries the allusions of errant sexuality; rather, it appears as the only natural response of a virtuous woman: “[Captain Anthony’s] unnatural and heartless order was, of course, broken. A woman’s love is not to be annihi-

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lated by the peremptory command of any one, whose breath is in his nostrils” (175). This last reference to Anthony’s animal nature reinforces his embodied status as sexual deviant, against which Douglass’s aunt appears as wholly chaste and innocent—the anti-Hester Prynne, if you will. But the transposition of the “h” in Hester’s name does more than simply free Douglass’s aunt from the illicit erotics associated with Hawthorne’s heroine, it also works to de-incarnate the very name of Hester. The consonant “h,” as linguistic historians have reported, is unusual in that its pronunciation mimics the breathing body. Typically, consonants are formed in the mouth through halting or detouring the flow of air (think of the abrupt discontinuance of breath required for the sound “t”). Vowels, by contrast, are formed in the larynx, require the use of the vocal cords, and generally involve lengthier expulsion of breath. They are more musical in tone and can even express grammatical ideas as in “I” or “a.” For this reason, vowels tend to hold a privileged position in the grammatical lexicon. As Steven Connor writes, “vowels have sometimes been thought of as speech itself—active living and ephemeral as it is presumed to be—with consonants allied more naturally with the letters which fix and represent it.”30 The “h,” however, represents a curious exception, since it does not halt the discharge of air as consonants typically do. Its function, rather, is pure unchecked aspiration. Thus, according to Connor, the “h” can be thought of as “the degree zero of consonance. It is a consonant in the sense that it is lacking in voice, but vowel-like in that it is open and unobstructed. . . . It belongs neither to voice nor to noise, neither larynx nor mouth.”31 Liminally situated, the “h” has an audibility that originates somewhere apart from its alphabetic siblings. Its rawness and pure aspirate function seem to tie it to a sphere before or beyond language. It is the sound of breath itself—particularly breath in its labored or explicit form— and therefore the “h” holds a peculiarly intimate relation to the human body. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that historically the letter H was also tied to ideas of sexual coupling and conjugality. In his 1637 treatise, William Austin claims that capital H is in fact graphically represented through the marriage of two I s (I I). Both I s, writes Austin, are signes of the singular and first person; . . . but unles there come some-what, that (after a friendly manner) may joyne them together, they both still remaine singular and alone. . . . Wherefore, if either man or woman, (being alone and built according to the singular and first person I) doe desire to change for a better: There is no

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better way to establish and make them most firmely grow into this well approved forme, then (by the love of their hearts) to reach each other their hands in direct sinceritie, thus I–I: And let the even and straight course of marriage, fully and firmely establish them into one letter, H. Which not only by uniting of two bodies, makes them eaven: but by bringing them into the forme of this letter H, makes their eaven, Heaven: if they continue in the love, which first joined them: which is, indeed Heaven upon earth.32

I will return shortly to the importance of this coupling for Douglass’s relation with his reader. For now, suffice it to say that given the promiscuity already associated with Aunt Hester, Douglass’s decision to remove the capital H from her name in the 1855 autobiography takes on new consequence. In deleting the initial H, moreover, Douglass would have been indirectly participating in a popular controversy among eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammarians, many of whom railed against the illogic of the letter h in the Germanic languages. As historian Jonathan Sheehan summarizes, “The h immoderately overflowed the parameters set by the natural law of orthography insofar as its use was irregular, unpredictable, and thoroughly unrestricted by the confines of proper pronunciation.”33 Indeed, some grammarians went so far as to call for its expulsion from the alphabet or to predict its inevitable obsolescence, as a sign of linguistic and cultural refinement. In his treatise The Vulgarism and Improprieties of the English Language (1833), W. H. Savage condoned the deletion of the letter as a mark of “softness,” “excellence,” and “good taste.” Unnecessary insertion of h, he continued, was indicative of bad breeding, belonging to “rustics [who] attach their rough breathing indiscriminately, . . . lacerating at the same time their own larynx and afflicting the more delicate tympana of their metropolitan auditors by a cacophonous pseudology” (!).34 It is in this context that we might understand Douglass’s decision to rename Hester, Esther, in his second autobiography. Transposing the initial (capital) H to the middle of the word may not have been a conscious choice, but it nonetheless had the significant effect of regularizing and refining Douglass’s orthography (always important for the slave narrative), while purging his aunt from associations with the raw, aspirate, and erotic functions of the body. Interestingly, such a move not only sanitizes the name of his aunt, it also, by extension, decorporealizes the reader. For if the H functions both as an icon of conjugality and “as a visual representation of the bodily expulsion of breath,”35 then its

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erasure from the beginning of Hester’s name necessarily signals to the reader a different, more abstracted relation to the material text. In reading “Esther” in place of “Hester,” in other words, the reader no longer engages in the breathy vitality the initial H necessitates. Reader and Esther are deincarnated in the 1855 autobiography, while Captain Anthony alone retains a burly primitivism—it is he, recall, “whose breath is in his nostrils.” But if this account, highly speculative though it is, forces us to rethink the Esther of My Bondage and My Freedom, it also allows us to consider the Hester of the 1845 Narrative anew. The inclusion of the H at the beginning of her name seems significant now for the way it establishes an intimacy with the reader, a call for breath and human presence. The h is the premier whisperletter. Indeed, according to Steven Connor whispering is “the whole of speech transposed into the key of H.”36 As a whisper to the reader, the initial H signals secrecy, proximity, collusion, and confession—all relevant themes in relation to Hester’s beating and its retelling. Moreover, in its written form, as a graphic depiction of conjoining subjectivities (I–I), the letter holds the promise of communion. Presented with the H in Hester’s name, the reader is asked to cross over, as it were, to join Douglass in the mutual breath of corporeal intimacy.

The Embodied Experience of Reading Thus far I have primarily concentrated on Douglass’s role as author, but the fantasy of erotic consubstantiality is also apparent in Douglass’s depictions of his own reading practices in the Narrative, to which I now turn. In his initial foray into literacy, Douglass, was, of course, aided by his mistress, Sophia Auld, and critics have justly pointed out that this fact, along with Douglass’s beatific descriptions of his mistress (“Her face was made of heavenly smiles” [37]), reinforce our impression of her as a substitute mother figure.37 Indeed, we might understand Douglass’s positioning in the Auld home as a rewriting of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the family romance and its relationship to language. According to Lacan, early infant development takes place in the “imaginary,” a world characterized by nondifferentiation and symbiotic merging of infant and mother. This sphere of maternal plentitude is interrupted by the entrance of the father, who, as signifier of the Law, at once disrupts the preoedipal unity of mother and child and plunges the child into the “symbolic,” an order characterized by language rather than by the real wordless presence of the mother. This transition from the “imaginary” to the “symbolic” results in the child’s individuation

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and in the taking up of appropriate social and sexual roles. But it also results in a traumatic experience of loss, since it is at this stage that the child realizes that access to the “real” (the body of the mother but more generally those things that language is but a poor substitute for) is impossible. In the Narrative’s rewriting of the Lacanian plot, Douglass’s moments with Sophia Auld represent an instance of maternal plentitude and bonding but not one linked to the preverbal world of the “imaginary.” Rather, because it is Sophia Auld who “kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C” (37), what is forged for Douglass is a connection between maternal intimacy and symbolic language. The mother here is identified not with wordless merging, but with a deep intimacy that includes linguistic signification.38 When Hugh Auld—the forbidding father—enters, he interrupts this mother-child dyad, but this does not result, as in the Lacanian model, in Douglass’s entry into the symbolic order—the acquisition of language and the move toward functional and autonomous identity formation. Instead, since it is Auld who forbids Sophia from giving further reading lessons, he plunges Douglass into both linguistic and social isolation. Douglass’s desire to read, then, must also be understood as a desire to return to a sphere of maternal intimacy, for the two are closely connected.39 Language acquisition here—learning “the A, B, C”—is not a means of compensating for the absent mother; on the contrary, it is always already linked to the mother’s felt presence. This perhaps explains why, far from being an abstracted activity, reading, for Douglass, retains a material and bodily component. As indicated above, this developmental model has an important erotic component. Lacan theorized that the child’s entry into language is also his entry into desire. At the moment the child attains individuation, he severs his connection to the real presence of the maternal body, which instigates the process of Oedipal longing. In the Narrative the production of desire in the child is reflected in part through Hugh Auld’s words to his wife concerning Douglass: “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell .  .  . if you teach that nigger . . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave” (37). Here Auld is commenting on the way education produces a recognition of lack in the slave that thereafter unfits him for hard labor; but he is also, perhaps, recognizing the extent to which Douglass’s desire to read is linked to Oedipal fantasies. That is, in insisting that given an inch, the slave will “take an ell,” Auld draws on the phallic signification of this latter term—an “ell” as a “measuring rod.”40 Indeed, he may even be drawing on its French translation: “taking the ell” as “taking the elle” or woman. The

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threat for Auld, in other words, is that Douglass will in fact take the “ell/elle” (phallus/woman) if allowed initial entry into language.41 Douglass’s response to Auld can also be understood in the register of Oedipal conflict, that is, as a symbolic slaying of the law of the father: “What he most dreaded, that I most desired. . . . That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought” (38). In the scenes that follow, Douglass describes learning to read on the sly, an activity that, given its origins in the Oedipal drama, always retains an element of both sexuality and aggression: From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell. (40)

While earlier it is Douglass’s Aunt Hester who occupies the role of specularized object, here it is Douglass who is “narrowly watched.” His occupancy of a private, interiorized space (“a separate room”) immediately conjures up fears in his owners of improper and threatening behavior. Thus, partly because of the Oedipal romance that precedes it and partly because, as Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks reminds us, “the idea of privacy always carries about it some aura of the erotic,”42 Douglass’s literacy practices are cross-hatched with white anxieties about black male sexuality. His illicit activity and secluded posture along with his owners’ voyeuristic relation to him all contribute to an eroticization of his reading practices. This is perhaps confirmed by Douglass’s proud declaration that in continuing to read he was effectively “taking the ell.”43 Douglass’s later descriptions of reading share this libidinal flavor even as they speak to a more complicated picture of the satisfactions of reading. The first texts he encounters are selections from The Columbian Orator, which he describes as follows: “These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance” (42). Here reading is imagined as supplementing the self, leading to its realization or completion. In giving “tongue to interesting thoughts of my soul,” The Orator helps Douglass articulate his still inchoate sentiments,

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and the result is a vision of merged thought or perfect correspondence between reader and text. Indeed, this sense of mutuality is reinforced by the ambiguity of ownership surrounding the word “tongue”—does it belong to Douglass or to the text/author he is reading? Tongues merge in this vision of literacy, so that black reader and white author are momentarily joined in mutual articulation. This idea that reading could enable psychic and corporeal completion is further articulated in Douglass’s description of the long-term consequences of studying The Columbian Orator. Although he recognizes that this was not an abolitionist book per se, Douglass is drawn to those pieces that feature discussions of freedom, and thereafter the concept takes on sudden urgency for him: “I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it” (43). Reading about freedom becomes the first step to bodily incorporating the concept so as to fill the psychic void left by its absence. Indeed, freedom is depicted almost as a phantom limb here, at once absent and a persistent felt presence for Douglass. It is aligned not with autonomy but with shared experience, since its very meaning is produced collaboratively. The concept of freedom, in other words, is articulated by the author of The Columbian Orator but made real, urgent, and embodied by Douglass, the engaged reader. While it is certainly true, then, that Douglass shows himself to be beholden to Western forms of literacy here—it is precisely these that result in his self-knowledge or, in his words, “a new conception of my degraded condition” (45)—it is inaccurate to conclude from this that Douglass is “reenslaved” through his enthrallment to the dominant discourse. For what seems significant here is the way Douglass transforms that discourse, fashioning it as a tool for intimacy and self-object correspondence. Interestingly, Douglass’s favored document from The Columbian Orator— “Dialogue between a Master and Slave”—is a text that itself features the themes of correspondence and shared understanding. In this piece a runaway slave is called upon by his master to account for his actions. The slave at first demurs, alleging, “I well know that nothing I can say will avail.”44 But after repeated promptings by the master, the slave, recognizing that the former desires to “talk with me, as man to man” (210), agrees to respond. This initial dialogue between master and slave thus stages a reversal of slavery’s most noxious discursive effects. Here, the slave, rather than being silenced, is continually induced to speak, and this leads to a recognition of the essential humanity of both parties (“as man to man.”) In the conversation that follows, the master brings forth several defenses of slavery, each of which the slave quickly and adroitly dispatches. The

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master, in response to this persuasive argumentation, agrees to emancipate the slave, whose last words end the dialogue between them: Now I am indeed your servant though not your slave. And as the first return I can make for your kindness, I will tell you freely the condition in which you live. You are surrounded with implacable foes, who long for a safe opportunity to revenge upon you and the other planters all the miseries they have endured. . . . Superior force alone can give you security. As soon as that fails, you are at the mercy of the merciless. Such is the social bond between master and slave! (211–12)

The “social bond between master and slave” is here implicitly juxtaposed to their discursive or dialogic bond, as manifested in the actual conversation between the two. While the former relation is characterized by mistrust, enmity, and the use of “superior force,” the latter is based on the reciprocal exchange of viewpoints and, ultimately, a union or resolution of antithetical sentiments. In this way the dialogue constitutes, as Thad Ziolkowski argues, “a kind of dreamtext for the Narrative,” but not because it enacts the slave’s rhetorical victory in the dominant discourse.45 Rather, the dialogue demonstrates an ideal understanding of linguistic communication, one characterized by full receptivity and perfect agreement. That Douglass understood this as an ideal is evidenced by his repeated (and failed) attempts to stage similar dialogues with his own masters. Following his initial beating by Covey, for example, Douglass resolves to go to Master Thomas and explain his situation: “I told him all the circumstances as well as I could, and it seemed, as I spoke, at times to affect him. He would then walk the floor, and seek to justify Covey by saying he expected I deserved it” (62). In the end, Douglass is ridiculed, threatened with more punishment, sent back to Covey’s, and ordered “not [to] trouble [his master] with any more stories” (62). The dialogic ideal of The Columbian Orator is—in the real world of slavery—replaced by continued antagonism and imposed silence. Such is also the case in Douglass’s story of Demby, which constitutes perhaps the antitext to the Orator’s “Dialogue between Master and Slave.” Demby—like the slave in the “Dialogue” who, according to Douglass, “was represented as having run away from his master three times” (41)—is given three chances to emerge from a creek, before being murdered without a chance to explain himself.46 Here again, Douglass

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seems intent on contrasting slavery’s violent foreclosure of communication with the potential of dialogic conversation to forge reconciliation and union. Indeed, understanding these two stories in juxtaposition may help to explain Douglass’s decision to specify (incorrectly) that the dialogue between master and slave “represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time” (41, emphasis added). In fact, The Columbian Orator indicates that the dialogue’s precipitating event was merely the slave’s “second attempt to run away” (209, emphasis added). In misremembering or miscommunicating the number, Douglass creates a more effective contrast between these two scenes, implying that while master-slave agreement is possible in fiction (i.e., in the pages of The Columbian Orator), such understanding is not likely in the real world of slavery. Thus while Douglass never abandoned his realworld abolitionist agenda, his Narrative suggests that he privileged textuality as a realm in which to revel in an otherwise thwarted cross-racial communion. Douglass’s final account of reading perhaps offers the clearest proof of his commitment to its fusional effects. Near the end of the Narrative he recounts his introduction to the antislavery paper The Liberator, commenting, “The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire” (96). Earlier, Douglass had described uneducated slaves as “starved by their . . . masters” for information and knowledge (71); here he extends the consumption analogy by depicting himself as gorging on abolitionist prose. As psychoanalytic theorists have noted, the desire for connection with another can unconsciously manifest itself through oral-aggressive fantasies of incorporation: “The primary-process ideation concerning incorporation usually represents the taking in of the object as occurring by way of the mouth, hence as cannibalistic.  .  .  . Incorporation is sometimes represented by the subject as a hostile or greedy destruction or controlling of the object, sometimes as a method of conserving and loving it, and perhaps typically (ambivalently) as both of these.”47 In the Narrative this ambivalent incorporation is directed toward The Liberator, and by extension its editor, William Lloyd Garrison. Indeed, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass specifies just how firmly in his mind the paper was connected with its famous editor: “From this time I was brought in contact with the mind of William Lloyd Garrison . . . I not only liked—I loved this paper, and its editor. . . . Learning to love him, through his paper, I was prepared to be pleased with his presence” (362). Thus we might understand Douglass’s ingestion metaphor in the Narrative as representative of a deep, albeit conflicted, fantasy of union with Garrison. But perhaps what makes the Narrative passage so striking is

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Douglass’s suggestion that this fantasy is reciprocal. “My soul was set all on fire,” he writes, thereby indicating that he is the object as well as the subject of a devouring force. Both consuming and consumed, Douglass envisions reading The Liberator as a mutually dynamic process in which author and reader are absorbed into one another. This understanding of reading, as a way to incorporate and to be incorporated by a desired other, is rendered more persuasive when contrasted to another scene of textual ingestion, one that signals a very different vision. When Douglass and his fellow slaves are arrested for a planned escape, Douglass puts his free pass in the fire and counsels his friends to “eat” their passes and “own nothing” (78). The consumption associated with either oral ingestion or fire that Douglass describes in relation to The Liberator is here replaced with the actual burning and eating of text. This literal consumption operates for Douglass as a negative or failed example of literacy, for rather than reaching its intended readers, the written passes are instead destroyed or incorporated into the self, in an act of autoingestion that precludes any real communication with others. The origins of these passes also speak to their status as negative examples. Written to mimic the handwriting of Douglass’s master, William Hamilton, they represent a kind of textual passing, or what Rafia Zafar calls “lettered whiteface.”48 In this act of counter-piracy Douglass steals the “hand” of his master, thereby both renouncing the labor that defines him as slave (or “hand”) and establishing his own authorial mastery. But while clearly necessary to his survival and freedom, this kind of authorship hardly represents Douglass’s ideal, lacking, as it does, both authorial creativity and readerly responsiveness. Significantly, this negative act of literacy is accompanied by Douglass’s strongest words in the Narrative concerning his attachment to his slave community: “We were linked and interlinked with each other. I loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced since. . . . I believe we would have died for each other” (72). With writing figured as theft and reading replaced by autoingestion, Douglass imagines life “within the circle” as holding the only promise for intimacy. These negative examples of literacy—characterized by authorial usurpation and author-reader detachment—point to the limits of the fantasy of textual communion, especially for dispossessed populations. Denied access to writing, Douglass has no choice but to violently appropriate the instruments of composition; his authorship must needs become an exercise in authority and mastery. Likewise, presented with racist doctrine, Douglass must resist collusion with the authorial mind. Resistant reading (as in his rejection of the false Chris-

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tian doctrine of America in the epilogue of his Narrative) and appropriation of meaning (as in his reinterpretation of the Constitution as a “glorious liberty document” in his speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”49) are crucial to his abolitionist project. The self cannot afford to be diffused in the act of reading/writing when such diffusion amounts to the elimination of the individual and the sacrifice of the race. And yet, understanding Douglass’s relation to literacy only within an agonistic framework ignores the fantasy of intimate communion also lodged there. For in the Narrative’s explicit references to crossracial literacy practices—those scenes where Douglass learns to read and write through the help of whites, reads books and papers authored by whites, or himself hails his own white audience—there persists an idea, albeit ambivalent, of racial fusion, in which the reader/author emerges not as an autonomous agent of identity formation, but as a blurred component of a larger subject-object whole. These episodes, then, are crucial for the way they replace the topos of literacy as selfhood with a vision of the book as a medium through which the boundary between identity and difference can be transcended. In the preface to the Narrative, William Lloyd Garrison writes of Douglass’s “large circle of friends and acquaintances” created as a consequence of Douglass’s activity as an abolitionist writer and speaker (3). We might understand this “large circle” as existing in concentric relation to the “circle” of slavery—that is, situated outside the experiential immediacy of slavery but also, as a circle, containing it. Douglass may exit “the circle” of slavery, but in doing so, he remains enveloped in a wider sphere, one equally based in embodied interpersonal relations but established through the discourse of print. This, then, is the promise of literacy for Douglass: it creates a ring of fellowship capacious enough to include various cross-racial publics while ever retaining at its core the intimacy of bodily presence.

Chapter 5

h “The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner

In the preface to her biography of her sister Susan, Anna Warner describes her initial discomfort with writing and its attendant self-exposure, but then justifies these through an appeal to religious duty: “New England blood is never ashamed of any work that ought to be done; and no believer has cause to cover his face, in any spot where his dear Lord sees fit to bid him dwell; for work, for service, or for the mere polishing attrition.”1 In the body of her work, Anna goes on to explain what she means by this latter term: “Our dear Miss Haines used to talk of ‘attrition,’—giving that name to the minor trials and sorrows which seem so small, and yet are set to do such finishing and polishing work; with fine and sharpened tools” (SW, 475). By Anna’s account, attrition (defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action or process of rubbing away . . . or grinding down by friction”) is figured as a source of refinement or “polish.”2 Through small but incremental experiences of suffering, the self begins to wear away and in the process takes on a spiritual glow. The subject is thus “finished”—both completed and made fine—through her own subtraction. Anna’s choice of the word “polishing” is significant. As an operation that invokes the rituals of housekeeping, polishing is women’s work. Here, however, the object to be scoured is not the home, but the woman herself, who likewise is expected to glow through expurgation, that is, through the eradication of excess will and desire. Interestingly, in the above passage, Anna ties this concept of attrition not to sickness or to poverty but to the activity of writing. Addressing those critics who “will wonder . . . [f ]irst, at our strange, exceptional life, and then that I should

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be willing to tell it so freely,” Anna counters, “I was not willing. I am by nature a terribly secretive person, and . . . our home life was so unendingly precious, that it hurts me to have it gazed at by cold and careless eyes.” After mounting this defense both of herself and of the sanctified domestic space, Anna explains that she writes only out of a sense of duty, for “a faithful chronicler must not please himself ” (SW, iii). By figuring writing not as voluntary production (“I was not willing”) but as obligation, Anna renders it entirely compatible with the disciplining logic of the polishing attrition. In this way, authorship is redefined as self-subordination, a painful but necessary means of regulating the will. Susan Warner shared with her sister this belief in literacy as a means toward attrition. In her own life and in the life of her fictional protagonist, Ellen Montgomery, Warner embraced punitive literacy practices (prolonged reading of difficult material, reading without movement, writing in the context of bodily prostration, etc.) as a way of regulating her perceived idleness. Pen and paper thus became some of the “fine and sharpened tools” through which the Warner sisters achieved self-reduction. Observations about effacement in the nineteenth-century woman are, of course, by no means new. Critics of American fiction have long been disconcerted by the religiously inflected vision of suffering and submission embraced by the antebellum woman writer and especially present in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World.3 Moreover, Richard Brodhead has linked these disciplinary themes to literacy, arguing that the private, leisured middle-class home encouraged novel reading as a means to enclose and limit subjects within predictable boundaries.4 But while Brodhead sees the disciplinary practice of novel-reading as a means of reinforcing individualism, I will argue that the attrition inspired by literacy could allow for greater incorporation of the outside world into the female subject. Her reduction, in other words, paradoxically created a sense of the self as aggregate or expansive, physically linked both to the material page and to other readers. Like Melville and Douglass, then, Warner regarded reading and authorship as privileged activities, because they facilitated an experience of intimate bodily communion. Indeed, if for Melville and Douglass, literacy practices were a means of forging illicit or extranormative connections (homoerotic in one case, interracial in the other), they functioned similarly for Warner, creating moments of imagined fusion with otherwise inaccessible objects (specifically, the familial and the dead). However, because of Warner’s position as a woman, this dynamic was necessarily altered to accommodate nineteenth-century prescriptions regarding gender propriety. The sensual aspects of reading recognizable

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in the accounts proffered by Melville and Douglass (Melville and Hawthorne’s merged lips, Douglass’s “giving tongue”) appear in Warner alongside more punitive directives. “Yesterday I read ‘Lady of the Manor’ till I cried over it,” Warner wrote in May of 1832. “Beat my brains hard & worked through half a page,” she penned in September 1852.5 Reading and crying, beating and writing—these activities constituted the rhythm of Warner’s textual practices, although by her own account they were amply compensated by the experience of bodily awareness, plentitude, and intercorporeity.

Reading and Regulation Susan Warner’s early journal entries affirm what her sister, Anna, claimed: that Susan was “a bit of a Sybarite by nature; liking ease and warmth and bright colours.  .  .  . Quite ready always to .  .  . do nothing herself that she could get some one else to do for her” (SW, 88). “I ought to exert myself,” Susan repeatedly states in her journals, “but I think far too little on what I ought to do; it is always what I like to do” (SW, 157). This “doing what she liked” was a source of concern for Susan’s mother, who described her young daughter as “grow[ing] more unmanageable every day” (SW, 41). Indeed, Susan herself claimed that her “willfulness and indolence have been the trouble . . . since I was big enough to have a will” (SW, 168). Her adolescence was spent learning to renounce her “strong temper” (SW, 34) in favor of “method and steady application” (SW, 131), but according to Anna, Susan had a hard time of it: For still she loved power, and ease, and dreams; and still would have had the work of the world go on without her handling. To hold the bridle, to manage the oars, were always a delight; and to drive—if she held the reins. Otherwise, she was wont to say “the horses had the best of it!” (SW, 199)

Alongside her “masterful love of power” (SW, 34), the young Susan also expressed a desire to differentiate herself from others. Anna writes that “in those days she never wished me to have anything like her things; always liking best to stand apart and unapproachable. Once she confessed that there was nothing she desired so much, as to be ‘odd’” (SW, 88). Between her willful recalcitrance and her longing for difference, Warner must have struggled mightily. Historians have extensively documented how

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nineteenth-century middle-class ideologies of “true womanhood” forced women to conform to “type” and to practice submissiveness and restraint.6 If Warner’s passion and individuality troubled those around her, however, her greatest “deficiency” was deemed her idleness. Warner’s own journals are filled with self-rebuke on this score. Consider these brief consecutive entries from a week in 1832, when Warner was twelve: Monday April 16th I spent the day rather idly; the more shame for me though to be sure I was not well. Wednesday April 18th Yesterday I spent pretty idly . . . and did very little which was useful. To day I have not spent much better than yesterday. Thursday April 19th I do not think I have been much more usefully employed to day than I was yesterday or the day before. Saturday April 21st Must I say again that I did nothing worth mentioning yesterday? I am afraid the fact is so; at least I cannot call to mind anything very useful. Sunday April 22 I have not spent this day as well as I ought . . . I find that I have spent a most unprofitable week, and as unprofitable a Sunday. The more shame for me. (“Journals,” 21–24)

It is no wonder that Warner was especially mortified by her indolence. Advice books written for young women singled out laziness as the scourge of middle-class life. The anonymous author of The Young Lady’s Own Book wrote that “many persons lose two or three hours every day for want of employing odd minutes. If we could resolve to employ . . . the many though individually brief portions of our time which we, by a perversion of sense and language, call spare minutes, how many advantages should we gain even in a single year!”7 In The Young Lady’s Friend, Eliza Ware Farrar was even more extreme in her excoria-

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tion of wasted time, insisting that each girl should scrutinize “her appropriation of every hour in the day.” Being idle, she warned, “is worse than useless.” It is “a wanton killing of time.”8 As a curative for this kind of murderous activity, Farrar called for a program of rigorous self-discipline and relentless time management. This included not only finding occupation for one’s body at all hours of the day but to do the same for one’s mind as well. Farrar explained it as follows: Many hours in a woman’s life are devoted to employments that do not occupy the mind, such as plain sewing, embroidery, knitting, netting, &c., and this time is generally spent in vague reverie; some persons dignify it with the name of thought, or meditation; but when trains of ideas are allowed to pass through the mind whilst the understanding remains passive, it is .  .  . at once the greatest waste of time and injury to the intellect. (24)

Farrar went on to suggest that girls “turn these hours to account” by thinking and working at the same time: When engaged with your needle, a younger brother’s lesson may be heard, reading aloud can be listened to with advantage, or a sister’s practicing can be attended to. If you are so situated that none of these resources are at hand, you can exercise your memory by repeating something you have learned, or you can commit a new piece by placing the book open before you. . . . If you are unable to acquire this art, . . . you can begin by taxing yourself to remember all the particulars of something you have read or heard, or you can make comparisons and find differences and likenesses between things or characters or writings. (24–25)

Farrar’s advice would seem to attest to a tremendous concern for the mental life of girls. Not simply concerned that young women engage in orderly, methodical activities in the domestic realm, she was also deeply invested in the arrangement of their thought processes. Indeed, she often borrowed the language of domestic economy in an effort to advise women on keeping good mental order: “Just as your own work-box would be of little use, if every spool of cotton and skein of silk were unwound and tangled up together,” she

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cautioned, “so are the treasures of the mind of little avail if all sort of facts and impressions are indiscriminately remembered and loaded up together without classification or arrangement” (26–27). In this way, Farrar imagined the woman’s mind as an extension of the home, a realm requiring constant and vigilant ordering. Farrar’s anxieties about the minds of young women were voiced at a time of burgeoning wealth and literacy in the United States. As historians have shown, changes in the social and economic structure of antebellum northeastern America brought with them the rise of a middle class and the creation of more leisure time. As a largely agricultural economy was gradually replaced by an urban-industrial one, women became less directly involved in the accumulation of capital and spent more time in the bourgeois home.9 The presence of advice manuals focusing on the mental activity of girls may have been a consequence of these transformations. Whereas cultural custodians once could rest assured that women’s minds were taken up with the economic reproduction of the family, now they concerned themselves with what middle-class women—engaged in the less taxing work of sewing and light cleaning—spent their hours thinking. Out of this concern emerged prescriptions like Farrar’s, bent on ordering the mental processes of young women. The anonymous author of The Young Lady’s Sunday Book carried her counsel one step further, advising girls not only on content but on method of thinking. Imaginative and fitful speculation was off limits. Instead, girls were instructed to “connect facts in the mind according to their true relations and to the manner in which they tend to illustrate each other.”10 Through such abstract prescriptions, writers attempted to regulate the fantasies of leisured young women. The most effective way these women could ensure that their mental activities were taken up by the right kinds of associations was through the activities of reading and writing.11 Farrar suggested that girls with wayward, flitting minds “take up a grave work and read in it for half an hour without one wandering thought” or “make a translation of twenty lines without thinking of anything but what she is about.” Such exercises helped to “concentrate her whole powers of mind upon a given subject” (30). And “if the labor of composition be irksome to you,” Farrar added at another point, “there can be no stronger proof that your mind requires the discipline” (426). The renowned educator Horace Mann made similar observations about the ability of reading and writing to regulate the minds of the young in his Lectures and Annual

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Reports on Education. Like Farrar, Mann worried about the dangers of idle, undirected ruminations. If a child’s mind “be not pre-occupied with some substantial subjects of thought,” he warned, the cockatrice’s eggs of impure thoughts and desires will be hatched.  .  .  . No parent, no teacher, can ever feel any rational security about the growth of the moral nature of his child, unless he contrives in some way to learn the tenor of his secret, silent meditations, or prepares the means, beforehand, of determining what these meditations shall be.12

For Mann, the best way to influence children’s thoughts was through books. In reading, the child is “supplied with vivid illustrations of the works of Nature and of Art.” This insures that the mind is “hung round with picture-thoughts and images of truth, and charity, and justice, and affection,” so that mental associations remain proper and pure.13 Even more self-regulative than reading was the exercise of reading aloud. Here, subjects were expected to follow strict rules of elocution and to divest themselves of all private feeling and critical reflection. “Reading is neither more nor less than speaking another’s words for him,” wrote the anonymous author of The Young Lady’s Book in a chapter meant to advise girls on reading aloud to friends and family. “The first point then to be attended to, is to put yourself in possession of the author’s sense, and also of his peculiar turn of expression, and general tone of thinking.”14 This entry into the sentiments of the author required the surrender of one’s own emotional state, an often painstaking process. In his Lessons in Reading and Speaking, Noah Webster included exhaustive physical prescriptions for transforming the self so as to achieve particular affective moods like mirth, perplexity, vexation, and so forth.15 His recommendations indicate that reading aloud did not entail a creative or interpretive response to the written text, but rather a highly labored attempt at imitation and a surrender of the self to the authority of the writer. As William Scott, another elocutionist, advised, the aim in reading aloud was “to see the subject operating on the speaker, and not the speaker on the subject.”16 As an extension of the general activity of reading, recitation was meant to foster regulation and social homogeneity. In the words of historian William J. Gilmore, “Conformity in behavior was the ultimate aim of conformity in reading style.”17 Such conformity has special implications for women, who were the

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principal practitioners of vocalized reading.18 Although the injunction that “a reader or speaker express every word as if the sentiments were his own”19 could be a means for women to manifest passions like anger that were otherwise deemed unacceptable, more often these injunctions served to stifle individual feeling and interpretation. Understanding this, Margaret Fuller rejected reading aloud as too passive. She recognized that for a woman, especially, to read aloud was to embrace the role of a transparent medium, speaking another’s (usually a man’s) sentiments rather than her own.20 At the same time that educators and reformers embraced reading and recitation as mechanisms of social control, however, they also conceded (often with great anxiety) the dangers of these activities. As discussed in Chapter 1, the myriad pitfalls associated with reading included skimming/skipping, overly absorbed reading, excessive reading for pleasure, reading late at night, reading in snatches rather than for extended periods of time, and, of course, reading the wrong material.21 Above all, reading raised troubling concerns about the “influence” of either text or reader. To what extent should the reader surrender to the text (especially when it was a sensational novel)? To what extent should she remain skeptical and critically engaged (especially when the text was religious or didactic)? Reformers, then, worried both about the dominance of “bad texts” over innocent readers and about the control of “bad readers” over morally superior texts. Still, these cultural custodians preferred to offer counsel and advice to their middle-class audience rather than to reject the activity of reading altogether. Horace Mann wrote, “there is danger, it is said, of reading bad books. So there is danger of eating bad food; shall we therefore have no harvests? No!”22 For Mann as for others, reading remained the centerpiece of civilized life and the primary tool for regulating the minds of the young.

Warner and the Pleasures of Ascetic Reading Mann’s account of the salutary effects of reading seems tailor-made for Susan Warner, who both yearned for self-improvement and delighted in books and stories. Although she occasionally excoriates the influence of fiction—exclaiming at one point: “Novels are bad things for people made as I am. The best way is to let them alone”—more often she offers opposite testimony: “Read Katherine Ashton these days and enjoy it very much. Don’t know what I should do without fictions” (SW, 188, 398). Warner’s commitment is not to novels per se—she often seems to derive as much pleasure from the Bible and history

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as she does from fiction—but to the activity of reading more generally. This passion seems to arise from a more primitive love of language shared by both Warner sisters. Anna writes of Susan’s letters that “our mother tongue is . . . no poverty-stricken thing, but has a wealth of varied, wholesome, simple words. It is like coming out of a cupboard into space” (SW, 223). Anna’s metaphor here is significant, because it suggests that she and Susan enjoyed language—reading, and eventually authorship—because these activities allowed the young women to exit the constrictions of the domestic (the “cupboard”) and to enter a broader, more unfamiliar realm (“space”). Indeed, Susan’s journal entries attest to her preference for words over household labor. “I like much better to write or read than to sew or work,” she writes at one point (“Journals,” 379). And at another: “At present one does nothing but .  .  . burying cabbage, building hot houses, covering roofs with shingles, and making pig pens. . . . But as soon as one reads or writes, what importance do all these things have?” (381).23 Warner’s bibliophilia extended beyond the activity of reading to the materiality of books themselves. Anna paints an extraordinary picture of her sister one night before Christmas, caressing the corners of a book-filled stocking: So in the darkness, with the biggest and fullest stocking laid upon her bed, she would fumble and feel and guess; spinning out the delightful mystery. What could these sharp corners be?—And was this solid package all books? Searching further as the daylight came on; trying to read titles, imagining colours. Lying back then again in bed to muse and wonder. Once when a work of Mrs. Sherwood’s was in the bag, three rather thick small volumes, she spelled out the strange name and then lay still, saying over and over to herself: “Roxobel—Roxobel—Roxobel.” (SW, 89)

It is hard to miss the erotic overtones in this description: young Warner in bed “would fumble” the “biggest and fullest” sheath of books, longingly repeating the heroine’s name in the dark. Reading as a cognitive process seems to be the least of the pleasures book possession offers here. Warner’s multimodal reaction combines tactile receptivity with postural shifts (“lying back again,” “lay still”) and synesthesia (“imagining colours”). It is figured as a complex response to the book’s seductive materialism—its “solid package,” “sharp corners,” and typographic unfamiliarity (“the strange name”). Indeed, it is the comingling of appendages—human and nonhuman—that partly gives this passage its sensual

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energy. The darkness, the confusion of touch, and Warner’s use of the interrogative (“What could these sharp corners be?—And was this solid package all books?”) all suggest an interlacing of subjects and objects such that the discrete boundaries of each are blurred and indistinguishable. A similar phenomenon is conveyed in Anna’s description of a Christmas morning sometime later: Another year, when I found the bag very heavy, it held the Novels and Tales of Maria Edgeworth: the old edition in nine light blue volumes; looking brown in the dusky morning, and coming out blue as a glad surprise. I have heard her say that she put her head down then with a sense of unbelievable riches. Nine volumes of unknown stories! (SW, 89)

For the Warner sisters, the romance is again centered on the sensual materiality of the books: their weight, their color, and the way they transform themselves through the reader’s touch (“looking brown in the dusky morning, and coming out blue as a glad surprise”). Here, too, the body of the reader takes on an odd symmetry with the textual object. Anna’s ambiguous comment concerning her sister’s prostrate head (“she put her head down then”—Where exactly? On the bed? In prayer?) suggests a kindred relation and physical proximity with the beloved volumes spread before her. Moreover, the enchantment that begins with the book’s voluptuous presence only increases with its reading, as indicated in Anna’s description of her father’s nightly recitations to the girls: Between readings, we were not to touch the work then in hand; but it tells of my sister’s high honour, that one day—on fire still from last night’s chapters—she asked my father if she might just “open” “Waverly,” to see with her own eyes the name of Flora McIvor. (SW, 90–91)

As in the case of “Roxobel,” the urgency here is principally located in the materiality of the printed word. Warner’s fiery desire to “‘open’ ‘Waverly’” so that she might “see with her own eyes” demonstrates the sensuality of the ocular dimension of reading, the extent to which it is an active, bodily phenomenon. Presumably, seeing the words “Flora McIvor” carries more sensual force for Warner than hearing them—an indication of the limited nature of reading out loud.

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As the above example indicates, despite—or more likely because of—the pleasures associated with reading, books were not divorced from disciplinary action. Henry Warner’s injunction “not to touch the work then in hand” may be interpreted alternatively as a concern that too much reading might be harmful, as an attempt to foster patience and self-command in his daughters, or as a desire on his own part to control the reading experience. This disciplinary use of reading was in effect in the Warner household even when books were not read out loud. Susan writes of finally being able to read Scott novels on her own, “Under great restrictions however. One hour a day is the prescribed term for that reading” (“Journals,” 125). In a similar vein, Anna relates the following story: Once . . . a friend brought to our house a copy of the Wandering Jew, and coaxed my father to read it; he had an inborn distaste for all French novels. But finding in this one some marvelously fine descriptions, historical and other, he wished my sister to read them, but not the whole book. Marking with his pencil certain chapters and pages, he simply bade her keep within those limits; and then put the volume in her hands, absolutely sure of her loyalty and truth. (SW, 91)

Henry Warner’s insistence that Susan stay within certain “limits” testifies to his wish that his daughter exert mastery over the reading material even as it signifies his own sovereignty over his daughter’s reading habits. The marks of his pencil amount to a new materialism—superimposed onto that of the book itself—meant to rein in the reading subject and her penchant for sumptuous exploration. These restrictive, desensualizing prescriptions for reading imposed by Henry Warner eventually became internalized by his daughters. Journal entries attest to Susan’s repeated attempts to limit her reading for pleasure, increase her consumption of more ponderous books, and correct what she perceived as faulty reading habits. Her efforts, however, were not always successful: “we have begun the Pirate, which I think we shall like much, for besides the evening reading, I have looked ahead as far as to the end of the book; a common way of mine, but a very poor one” (“Journals,” 175). These kinds of “poor” reading practices cause Warner much anxiety, in part because she links them to more general defects in her character that want regulation. “Kames of course, comes on

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slowly,” she writes in reference to the eighteenth-century author. “I should like to finish it before the ball, & I should also like to cure myself of a certain trick of rubbing my fingers which gives great offense to my good friends. Whether I shall do both, or either, remains to be seen” (“Journals,” 181). While such comments may seem banal enough, Anna claims that Susan’s punitive relation to reading worsened as the years progressed and was ultimately responsible for the “undermining of her health” (SW, 120). In particular, Susan’s penchant for sitting—her self-imposed hours of reading without movement—was the primary reason for her physical decline. Susan herself notes that she would “sit till my bones ache,” often “with little variation” (“Journals,” 136), and persists in this habit of reading even after her family warns “that sitting still so much is the way to kill me” (134). Warner’s obstinacy suggests that it is precisely in such corporeal habits that she locates her primary satisfaction in reading. If, as Warner confesses, “there are almost no pleasures in this world that do not follow or precede pain” (383), then reading with its attendant bodily constriction becomes the privileged activity through which this pain-pleasure is accessed. A satisfying reading experience for Warner must involve a degree of affliction, and this was achieved through controlling the urge to read too much or too little and through carefully monitoring bodily movement while reading. Indeed, Warner’s link between the desire to finish Kames’s book and to stop the vaguely erotic activity of “rubbing fingers,” referenced above, seems significant for the way it figures reading as simultaneously a source of regulation and libidinal pleasure. Hers is the “rub” of the polishing attrition, a delightful and refining self-denial. Thus the limits placed on Warner’s reading (by herself or by others) do not simply counter the sensual aspects of reading; rather, they magnify these aspects precisely because Warner achieves psycho-corporeal satisfaction through the experience of constraint. Likewise, her attempts to remove her body from the practice of reading (by, for example, refusing its natural movements) end up highlighting the body and its desires all the more effectively. Deprivation thus becomes a safe and socially acceptable way to engage the female body while reading.24 When Warner’s reading was light or particularly desirable, this deprivation could be achieved through tactics of forestallment. She writes of saving her beloved Scott “for the last hour of the evening” (125), and she describes prolonging the hours before she would “break the seal” on epistolary communications, for “That is my way of enjoying my letters” (SW, 251). The satisfactions of these

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delay tactics, requiring both emotional and bodily control, usually trumped the gratification garnered from actual reading. Indeed, more than once Warner confesses that her “anticipations gave more pleasure than the work itself did” (186). This is because in the context of compelling material like Scott or private letters, the rewards of reading are linked to its deferral. Pleasure, in other words, is accessed through reading’s refusal. This pleasure, however, is hardly solipsistic, for Warner’s reading habits are never simply individualistic forays into female desire. As Warner makes clear in her journals, the satisfactions accessed through reading (or reading’s refusal) always involve an element of communion. Prolonging the period before opening her letters is Warner’s method of facilitating a more intense connection with another, be it the correspondent or (more often) a fellow reader who shares in her anticipation and desire.25 In her novel-reading, too, Warner’s disciplinary habits work to create deeper fantasies of connection. Anna writes of Susan “identifying herself with the characters in a way that must have been often more pain than pleasure, and taking much to heart the least seeming blemish in some favourite personage” (SW, 89). She adds: “If the thought sprung up, that So and So should have done (or not have done) this or that, she would brood over the question for hours and days: thinking, thinking, perfectly absorbed; and glad or distressed, according to the final decision” (SW, 90). Here Susan combines identification with relentless introspection so that the self and the characters of a novel become psychically merged, both subject to Warner’s exacting judgment. Her punitive reading practices seem to allow for increased intimacy with her protagonists, as if the eradication of self creates more room for the incorporation of another.

Subjugation and Authorship If reading is infused with both satisfaction and self-denial for Warner, so too is the activity of writing. Although Warner professes, especially in her early years, a desire to keep regular entries in her journals, she seems to derive little direct enjoyment from this activity. “It is not a pleasure to me now to write my journal,” she comments a little over a month after beginning her first one; “I do not much like to write my journal,” she reiterates three days later (“Journals,” 31). And yet, Warner persists in this practice in part because she sees it as one element in a Franklinian regime designed to perfect the self. As a consequence, journal records in her early years tell less of her inner life than

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her daily accomplishments, including that of the journal entry itself. Such activity, although immediately ungratifying, promises future satisfaction: “On looking back into my journal I find myself so much amused that I am determined to take a new start & write regularly, in order to provide myself the same pleasure for the future” (“Journals,” 206–7). As in her reading, Warner’s conception of pleasure here is future-oriented and bound up with the mechanics of discipline. Despite these motivations, however, Warner often lapses in her writing, and this neglect brings with it much anxiety. Consider, for example, this typical set of consecutive entries in which she vows to write more, only to continually neglect that promise in the days that follow: Monday Feb 8th I do mean at last, & after such an interval, to resume my very neglected journal. Sunday Feb 21st Is it possible that I cannot be steady enough to write regularly in my journal? Sunday March 6th Here’s another great gap in my journal. One would think I might as well give it up altogether. . . . Every little while I think to be more regular & then day after day it is neglected. (208–10)

These consecutive entries testify to the ambivalent space that journal writing occupies for Warner. Many feminist scholars speak of women’s diaries as testaments of self-realization, private assertions of competence and desire.26 For Warner, however, her journals functioned otherwise. Writing for her was less an act of self-confirmation than an occasion for self-punishment. Her journal entries often do no more than record her sense of shame for not writing earlier; they excoriate rather than consolidate the self. Even when Warner is not lamenting the paucity of her entries, her descriptions take on a punitive cast: What account can I give of the winter . . . ? For myself, I have done nothing, literally, I am afraid . . . and I have disappointed my friends. I know I am not what they once thought I would be, and I know

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Here, writing serves as a tool for recognition but only insofar as it makes manifest the self ’s inadequacy. (“I scarcely knew . . . till I began to write.”) Ironically, then, textual production allows Warner to come into being by enabling a more thorough disavowal of self. It would be a mistake, however, to think of this relationship to writing as merely debilitating for Warner. Although authorship often went hand and hand with self-recrimination, it was nevertheless sustaining, in part because, as in Warner’s reading, the attrition of self was compensated by a deep intimacy with another. This was especially true in her adult years, when Warner and her sister began to write professionally and to read each other’s works. “Shall I ever forget the pleasure of this evening?” Susan writes on 7 January 1851. “We had concluded to give each other samples of our works—& resolved to exchange chapters . . . & by [the] precious light we read, she my first, I her first & fifth, with oh how great pleasure. Then I must needs read hers to Aunt Fanny, so that pleasure was had over again” (278–79). Warner’s descriptions of multiple narrative exchanges evoke a same-sex writing community reminiscent of Melville’s described in Chapter 3, where satisfactions are had through the mutual sharing of prose. More suggestive, still, however, is the continued sense of subordination that accompanies this delight in textual communion. Here is Anna’s description of Susan’s composition of The Wide, Wide World: it was written in closest reliance upon God: for thoughts, for power, and for words. Not the mere vague wish to write a book that would do service to her Master: but a vivid, constant, looking to him for guidance and help: the worker and her work both laid humbly at the Lord’s feet. In that sense, the book was written upon her knees. (SW, 264)

Anna’s depiction of Susan writing “upon her knees” offers a powerful image of simultaneous prostration and production. Self-subordination is depicted here as a richly enabling posture, one conducive to both narrative expression and union with God. Indeed, the image of “the worker and her work both laid humbly at the Lord’s feet” suggests the extensivity and correspondence of writer and text (captured in their proximate positioning as well as in the near iden-

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tity of their linguistic signifiers—“worker and work”). The erosion of self that propels authorship, then, is here compensated by the experience of fusion with God and text.

Bible Love in The Wide, Wide World This same confluence of intimacy, abjection, and textuality manifests itself in Warner’s best-known heroine, Ellen Montgomery. In the opening pages of The Wide, Wide World Ellen is given her first lesson in resignation. Informed that her ailing mother must leave her for a trip abroad, Ellen responds with a violent outburst of grief. Such passion, however, cannot be tolerated, and Mrs. Montgomery cautions Ellen that “though we must sorrow, we must not rebel.”27 In order to drive home this lesson in the days that follow, Mrs. Montgomery asks her daughter to read to her from the Bible. This results in the beginning of Ellen’s transformation, for “though, when she began, her own little heart was full of excitement . . . the sublime beauty of the words and thoughts, as she went on, awed her into quiet, and her mother’s manner at length turned her attention entirely from herself ” (27). Ellen’s vocalized reading aids in the process of her self-regulation. This is not simply because the Bible teaches obedience, but because the activity of reading aloud, as discussed above, evokes a submission to the text and a yielding of one’s subjectivity, so that Ellen’s attention is “turned entirely from herself.” This communal engagement with the book is contrasted to more private forms of reading that result in dangerous overexcitement for the woman. When Mrs. Montgomery appears flushed and nervous, for example, the doctor fears she has been “secretly . . . reading some furious kind of a novel” (19). Reading religious and didactic texts in a shared setting thus becomes the model of appropriate female literacy in The Wide, Wide World. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Ellen’s parting gift from her mother is a newly purchased Bible. Mrs. Montgomery procures this Bible through the sale of her beloved ring, a present given to her by her own mother. The substitution of a Bible for a ring (the marker of heterosexual union) is crucial to the establishment of Ellen’s narrative trajectory, for in passing along a book rather than a ring to her child, Mrs. Montgomery effectively bars her daughter from the typical fate of the nineteenth-century heroine. Ellen, in other words, is destined not for the “marriage plot,” but for the “reading plot.” Stated more accurately, Ellen’s erotic gaze will be directed more toward books than toward men.28 This replacement of bibliophilia for heterosexual romance is confirmed in the book-

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store, where Ellen exhibits what can only be characterized as Bible lust. Having an array of scriptural editions before her, she pored in ecstasy over their varieties of type and binding and was very evidently in love with them all. . . . In the excitement and eagerness of the moment, Ellen had thrown off her light bonnet and with flushed cheek and sparkling eye . . . she was weighing the comparative advantages of large, small, and middle-sized; black, blue, purple, and red; gilt and not gilt; clasp and no clasp. Everything but the Bibles before her Ellen had forgotten utterly. (29–30)

This scene creates an effective counter to the communal scene of reading detailed above, because here Ellen’s absorption is entirely private and isolated— indeed, her mother has been “forgotten” and sits at a “distance” (30). Moreover, her “ecstasy” is a response not to the “sublime beauty of the words” of the Bible but to the pleasures of its materiality. Ellen displays a troubling sensuality here—brought on by the excessive options of the market. In what follows, she must learn to associate her love of books not with their material pleasure, but with their ability to subordinate the self and forge communion with others. In the end, despite the dazzling array of options, Ellen chooses a plain, practical Bible, one that exactly resembles her mother’s own. Thus the Bible is defined for Ellen less as a personalized possession than as a medium of identification with her mother. A similar lesson is delivered in the next scene, where Ellen and her mother proceed to buy a writing desk. Again, Ellen is seduced by the endless possibilities for consumption, and again her mother must forcibly temper her desires by defining the desk not as a luxury but as a disciplinary tool and a vehicle of mandatory communication between mother and daughter: “My gifts will serve as reminders for you if you are ever tempted to forget my lessons. If you fail to send me letters, or if those you send are not what they ought to be, I think the desk will cry shame upon you” (37). What is critical in these scenes is not simply the mild sadism of Mrs. Montgomery, but the extent to which her gentle threats are tied to Ellen’s emerging literacy. Bible reading and letter writing, in other words, are defined as self-subordinating activities, meant not to foster creativity in Ellen, but to reinforce the “lessons” of a powerful mother.29 Indeed, the threat of “shame” associated with Ellen’s writing desk again suggests the way literacy has replaced heterosexual love in defining Ellen’s narrative trajectory.

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The fear, anxiety, and abashment that Freud posited as central to the child’s initiation into heterosexuality here emerge solely in relation to the activities of reading and writing. Because these forms of literacy have been stamped with maternal love and discipline, they become effective substitutes for Mrs. Montgomery’s presence. Indeed, once Ellen begins her journey, her Bible, the cover of which is inscribed by Mrs. Montgomery, serves not only to remind her of her mother, but eventually to take her mother’s place. Whereas the opening scenes of The Wide, Wide World find Ellen reclining in Mrs. Montgomery’s embrace, scenes following their separation show Ellen’s “mind resting itself in one of the verses” of the Bible (559). Likewise, the silent mutuality she experiences with her mother in the early pages of the book (36, 57, 63) is reestablished in her dynamic with her Bible, whose words are “exactly fitted to every want and mood” (406). These words carry a “healing breath” (307) reminiscent of her mother’s influence, so that when Ellen, prostrate with sickness, longs for “the touch of that loved hand,” she contents herself by clasping her Bible, “the very “touch of [which] is a solace to her” (207). Touching her book comes to resemble being touched by her mother because by now the two have become indissolubly linked, and Mrs. Montgomery’s loving hand has been transformed into her writing hand, or the “beloved handwriting” (352) that adorns the inside cover. Indeed, Ellen’s response to Mrs. Montgomery’s death suggests that her mother’s textual manifestation has become more meaningful to Ellen than her living reality: “She never spoke of her mother after once hearing when and where she died; she never hinted at her loss, except exclaiming in an agony, ‘I shall get no more letters!’” (348). Ellen’s Bible, then, is not so much a replacement for her mother as a prosthetic extension of her, its materiality (and particularly the metonymic handwriting on its cover) providing a way for Ellen to experience her mother’s felt presence. The intercorporeity that Ellen establishes with her Bible also manifests itself in the scene of the Bible’s inscription. After penning Ellen’s name and two messages (to be discussed shortly), Mrs. Montgomery quite literally collapses onto the book, or as Warner’s narrator puts it, her “head sank upon the open page” (42). The accompanying illustration in the 1892 edition shows a young woman slumped over, face pressed against the interior of a book, arms circling around it, fingers intertwined (figure 2). Mrs. Montgomery’s embrace of the book mimics earlier scenes of embrace with her daughter, although here it is Mrs. Montgomery who appears nurtured and comforted—her head rests

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on the book just as Ellen’s head is often seen “resting on her mother” (18). Even more important, Mrs. Montgomery and the Bible are positioned in parallel formation, the book opened to meet her embrace, her own spine dovetailing the spine of the book. In this way, subject and object appear as bodily equivalents, achieving what Leo Bersani calls “correspondence of form.”30 Mrs. Montgomery’s physical orientation to the book recalls Susan Warner’s own posture—her “head down” on the Christmas she received Maria Edgeworth’s novels. It also anticipates Ellen’s bodily relation to the same Bible her mother inscribes; for Ellen, too, is often positioned with her head “bent .  .  . upon her little Bible” (352). All these postural attitudes, in other words, suggest a structural correlation between bodies and books, a sense that the two are extensions of one another. Ellen is merged with her mother; her mother is merged with the Bible; the Bible is merged with Ellen: these scenes show the fungibility and interpenetration of bodies with other bodies, the idea that (as Bersani puts it) “objects (including ourselves) are always being repeated and lost in other objects to which they correspond as forms.”31 But if these postures ward off isolation by suggesting an intimate coextension with other objects in time and space, they also gesture to the female subject’s subordination. As argued above, Warner’s vision of communion and correspondence is only made possible through a disciplinary fantasy involving the self ’s partial dissolution. This dual vision of amplification and erasure is, of

Figure 2. “Mrs. Montgomery’s head sank upon the open page.” Illustration by Frederick Dielman in Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1892), 42. Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries.

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course, religious in its origins, since for Warner, faith entails both an ecstatic incorporation of God and a diminishment of the self; hence she can write that Christ must both “dwell in our hearts” (SW, 460) and commandeer them—“oh Lord, come to my heart thyself and take all!” (SW, 484). In The Wide, Wide World this sense of concomitant plentitude and self-loss is especially evident in Ellen’s dynamic with her hymn-book, a beloved possession given to her by a kind stranger on a ship. In this book, the stranger has inscribed a special “mark” to denote those passages he hopes Ellen will find particularly edifying. “Whenever you find it,” he tells Ellen before parting, “you may know there is something I want you to take special notice of. There are some other marks here too, but they are mine: these are for you” (78, emphasis original). By designating certain marks for Ellen and implicitly withholding other marks, in a move that recalls the regulating tactics of Warner’s father, the stranger—later identified as George Marshman—thwarts Ellen’s potential for autonomous reading and independent interpretation. And yet, at the same time, he also establishes the grounds for textual communion, since the book thereafter “brought back to her mind the friend who had given it” (88). Like her Bible, the touch of which reminds Ellen of her mother’s felt presence, the marked hymn-book creates a tactile connection to the now-absent Mr. Marshman: “it was with her hand upon it that Ellen went to sleep; and it was in her hand still when she waked the next morning” (88). In touching books that have been touched by others, Ellen, now adrift in the wide, wide world, regulates her behavior while achieving emotional intimacy and physical correspondence with objects. Religious and didactic books are especially appropriate for this purpose, since they tend to restrict both interpretation and corporeal movement; that is, they interpellate a reader who is expected to be both hermeneutically limited and physically prostrate.32 They thus produce subjects characterized by bodily and spiritual equivalence rather than by autonomy or difference. The inscriptions on Ellen’s Bible exemplify this ideal of shared textual subjugation. On its front cover, Mrs. Montgomery has penned a biblical verse intended for Ellen (“I love them that love me; and they that seek me early shall find me”) as well as one intended for herself (“I will be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee”) (42). Jane Tompkins and Nancy Schnog have suggested that these lines are significant because they link the “I” of God to the “I” of Mrs. Montgomery, essentially making the two indistinguishable. In this way, Mrs. Montgomery “joins herself with God and invests Ellen’s Bible with words that become the lasting symbolism and legacy of maternal divinity.”33

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I would argue, however, that the fundamental ambiguity of these two verses stems not so much from the “I” of the speaker—it is clearly God in both examples—but from the “thee” of the addressee. In the first line, it is Ellen who is implicitly addressed; in the second, it is her mother. Thus these lines indicate not the link between Mrs. Montgomery and God but that between Mrs. Montgomery and her daughter—a link that is realized through their common designation as reader (“thee”). The biblical inscriptions, then, attest to the power of religious reading to band multiple subjects into an intimate community, all of whom are subordinated to the word of God. The notion of a shared textual subjugation is reinvoked in slightly altered form during one of Ellen and John’s many conversations about the religious text Pilgrim’s Progress. Asked why the protagonist, Christian, has a “mark in his forehead,” John answers, “That is the mark of God’s children—the change wrought in them by the Holy Spirit—the change that makes them different from others, and different from their old selves” (351–52). When Ellen queries, “But how can one tell whether one has [the mark] or no?” John responds, Carry your heart and life to the Bible and see how they agree. The Bible gives a great many signs and descriptions by which Christians may know themselves—know both what they are and what they ought to be. If you find your own feelings and manners of life at one with these Bible words, you may hope that the Holy Spirit has changed you and set his mark upon you. (352)

According to John, conversion is defined as the mark of God, an impressment that at once subordinates and distinguishes the subject. Ellen can determine her religious commitment by comparing herself to the text of the Bible. If the two match, she may know that God has “set his mark upon you.” Ellen, who, we recall, has already received special “marks” from Mr. Marshman (whose own name gestures to his status as a “marked” man), seems a perfect candidate for this kind of imprint. Having succumbed to the rigors of the polishing attrition, she is increasingly characterized only by the mark of Christian refinement—the flesh made word. Such a mark, moreover, holds the promise of community, for through it “Christians may know themselves.” Thus to be marked is to be subordinated, but it is also to join in correspondence and intimate recognition both with the words of Bible and with similarly marked others. It is precisely this combination of subordination and solidarity that charac-

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terizes Ellen’s own conversion, an event that begins with her once again studying her mother’s inscription in her Bible and concludes with her falling “on her knees in a perfect agony of weeping” (352). In the period that follows, Warner’s narrator states: There seemed to be a link of communion between her mother and [Ellen] that was wanting before. The promise, written and believed in by the one, realized and rejoiced in by the other was a dear something in common, though one had in the mean while removed to heaven and the other was still a lingerer on the earth. Ellen bound the words upon her heart. (353)

In binding the words of scripture “upon her heart,” Ellen fulfills John’s mandate to make “your own feelings .  .  . at one with these Bible words”; that is, she acquires the “mark” of Christianity. Even more importantly, in so doing she heightens her sense of intimacy with her mother, achieving a “link of communion.” For despite the fact that one is “removed to heaven” and the other is “still a lingerer on earth,” their shared relationship to the authority of the Bible joins them in mutual textual submission. The scene of Ellen’s conversion thus points to the power of Bible reading to unite separated individuals, to turn the living and the dead into bodily equivalents of the Scriptures and of each another. The headpiece to Chapter 1 of The Wide, Wide World (1892 edition) contains an illustration of this fantasy (Figure 3). Here Ellen is depicted with one hand encircling a book and the other touching an angelic female figure, presumably her deceased mother. Ellen’s wingless state would seem to suggest that she is not dead, but simply connected with her mother through the experience of reading her Bible. Death is not the final barrier, the image implies, because the Bible is capable of bridging the distance between the living and the deceased, joining the two in textual fellowship. Seeing this image, the contemporary reader may herself feel implicated in this intimacy. After all, in holding Warner’s book, the reader adopts a pose that resembles that of the illustrated Ellen, and thus joins a circuit in which touching books leads to touching and being touched by others. At the same time that this illustration emphasizes communion and bodily correspondence, however, it also reinforces the themes of renunciation and attrition. Just below the novel’s title, on the left, is a headstone, which at once serves to mark the grave of Ellen’s mother and to begin the chapter. We can

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Figure 3. Frontispiece. Illustration by Frederick Dielman in Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1892), 9. Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries.

identify this headstone as Mrs. Montgomery’s both from the M upon it and because the word it helps form is Mrs. Montgomery’s preferred appellation— “Mamma.” The effect of this illustration is a curious one: the M pronounces Mrs. Montgomery as dead even as it forms the first word in her dialogue with Ellen. At the moment she is hailed, in other words, she is simultaneously revealed as deceased. One may read this illustration as a particularly vivid example of Warner’s preferred model of identity. If for Warner female subjects come into being through the eradication of their will and desire, then what

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better way to illustrate this than through an ornamental initial that introduces a speaking woman while suggesting that she has already expired? In this way Mrs. Montgomery—ultimate role model for her daughter Ellen—is a subject both hailed and erased, at once narratively productive and physically prostrate. The epitome of the logic of the polishing attrition, she perfects a posture simultaneously informed by presence and absence. The coming together of textuality, subjugation, and intimacy in this illustration reflects Warner’s preoccupation with these themes as central components of middle-class female subjectivity. Having been taught by her pastor that “the faith and love of Christ make it delightful to use self-denial” (SW, 218–19), Warner embraced those practices that diminished the self while producing emotional connections and physical correspondence with others. Religious and didactic books were particularly effective as instruments of subordination because readers were expected to discontinue their interpretive faculties and surrender to the text’s authority. And yet, this state of self-diminishment importantly allowed for increased identification, both with the book itself and with imagined fellow readers. For Warner, the pain of literacy could thus engender affective communal bonding while polishing the spiritual self “with fine and sharpened tools.”

Epilogue

h No End in Sight When, over the last few years, I have told people that I have been working on a manuscript about the experience of reading in the nineteenth century, inevitably they have asked, Will you be addressing the contemporary phenomenon of digital reading and the end of the book? This is an issue that, by all accounts, has preoccupied more than just my own friends and acquaintances. Every day news sources (both print and online) are awash with commentary about how technology is transforming both the publishing industry and our capacity for genuine interactions with books. Nicholas Carr, author of the controversial study The Shallows, has argued that the Web, with its endless byways for searching and surfing, has reconfigured our brains, making us physiologically less capable of sustained and concentrated reading: The cellular structure of the human brain, scientists have discovered, adapts readily to the tools we use, including those for finding, storing and sharing information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology strengthens certain neural pathways and weakens others. . . . What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection.1

Psychologist Maryanne Wolf agrees: “My principal worry is that children who are learning to read while immersed in a digital environment may not develop what I call the ‘expert reading brain,’ one that learns in its formation

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process to integrate ever more sophisticated, deep reading comprehension processes.”2 These anxieties, of course, mimic those of the nineteenth century, particularly in the metaphors they employ around the speed of reading. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” comments Carr. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”3 Striking a similar note, Greg Garrard observes that “like a high-speed train through gorgeous countryside,” the modern tendency to skim “turns the lovely hinterland of literature into a meaningless blur.”4 And Sven Birkerts bemoans the “chaos of endlessly branching paths” characteristic of the Internet: “A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet.”5 As discussed in Chapter 1, comparisons of reading to locomotive experience (hopscotching, trains, even Jet Skis) speak to larger anxieties about the culture of modernity and particularly its ties to velocity and impermanence. Speed and novelty, the argument goes, threaten to sunder us from familiar ways of interacting with and perceiving our environs. Articulated in relation to reading, they suggest the termination of a specific way of thinking, indeed, of being in the world. While our present cultural moment is often hailed as singular, the rhetoric around it indicates that, in fact, we are participating in a reading revolution not unlike the one that characterized the nineteenth century. The technologies may have changed, but the fears they evoke—particularly about the doomed fate of deep inquiry—remain the same. The real issue, then as now, seems to revolve around the reader’s autonomy. As I’ve indicated, throughout the nineteenth century, cultural commentators, authors, and ordinary readers registered fear about the book’s capacity to overwhelm the reader, even as they reveled in the pleasures of attenuated subjectivity, brought on by the practice of reading. The directive to absorb the book (rather than to let the self be absorbed by it) demonstrates the extent to which reading was made to align with notions of possessive individualism. Recall, in this context, the advice of one anonymous writer in 1866: “The reader must master the book, instead of the book mastering him; otherwise he forfeits his own mental individuality, his freedom of mental action.”6 In the contemporary context, concern for the reader’s “mental individuality” can be found not only in the plethora of literary studies that emphasize readerly resistance as a path toward identity formation and political empowerment, but also in the dire pronouncements of the Web’s detractors who worry that the Internet is slowly eroding its users’ subjectivity. “People feel a growing sense of distractedness and

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diffusion . . . connected to the power and seductiveness of electronic technologies,” comments this camp’s most eloquent spokesman, Sven Birkerts: “a whole array of forces working through our society is changing the deep patterns of how people behave in public and private; is modifying, further, their sense of self, and dissipating subjectivity.” The decline in what Birkerts calls “deep reading” also heralds, then, “a new creature in the making: .  .  . the self no longer tightly gathered about a core identity.”7 Echoing this assessment, Henry Hitchings writes, “the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one’s sense of self.”8 For these thinkers, the remedy for this state of affairs is a return to an older mode of study, what many in a growing movement call Slow Reading. Associated with the larger Slow Movement (Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Living), Slow Reading rejects the speed, technology, and innovation associated with contemporary life. According to John Miedema, “An increasing number of people are getting frustrated with information overload and are choosing to read slowly. They share a conviction that slow reading is an advantage, a pleasure when reading fiction and an aid to comprehension when deciphering a complex text.”9 Slow readers like Miedema bask not only in the unhurried pace of reading, but also in the rational reflection that such a pace makes possible. Most importantly, Slow Reading promises to return us to a sense of coherent selfhood. As Birkerts puts it, Reading of the sort we nostalgically harken to—deep, engrossed, ardent, knowledge- and wisdom-oriented—belongs to history. . . . But all is not therefore lost. . . . The time of reading, the “deep time” . . . that is, in essence, absorbed experiential time wherein we are utterly unaware of the clockface or the clicking of digits—will become one of the surest paths back. Not so much to a specific past, but to the more reflective and contained selves we will realize we cannot bear to lose touch with.10

Slow Reading, then, promises to reinstate deep subjectivity, all but eroded by contemporary technologies. It is, in Birkerts’s phrase, “an ignition to inwardness.” “To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.”11 For Birkerts, reading is the crucial antidote to the loss of autonomy and self-possession propagated by the terra nova of electronic communication. And

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yet, as I have tried to demonstrate throughout this study, reading has been historically valued, in certain contexts, precisely for the way it inhibits identity formation and coherent selfhood. The psychic and bodily communion fostered by the practice of reading allows subjects to bask in a sense of fusion or oneness, both with others and with the material book itself. The result is not a “strengthen[ing] of one’s essential position” (with the defensive fortification of the ego that this implies), but an undoing of barriers between the self and its objects. The Web with its variegated possibilities for “linking” may be capable of creating a similar condition, particularly when the aim of the user is fellowship rather than mere information gathering. I would suggest, then, that to the extent that electronic technologies cater to the desire for sociality, they continue and intensify rather than counteract the age-old work of the book. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that nothing has changed with the move to new media. Indeed, the real transformational shift that has occurred centers around the materiality of the book and our tactile relationship to it—what is sometimes referred to as the haptics of reading. Much has been made of the fact that electronic communications make use of both scroll and codex—returning us to a linear interface while simultaneously allowing us to engage in nonlinear indexical reading, albeit at a far faster speed than with the book—and that new media therefore mimic rather than supplant older technologies. Likewise, contemporary commentators have pointed out that e-readers like the Kindle, iPad, and Nook model themselves on the material book (from their size to the technology they employ for ink and for page turning) and thus represent a capitulation to the logic of the analog text rather than a whole-scale revision.12 Despite these arguments, however, few would contest the fact that reading hypertext or an e-book represents a fundamental shift in the phenomenal reading experience. As book designer Carl W. Scarbrough puts it, “there are certain haptic experiences that an electronic device simply can not afford the reader . . . [A] digital interpretation could never approach the sheer sensual pleasure of the subtly tended, gently irregular typography, the charming ornaments, the extraordinary pale-gray paper.”13 To be sure, electronic media (and, to narrow the discussion, e-book devices in particular) have a materiality of their own, despite the tendency of some detractors to imagine their processes as “invisible.”14 What Bill Brown calls “the crisis of besieged materiality” must be countered by the recognition that information is always delivered through a specific medium and received via the body’s interaction with this technology.15 The iPad may not register marginalia

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and dog-eared pages in the same way the traditional book does, but as blogger Gary Frost points out, “Just as interesting are the tangled smudges of finger marks when the screen is off. These are better than eye trackings and show how busy our fingers are during reading.”16 There is still, then, a sensual materiality to our interactions with e-books, and yet, what users continually reference (often in tones of regret) is the flattening or homogenization of this experience, so that reading a tome like War and Peace becomes indistinguishable in haptic terms from reading the newspaper. The e-book device functions, much like the phonograph or CD player, to standardize the material dimensions of reading, and while some would argue that such an approach frees up the reader to enjoy the “transcendent” aspects of the text,17 many more bemoan the lack of commensurability between content and vehicle—the fact that a novella, for example, should necessarily be housed in a smaller, more intimate frame than a philosophy textbook.18 After all, unlike in the case of music, where our interaction with the material object precedes the aesthetic experience, the material dimensions of the book have always been integral to and simultaneous with the act of reading. There are other costs as well. The sense of movement through a book—the felt relation, registered in visual and kinesthetic terms, between pages consumed and pages unread—is unavailable on the Kindle, and makes e-reading, as a friend of mine put it, a bit like being on an endless treadmill. Sven Birkerts adds that the bound bulkiness of books functions as a sensual metaphor for the elaborate context that produced them: “The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.”19 According to Birkerts, what is destroyed by the Kindle’s ethos of instant access, in which books arrive “from a vast, undifferentiated cyber-emporium out there,”20 is the relationality of the text—its complex connections to its author, to other titles, and to the commercial publishing industry that brought it into existence. It is these forces that we implicitly recognize when we pick up a bound book, perhaps because they have been historically organized around a similar form. And yet, if the move toward the Kindle represents a symbolic eradication of the various players that brought the book into being, it also heralds new relational dynamics in the making. For the popularity of the e-book device stems in no small part from the “connectivity” it creates—from the ability of users to access the dictionary to the “popular highlights” feature that allows readers to see the favorite passages of other Kindle users to the practice of posting com-

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mentary or “booklogs” to social media sites.21 All these activities contribute to a collectivization of the reading process, a sense that the “fifth wall”22 has been removed, so that the book can no longer be imagined as a private communication between an author and a reader. Detractors bemoan this de-privatization of the reading experience as another of modernity’s assaults on the solitary self. In a variation of the railroad metaphor, Andre Codrescu inveighs against the “popular highlights” feature of the Kindle: “the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station. . . . [This is the] end of the privileged relation between yourself and your book.”23 Codrescu and others reject the argument that this kind of reading represents collectivism in any meaningful way, since users remain isolated behind protective screens. Accordingly, we lead lives that are at once public and atomized, plugged into a circuit of “connectivity” with no authentic sense of connectedness. But are we really, as Sherry Turkle puts it, “alone together”—“curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers”?24 To be sure there is much in new media practices to make us wary. The sight of companions texting over the dinner table rather than engaging in face-to-face conversation can depress even the most devoted technophile. And studies have shown that overexposure to social networking sites can negatively impact the moods and self-esteem of teenagers over time.25 Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to imagine that online collectivity might be deeply sustaining in ways that cannot be written off as either pseudo-interaction or pathology. Steven Johnson describes the world of digital relations as a “valley of intimate strangers,” where public disclosures to unknown but sympathetic acquaintances can have “an intensity and honesty” that rivals face-to-face interaction.26 Because communicants imagine the social outcomes of online speech as less consequential, they can engage in riskier forms of self-expression. And while this can contribute to cyber-bullying and other harmful dynamics, it can also create zones of experimentation, in which people bear their hearts without fear of social reprisal, and in return for which they receive empathy from similarly “noncommitted” others. Technology writer Kevin Kelly also celebrates the Internet for its unpredictable spaces of human connection and intimacy. It is an “uncharted territory where you can genuinely get lost. . . . The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life.”27 How different is this experience of being “lost” in “otherness” from the ordinary act of reading, where (as Leah Hager Cohen put it in a book review) you

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can be “drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own”?28 To be sure, the instances that I have provided from the nineteenth century are far more exclusive in orientation. Here a reader experiences a mutual ensoulment with a single author or with another known reader through her private engagement with the book. The presence of an expansive network of readers—not exactly anonymous, but fundamentally unknown, except through what they choose to reveal online—is entirely novel and necessarily attenuates the intensity of the interaction. As Jonathan Franzen reminds us in an essay on the dangers of online communication, “love is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self ’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.”29 Although I would argue that the deep connection and self-abandonment that Franzen celebrates can be directed toward multiple objects (rather than a single entity), I take his overall point. If connection is boundless—if the entire universe is included in the purview of our affection—then loss can no longer register. Someone is always available to take the place of the absent object, so that the self need never surrender its integrity in an act of devotion. To the extent that online communication fosters unlimited connectedness, it is hard to defend it as an instrument of authentic intimacy. In reality, however, the Web rarely functions in this way. Social networking sites like Facebook connect a limited group of individuals, and while part of their aim is to expand networks of association, they also operate as arenas of exclusivity (as when requests to “friend” are denied). Thus although it has become a truism to speak of the Internet as fostering infinite connectivity, and although it does not, in theory, circumscribe social linking, in practice the Web tends to bring together clusters of like-minded people who develop specific (although not exclusive) intimacies with one another.30 Online collectivism is clearly not identical to the feelings of deep connection with another that can sometimes accompany book reading, but there are important areas of overlap in the kinds of communion that each medium can create. Indeed, some users even tie their feelings of intimacy to the material medium of the electronic device, like this woman who comments about a man she falls for on a multiuser chat system, His body was a green light on a Kaypro screen and the feel of slightly concave keys nestled in a brushed stainless steel tray. His

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breath was the sound of a fan cooling the CPU. I heard his voice in the sound of my modem; . . . To this day, every time I boot up my machine, I see a shadow of him flicker past.31

Such comments invoke the nineteenth-century fantasy of embodied communion through the medium of the book. Recall Whitman in this context: “Who touches this, touches a man . . ./ I spring from the pages into your arms.” If visions of authentic intimacy can be found across the web, they are especially apparent in social media sites organized around books, where the activity of forging bonds through reading is highlighted. One fan on Goodreads, the largest social network specifically for readers, claims that the site “allows me to take my friends into my secret escapes with me. . . . I like getting to know people who like to read the same way I do (with a passion!) I know that when I share how a book makes me feel they can understand me better than anyone because they went through the same thing.” Voicing a similar opinion, another adds, “I think that when I read something that has affected me in such a way, it is neat to see that others have also been affected (and can possibly gush over it the way I am, haha). A third adds, “I really enjoy hearing people speak as passionately as I do about books. I love the way we all get excited and starry eyed over imaginary worlds that we all get lost in.”32 These comments limn the pleasures of reading as expansive co-presence. Readers in the digital age experience the same dislocation and loss of self that books have always provided (“secret escapes,” “imaginary worlds”), but rather than communing privately with an author, they take a group of fellow readers with them and in the process experience a palliative unity (“they went through the same thing”). This is not to deny that differences exist on these sites; but more often than not, these tend to function as a way of reinstating collective investment in a book. Says one Goodreads fan during the same discussion thread referenced above, “With books there are certain elements that are open to interpretation, and I adore the fact that we can all put our two cents in and not have to worry about a backlash. And finding people who are passionate about something that I have loved my entire life is such a wonderful thing.”33 By this reasoning, singular interpretations (your own “two cents”) become a means of forging deep connections with others. This is especially true of the Goodreads “Haters Club,” a discussion board dedicated to contrarian and misanthropic thoughts on books. Here, enmity slides into empathy and affirmation (“great rant”) and then into a vision of self-other mutuality: “I find your life interesting as hell!! You have

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any idea of how rare it is for me to say that about a person? Dude you know all the shit that I ever want to know, and talk like I want to talk.”34 Haters Club, indeed. In a book-length interview published just after his death, David Foster Wallace describes reading as a way to ward off loneliness: “there’s a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us . . . one of them has to do with the sense of . . . capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell, ‘Another sensibility like mine exists.’ Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.”35 Much as Wallace might have resisted the idea, digital reading practices often represent a continuation of this desire to assuage loneliness, the logical extension of a culture increasingly atomized and hungry for the experience of mutuality. No doubt, these practices are part of the problem, too. Like the book itself, the computer creates imagined communion even as it encourages us to engage in private behaviors. But recognizing the similarities between analog and digital reading practices should also be heartening. What nineteenth-century subjects called the breathing, living book finds its parallel in modern day electronic devices, often described by their users as “sort of alive.”36 As media that enable vital contact, the book and the computer give rise to a sense that we are joined to other subjects and other matter. Through these technologies, we achieve reparative experiences of consubstantiality and intimacy, even if this sense of healing merger is just provisional. No matter the vehicle of communication, reading continues to occasion an escape from the confines of limited subjectivity, allowing us, like our nineteenth-century forebears, to invest in forms of oneness with each other.

Notes

h

Preface: Reading and the Search for Oneness Epigraph: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860, ed. Jason Stacey (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 455. 1. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). 2. While “consubstantiality” is a theological term, the inflections of which are important here, I also mean to invoke Kenneth Burke’s use, in which objects are at once independent and joined indissolubly in relation to one another. As Burke explains it, “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. . . . Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. . . . Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.” Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 20–21. 3. Wayne Koestenbaum, “Wilde’s Hard Labour and the Birth of Gay Reading,” in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett, 164–80 (New York: Longman, 1995), 178.

Introduction: The Fantasy of Communion 1. Luella J. B. Case to Sarah E. Edgarton, Schlessinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Richard James Hooker Collection (A-133), box 2, folder 64, undated; reprinted with permission. I was first introduced to this correspondence through Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 261. 2. On the difference between “community” and “communion,” see Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 365–71. 3. Noah Porter, Books and Reading, Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? (1870; reprint New York: Scribner, 1883), 45–46.

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4. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor, 1154–71 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1167. 5. On the erotics of this passage by Melville, see Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person, “Hawthorne and Melville: Writing, Relationship, and Missing Letters,” in Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person, 1–24 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 2, 13. 6. Margaret Fuller, “Autobiographical Romance,” in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele, 24–43 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 39. 7. For example, Fuller’s description of her interaction with the young woman following this scene of reading seems more maternally romantic in tone: “Just then she entered with light step, and full-beaming eye. When she saw me [crying], a soft cloud stole over her face. . . . She did not question, but fixed on me inquiring looks of beautiful love.  .  . . She waited till my tears were spent, then rising, took from a little box a bunch of golden amaranths or everlasting flowers and gave them to me” (“Autobiographical Romance,” 39–40). 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Ernest Spiller and Alfred Riggs Ferguson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 10. 9. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14, 237–60 (1917; reprint London: Hogarth, 1957), 249. 10. Given this process, it is no wonder that both reading and Freudian identification are similarly articulated through tropes of ingestion or eating; see Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in The Standard Edition, 17: 3–123 (1918; reprint London: Hogarth, 1955), 106–7. The relationship between books and ingestion will be discussed further in Chapter 1. 11. In this way, reading resembles the Freudian game of “fort-da” in which the young child throws a spool of thread outside his vision while uttering “fort” (gone) and then reels it back in, expressing his joy at its reappearance with the word “da” (there). By teaching himself that departure is a necessary step toward joyful return and reunion, the child attempts to negotiate the upsetting experience of loss and to gain a sense of mastery in the world: “At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part.” Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition, 18: 3–64 (1920; reprint London: Hogarth, 1968), 16. Similarly, we might understand reading as an adaptive strategy designed to assuage a reader’s sense of loss. By using books to create and then diffuse imagined relationships with others, the reader negotiates a narrative realm otherwise out of her control. 12. In “The Ego and the Id,” for example, Freud writes: “When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego. . . . [T]he character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . contains the history of those objectchoices.” The Standard Edition, 19: 3–66 (1923; reprint London: Hogarth, 1968), 29. 13. Heinz Kohut, “The Future of Psychoanalysis,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975): 329; and Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf, “The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment: An Outline,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 59 (1978): 416. 14. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2. Tammy Clewell also comments about “the predicament of being inhabited by otherness as a condition of

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one’s own subjectivity.” “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, 1 (2004): 65. 15. In Paul Ricoeur’s words, reading is “primarily a ‘letting-go.’ .  .  . It is in allowing itself to be carried off towards the reference of the text that the ego divests itself of itself.” “Appropriation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson, 182–93 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 191. 16. For studies that problematize the desire for unity and similitude inherent in identificatory fantasy, see Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 28–36; Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 13–20. For a thoughtful response to these charges particularly in relation to sympathy and American sentimental fiction, see Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–15. 17. Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 194. 18. See Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” PMLA 114, 1 ( January 1999): 20–31. On the value of affective and therapeutic approaches to art, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37; and Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Anthem Press, 2007). 19. While I have tried to be attentive to the historical developments and changes in reading practices that attend this period, my research has led me to consider the long nineteenth century in relatively holistic terms. The conditions of industrial capitalism changed substantially between 1830 and 1890, but the language of communion, deployed by readers partially in response to these developments, is a consistent feature of the reading experience, manifesting itself most vividly at mid-century, on which this study largely concentrates. 20. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 239. On the consequences of American industrialization, also see Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 21. See, for example, Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 22. See John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). 23. Here I am implicitly challenging those accounts that link (novel) reading to con-

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cepts of modern selfhood; see, for example, Nancy Armstong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 24. See Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25. Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 75. Matthew Brown makes a similar comment on the book’s dual status: “the book, as conscience, absorbed into the subjective life of the reader; and the book, as animate force and physical prop, outside the reader in a theater of literacy.” Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 13. Likewise, Meredith McGill uses the phrase “the matter of the text” to refer both to “textual embodiment” and to the interpretive concerns raised by reading. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 7. For two nuanced discussions of the book’s trajectory from an interpretive to a material object in English studies, see James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence, “Between Thing and Theory,” in Between Thing and Theory; or, The Reflective Turn, special double issue of Poetics Today 24, 4 (Winter 2003); 25, 1 (Spring 2004): 641–71; and Leah Price, “From The History of a Book to a ‘History of the Book,’” Representations 108 (Fall 2009): 120–38. 26. For an alternative reading of Whitman’s erotics of bodily presence as facilitated by print, see Michael Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 269–89. For an account of the reader-privileged quality of Whitman’s poetry, see Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 103–74. 27. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 5. Also see Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 14. Gérard Genette’s more nuanced account differentiates between “immanence”—the physical manifestation or vehicle of aesthetic experience—and “transcendence”—those aspects of the work that may exceed the physical object; see Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 28. On the embodied dimensions of reading, see Nell, Lost in a Book; Roger Chartier, “Preface,” in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), vii–xi; Deanne Bogdan, James Cunningham, and Hilary Davis, “Reintegrating Sensibility: Situated Knowledges and Embodied Readers,” New Literary History 31, 3 (2000): 477–507; Mark Amsler, “Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages,” Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001): 83–110; Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003); Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006); Andrea Adolph, “The Reader’s Body: Reader Response and the Consuming Body in Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead,” Literature Interpretation Theory 17, 3–4 ( July 2006): 353–77; Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee; and Rachel Ablow, ed., The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010) .

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29. Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner (New York: Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1909), 89. 30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978). 31. Husserl writes, “in perception something is perceived, in imagination something imagined; in judging something judged, in love something loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, etc.” Quoted in Simon Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007), 36. 32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002), 273. 33. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4, 16. Also see Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 34. Jeanine M. Vivona, “Embodied Language in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 57, 6 (December 2009): 1330. 35. See Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions,” Current Biology 16, 18 (September 2006): 1818–23; Olaf Hauk et al., “Somatotopic Representation of Action Words in Human Motor and Premotor Cortex,” Neuron 41, 2 ( January 2004): 301–7; and Friedemann Pulvermüller, “Brain Mechanisms Linking Language and Action,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6, 7 ( July 2005): 576–82. 36. Nicole K. Speer et al., “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20, 8 (August 2009): 989–99. 37. Punday, Narrative Bodies, vii. 38. Although in The Phenomenology of Perception, he distinguished between consciousness and world—or, following Husserl, between acts of thought (noesis) and objects of thought (noema)—Merleau-Ponty would later write that “The problems posed in [Phenomenology of Perception] are insoluble because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction.” Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 200. 39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 106. 40. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 100–101. Although Merleau-Ponty invokes the “double sensation” in The Phenomenology of Perception as a way of distinguishing the body from other objects in the world (which are not sentient), his claims set the stage for his later postulations about the intercalation of subjects and objects. 41. In a note inserted in the manuscript, Merleau-Ponty writes: “The openness through flesh: the two leaves of my body and the leaves of the visible world. . . . It is between these intercalated leaves that there is visibility” (The Visible and the Invisible, editor’s note, 131). 42. Amsler, “Affective Literacy,” 84. Also see Martha Petry, “Permeable Skins,” in “After the Book: Writing Literature, Writing Technology,” special issue of Perforations 2, 3 (Summer 1992), http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf3/pm_skin.html, accessed 17 July 2011. 43. “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world since the world is flesh?” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 138). 44. See Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 67–68, 83–85. 45. Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1935; reprint New York: International University Press, 1950), 202. 46. Ibid.

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47. Ibid., 205. 48. Sidney Fels, a theorist of machine-human interaction uses the term “intimacy” to indicate the “subjective match between the behavior of a device and the operation of that device. For example, for a musician to be expressive with her instrument it is critical for her to have a high degree of ‘control intimacy.’” Fels, “Intimacy and Embodiment: Implications for Art and Technology,” in Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Multimedia Conference Proceedings (2000), http://www.acm.org.sigs.sigmm/MM2000/ep/fels/, accessed 4 June 2001. Frank Wilson refers to a similar phenomenon as “incorporation” in The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Random House, 1999), 63. 49. See the collection Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, ed. Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 50. Porter, Books and Reading, 364–65. 51. See H. J. Jackson’s comment that a “marked or annotated book traces the development of the reader’s self-definition in and by relation to the text.” Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 87. 52. Walter Benjamin articulates something similar when he writes of the books in a man’s personal library: “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 67). 53. Porter, Books and Reading, 365, emphasis added. 54. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–82. 55. On the kinship between analytic bibliography and formalist/structuralist criticism, see D. F. McKenzie, cited in Chartier, The Order of Books, 25–27. 56. Quoted in Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004): 306. 57. The phrase “communications circuit” is Robert Darnton’s; see his foundational essay “What Is the History of Books?” in The Kiss of the Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 111. 58. Quoted in Andrew Bennett, Introduction to Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (New York: Longman, 1995), 5. Burton J. Bledstein also provides an account of reading in the nineteenth century as isolating and individualist; see The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976), 77–78. For two incisive critiques of the myth of the solitary reading, see Heather Murray, “Readers and Society,” in The History of the Book in Canada, Beginnings to 1840, vol. 1, ed. Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Gilles Gallichan, and Yvan Lamonde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Long, “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 180–211. Murray is interested in reading as a social practice, “encouraged and enabled through the new public institutions of reading” and making use of publicly disseminated “protocols of reading.” Hence, for her, the impossibility of referring to even the solitary reader as “private” (175, 181). Long, too, is interested in the complex infrastructure in which reading takes place, but she also emphasizes actual “textual communities” and reading groups that organize themselves around books. For more on the sociality of texts and reading, see Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-

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versity Press, 1991); Patricinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn, eds., Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004); Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 17–24; and Barbara Sicherman, Well Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 59. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, New York: Verso, 1983), 39, 40. 60. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), xiii. 61. See Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 167–73. 62. Zboray, A Fictive People, 79. 63. Michael Riffaterre, “Compelling Reader Responses,” in Reading Reading: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (Tampere: University of Tampere, Finland, 1993), 85–106; Georges Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 41–49; Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?; Norman Holland, “Unity Identity Text Self,” in Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism, 118–33; and David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Jonathan Culler points out that accounts that emphasize the dominance of readers or texts are rarely consistent even within the work of a single theorist; see On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 64–73. 64. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, “Introduction” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 1–36 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 34. 65. Jackson, Marginalia, 85–86. 66. Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, 154–75 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 156. For other accounts that emphasize the conflictual and failed relations between author and reader, see Ellen Spolsky, ed., The Uses of Adversity: Failure and Accommodation in Reader Response (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990), esp. Claude Gandelman’s essay, “Master Text and Slave Text: A Hegelian Theory of Writing,” 90–98. 67. Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 8. 68. Although nineteenth-century secular and religious authorities consistently counseled a critical approach to reading that emphasized self-control especially over lurid material, they were not invested in producing new meanings or interpretations and thereby freeing the reader from the constraints of the text. These themes will be explored further in Chapter 2. 69. Child to Lucy Osgood, 26 March 1847, in The Letters of Lydia Maria Child, ed. Harriet Winslow Sewall (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 139. 70. On the relationship of dead letters and failed communication, see Philip Joseph, “Dead Letters and Circulating Texts: On the Limits of Literary Archiving,” English Language Notes 45, 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 5–20; and John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 167–71.

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Notes to pages 18–24

71. The literature here is extensive; for some representative work, see Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Karla F. C. Holloway, Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 72. Leo Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 26, 4 (Summer 2000): 642, 656. 73. Ibid., 647–48. 74. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide (1889–1913), ed. and trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), 29–30. Gide’s idea of the mise en abyme has been importantly revised and extended by Lucien Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 75. In choosing to underscore the professional author’s ideas about reading here, I depart from those book historians who differentiate between elite and everyday readers, and who embrace the latter as the only authentic gauge of reception. As Barbara Hochman reminds us in her own study of author-reader relations, “The reading habits of well-known authors should not be disqualified as evidence of more general trends just because academics have sequestered them in a ‘high’ cultural preserve.  .  . . To do so is to overestimate—and reinforce—the rigid division between levels of culture that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century.” Hochman, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 6. Similarly, I do not bracket out “internal evidence” from the text—for example, the “implicit” reader in a novel—in favor of “real” historical readers. After all, implicit readers are the creations of authors who are themselves responding to interpretive conventions and readerly demands. For this reason the internal evidence of the text must be recognized as a complex and overdetermined consequence of mutual reader-author influence. For other accounts that emphasize the value of a text’s internal evidence for understanding reading practices, see Darnton, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” in The Kiss of the Lamourette, esp. 181; Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia, “Introduction: Women Readers as Literary Figures and Cultural Icons,” in Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia, 3–26 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); and Barbara Hochman, “The History of Reading and the Death of the Text,” American Literary History 21, 4 (Winter 2009): 853.

Chapter 1. Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading 1. Life and Thought: or, Cherished Memorials of the Late Julia A. Parker Dyson, ed. Miss E. Latimer (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, Hafflefinger, 1871), 70. 2. Quoted in Nicholas A. Basbanes, Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 149. 3. William Alcott, Familiar Letters to Young Men on Various Subjects: Designed as a Companion to the Young Man’s Guide (Buffalo, N.Y.: George H. Derby, 1850), 105. 4. Earl of Iddesleigh [Sir Stafford Henry Northcote], The Pleasures, the Dangers and the Uses of Desultory Reading (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885).

Notes to pages 24–26

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5. Bill Katz, Dahl’s History of the Book (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 218. 6. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987), 9–16. 7. Frank Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 122. 8. Katz, Dahl’s History of the Book, 235. 9. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experiences Among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), xxiv. 10. Barbara Sicherman, “Ideologies and Practices of Reading,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, ed. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey G. Groves, Stephen W. Sissenbaum, and Michael Winship, 279–302 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society, 2007), 280. Scott E. Casper has likewise confirmed that literacy was “virtually universal among native-born men and women by 1850.” “Antebellum Reading Prescribed and Described,” in Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary, ed. Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves, 135–64 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society and The Center for the Book, 2002), 135. 11. See Sicherman, “Ideologies and Practices of Reading,” 279–302; Ronald J. Zboray, “Antebellum Readings and the Ironies of Technological Innovations,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 180–200; Steven Roger Fisher, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 253–306; Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 83–109. 12. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). 13. See, for example, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 11–71. 14. M. F. Sweetster, “What the People Read,” in Hints for Home Reading: A Series of Chapters on Books and Their Uses, ed. Lymon Abbott (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), 12. 15. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Duties of Young Women (1848; repr. Boston: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1856), 83, 81. 16. W. P. Atkinson, On the Right Use of Books (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1878), 36. 17. Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 286, 290. 18. Alcott, Familiar Letters to Young Men, 84, 80. 19. “Self Culture: Uses of Books,” Meliora: A Quarterly Review of Social Science in Its Ethical, Economical, Political, and Ameliorative Aspects 9, 35 (1866): 199. 20. Earl of Iddesleigh, The Pleasures, Dangers and Uses of Desultory Reading, 28. 21. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, Thoughts on Books and Reading (Philadelphia: Friends’ Book Association, 1881), 10–11.

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Notes to pages 26–31

22. Osage Sun, 20 July 1888; cited in Christine Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 61. 23. Braithwaite, Thoughts on Books and Reading, 10. 24. Atkinson, On the Right Use of Books, 57. On the turn to attentiveness or concentration in the modern condition, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 25. See Kelly J. Mays, “The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals,” in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordon and Robert L. Patten (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 165–94; and Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 42–50. 26. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; reprint Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 27. Alcott, Familiar Letters to Young Men, 33. 28. Lydia Howard Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Skinner, 1838), 145. 29. Littau, Theories of Reading, 55–57. Littau’s excellent treatment has shaped my own understanding of reading and modernity. 30. James Freeman Clarke, Self-Culture: Physical, Intellectual, Moral, and Spiritual: A Course of Lectures (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889), 310. 31. Slavoj Žižek has written about how Western modernity functions by positing a void (in subjects and in culture) that must remain unfilled, always open to rearticulations of desire; see, for example, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999). 32. Braithwaite, Thoughts on Books and Reading, 11, 5. 33. Earl of Iddesleigh, The Pleasures, Dangers and Uses of Desultory Reading, 14. 34. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; reprint New York: Modern Library, 2001), 220. 35. Ibid., 220–21. 36. Ibid, 220. 37. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Moral Aspects of City Life (New York: Henry Lyon, 1853), 125. 38. Ibid., 122. 39. Ibid., 126. 40. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 9–25. 41. Brian Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi, 3–38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6. 42. Atkinson, On the Right Use of Books, 32. 43. Hugh Lenox Hodge, On Diseases Peculiar to Women, Including Displacements of the Uterus (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1868), 256, 108. For more on the physiological consequences of reading for women, see Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 44. Clarke, Self-Culture, 315; Braithwaite, Thoughts on Books and Reading, 4. 45. This phenomenon is discussed by a wide variety of critics, including Nina Baym,

Notes to pages 31–34

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Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 44–62; Isabel Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 136–41; and Alice Jenkins, “What Katy Ate: Girls Eating and Reading in Classic NineteenthCentury American Children’s Fiction,” in Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900, ed. Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007), 173–88. 46. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Duties of Young Men (1840; reprint Boston: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1856), 128. 47. Mays, “Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals,” 173. 48. Janice A. Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,” Book Research Quarterly 2 (Fall 1986): 10. 49. For example, David M. Stewart argues that “As a biological metaphor . . . consumption realizes the physicality of men’s working lives, including the physicality of their reading.” “Consuming George Thompson,” American Literature 80, 2 ( June 2008): 235. Also see Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Henry James’s Art of Eating,” ELH 75, 1 (2008): 27–62; and Littau, Theories of Reading, 58–61. 50. “Self Culture,” 199. 51. As Radway explains, “consumption” refers to “the process of purchasing an object made by another (in contradistinction to the process of producing one’s own),” but this meaning derives from an earlier definition of consumption as annihilation or destruction, as in the consuming action of fire. “The point in extending its use to the process of purchase was to suggest that in personal consumption, one used up an object fully, thus exhausting its exchangeable value” (“Reading Is Not Eating,” 8). In this way, mass cultural objects were condemned because once consumed or “used up,” they lacked the ability to be further circulated, exchanged, and engaged with productively; this in contrast to artifacts of a preindustrial age, which might be reused, transformed, or passed on. 52. Chapin, Duties of Young Men, 128. 53. May Z. Parker, “The Study of Literature in Public Schools,” Osage News, 30 June 1887; cited in Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border, 39. 54. Lydia Howard Sigourney, The Girl’s Reading Book: In Prose and Poetry, for Schools (New York: Turner, Hughes, & Hayden, 1843), 7. 55. Historians of the book are generally in agreement that by the mid-nineteenth century, fiction was an accepted form. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 26–43; and Casper, “Antebellum Reading Prescribed and Described,” 135. 56. Chapin, Duties of Young Women, 80–81. 57. Fred B. Perkins, “Plans of Reading,” in Abbott, Hints for Home Reading, 38. 58. Barbara Sicherman identifies “four approved models of reading” in the nineteenth century: the evangelical, the civic, the self-improving, and the cultural or cosmopolitan. I have chosen to group these together because all make use of a similar discourse of utility and betterment. See Sicherman, “Ideologies and Practices of Reading.” 59. “Plans of Reading: Henry Ward Beecher’s Method,” in Abbott, Hints for Home Reading, 51. 60. Harvey Newcomb, How to Be a Lady: A Book for Girls Containing Useful Hints on the Foundation of Character (Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1848), 155. 61. Ibid., 160.

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Notes to pages 34–38

62. “Plans of Reading: Henry Ward Beecher’s Method,” 50. 63. “Self Culture,” 201. 64. Dorothy White, The Girl’s Weekday Book (New York: William Jackson, 1836), 223. 65. See Mays, “The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals,” 172. 66. Chapin, Duties of Young Women, 56–57. 67. Ibid., 84. 68. “Self Culture,” 201. 69. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 59. 70. J. Brooks Bouson, The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 170. Bouson is citing Walter Slatoff here; see Slatoff, “Some of My Best Friends Are Interpreters,” New Literary History 4 (Winter 1973): 375–80. 71. Atkinson, On the Right Use of Books, 57. 72. Hamilton W. Mabie, “The Art of Reading,” in Abbott, Hints for Home Reading, 58. 73. Earl of Iddesleigh, The Pleasures, Dangers and Uses of Desultory Reading, 30. 74. Child to Rev. Convers Francis, 26 December 1819, in The Letters of Lydia Maria Child, ed. Harriet Winslow Sewall (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 4. 75. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958), 26. 76. James H. Smart, Books and Reading for the Young (Indianapolis: Carlon and Hollenbeck, 1880), 5. 77. Chapin, Duties of Young Women, 56–57. On the bureaucratization of reading in the late nineteenth century, see Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border, 218. 78. Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974). Engelsing’s thesis has been widely discussed and contested; see, for example, Robert Darnton, The Kiss of the Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 132–33, 165–67; Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 72–73; Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, “Introduction,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Cavallo and Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 24–26. 79. Chapin, Duties of Young Women, 56. 80. Augst, “The Business of Reading,” 272. On reading and the creation of the middleclass subject, also see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 81. On time keeping and time discipline in the age of industrial capitalism, see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97. 82. Eliza Ware Farrar, The Young Lady’s Friend (Boston: American Stationer’s Company, 1837), 15, 23, 27. 83. Ibid., 23–24. 84. Lee Edelman in Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, 2–3 (2007): 181. On the relationship between reading and modernity, also see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 85. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 138–39. 86. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 16–44.

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87. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851; repr. New York: Penguin, 1988), 605. 88. Chapin, Duties of Young Women, 57. 89. Reading for the Railroad: Being Interesting and Instructive Selections from Various Christian Authors (London: B. Werthheim, Aldein Chambers, 1848), A2. For more on the phenomenon of reading on the railroad, see Ronald Zboray, Fictive People, 72–75. 90. Mabie, “The Art of Reading,” 59. 91. Ibid., 57. 92. Ibid., 61. 93. Quoted in Jane Weiss, “‘Many Things Take My Time’: The Journals of Susan Warner” (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1995), 31–32. 94. Ibid., 54. 95. The phrase is Jacqui Alexander’s. It is quoted by Carolyn Dinshaw in Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 185. 96. On rethinking time in relation to subjectivity, see Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); and “Time and the Arts,” special edition of English Language Notes 46, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008). 97. The Papers of M. Carey Thomas in the Bryn Mawr College Archives, ed. Lucy Fisher West (Woodbridge, Conn., 1982), microfilm ed., reel 2, August 23, 1878. I first located this Thomas citation in abridged form in Sicherman, “Ideologies and Practices of Reading,” 293. 98. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 63–64. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 99. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 7. 100. On Austin’s relationship to collaboration, both spiritual and textual, see Linda K. Karrell, “Mary Austin, I-Mary, and Mary-by-Herself: Collaboration in Earth Horizon,” in Writing Together, Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 92–116. 101. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (1854; reprint Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 99. 102. Maurice Blanchot, “Reading,” in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (New York: Longman, 1995), 190. 103. Annamarie Jagose, in Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 189. 104. Thoreau, Walden, 102. 105. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51. 106. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), xviii–xix. François’s book is a brilliantly subtle exploration of literary works that, in contesting ideologies of improvement, “share an ethos of attending to unobserved, not-for-profit experience rather than results entered on the public record, of defining action as a matter of timing and form rather than consequence, and of measuring difference not by what an action materially produces but by the imaginative possibilities revelation may either open or eclipse” (21). My understanding of the ability of

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nineteenth-century reading practices to thwart imperatives for mastery and appropriation is particularly indebted to François’ discussion as well as to the work of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit; see Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment and Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004). 107. Henry James, The American (London: Macmillan, 1921), xxii. 108. Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 27. 109. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert Ernest Spiller and Alfred Riggs Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 10. 110. Thomas De Quincey, “Alexander Pope,” in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 8, Leaders in Literature (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1863), 6. 111. Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 7.

Chapter 2. Books and the Dead Epigraph: John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1957; reprint Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 720. 1. Stuart Robinson, Discourses of Redemption: As Revealed at “Sundry Times and in Divers Manners” (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 46. 2. Frederick Denison Maurice, The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures, ed. T. Hughes, Q.C. (New York: Macmillan, 1873), 2, 30. 3. Child to Mrs. S. B. Shaw, 1862, in The Letters of Lydia Maria Child, ed. Harriet Winslow Sewall (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 164. 4. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Duties of Young Men (1840; reprint Boston: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1856), 127. 5. Noah Porter, Books and Reading; or, What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? (1870; reprint New York: Scribner, 1883), 377. 6. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 10. 7. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 40; emphasis original. 8. Matthias Rothe, Lesen und Zuschauen im 18. Jahrhundert: Die Erzeugung und Aufhebung von Abwesenheit (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neuman, 2005), 61–65. For a discussion of the importance of orality in early American print culture, see Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xiii–xxv. 9. Maurice, The Friendship of Books, 5. 10. Barbara Hochman, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 13. Also see Thomas J. McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997), 40–42. 11. Elizabeth Dwight to Elizabeth L. Eliot, 21 June 1846, cited in Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “‘Have You Read. . . . ?’ Real Readers and Their Responses in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52, 2 (September 1997): 158. 12. The Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 164–65.

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13. Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe, The Girlhood of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Project Gutenberg Consortia Center’s World Public Library Collection, http:// ebooks.gutenberg.us/WorldeBookLibrary.com/girlhoodstowe.htm, accessed 17 July 2011. An almost identical description can also be found in relation to Stowe’s autobiographical character, Dolly. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives (1878; reprint New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), 172. 14. Julia A. Parker, Life and Thought: or Cherished Memorials of the Late Julia A. Parker Dyson, ed. Miss E. Latimer (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, Hafflegfinger, 1871), 12. 15. The Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 164–65. 16. See, for example, Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 169–74; Sharon O’Brien, “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 240– 58; Hochman, Getting at the Author; Jane Greer, “‘Ornaments, Tools, or Friends’: Literary Reading at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938,” in Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950, ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 179–98; Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 186. As is clear from this list, some authors extend this metaphor into the twentieth century as well. 17. Ronald Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 195. 18. See Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 13–15. 19. William Ellory Channing, Self-Culture (Boston: James Munroe, 1842), 65. 20. William Wirt, The British Spy; or, Letters to a Member of the British Parliament Written During a Tour Through the United States (Newburyport, Mass.: Repertory Office, 1804), 29–30. 21. Ibid., 32. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 33–34. 24. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78. 25. Quoted in Peters, Speaking into the Air, 78. 26. See Peters, Speaking into the Air, 63–108. 27. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 9. 28. Ibid. 29. See Gillian Silverman, “Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” American Studies 43, 3 (Fall 2002), 10. Michael L. Frazer argues that, despite these gestures to unity, Smith’s theory of sympathy is broadly committed to liberal individualism. For an excellent discussion, see Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 89–111. 30. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, vol. 2, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (London: Longman, 1898), 111. 31. Ibid., 113, emphasis added. 32. Ibid., 111.

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Notes to pages 58–59

33. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 11–12. 34. Ibid., 11. 35. Ibid., 12. 36. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852; reprint New York: Penguin, 1982), 150. 37. Ibid., 159–60. 38. Silverman, “Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” 11–12. The criticism on the workings of sympathy in American literature is vast. For some excellent representative accounts, see Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Maurice S. Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Laura L. Mielke, Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). For two compelling accounts of sympathy in a non-American context, see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 39. For more on the phenomenon of sympathy in the reading process, see McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy; Willis Buckingham, “Poetry Readers and Reading in the 1890s: Emily Dickinson’s First Reception,” in Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, ed. James Machor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 164–79. 40. Porter, Books and Reading, 20. 41. Shakespeare’s lines (spoken by Theseus) read as follows: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

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Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.4–17) 42. Cited in Jeanine M. Vivona, “Embodied Language in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 57, 6 (December 2009): 1351. Also see Keith Oatley, Keltner Dacher, and Jennifer M. Jenkins, Understanding Emotions (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 156. 43. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Duties of Young Women (1848; reprint Boston: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1856), 147–48. 44. The idea of the Bible as the “voice of God” reaches back, in America, to the Puritan period; see Robert A. Gross, “Texts for the Times: An Introduction to Book History,” in Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary, ed. Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves, 1–16 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society and The Center for the Book, 2002), 8. 45. Lindley Murray, The Duty and Benefit of a Daily Perusal of the Holy Scriptures (New York: C. Wiley & Co., 1817), 15, 38. 46. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 67. 47. 2 Corinthians 13:5; Thomas H. Skinner, Hints Designed to Aid Christians in Their Efforts to Convert Men to God (Hartford, Conn.: Andrus and Judd, 1832), 13. 48. Rev. Thomas Watson, The Bible and the Closet; or, How We May Read the Scriptures with the Most Spiritual Profit, ed. John Overton Choules (Boston: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, 1842), 35. 49. Porter, Books and Reading, 45–46. 50. W. P. Atkinson, On the Right Use of Books (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1878), 17–18. 51. Martha Osborne Barrett, diary, 22 October 1854; cited in Zboray, Everyday Ideas, 270. 52. Diary (1843–1852) of James Hadley, Tutor and Professor of Greek in Yale College, 1845–1872, ed. Laura Hadley Moseley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), 88. 53. John Moore Heath to Alfred Tennyson, ca. mid-February 1835, in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, vol. 1, 1821–1850, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 129. The contemporary critic Nicholas Royle writes in relation to this phenomenon: “Books are telepathic—they can read your mind, see you coming from a distance, tell you what you are thinking, tell you what you have been perceiving all along without realizing.” Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 75. 54. Cited in Zboray, Everyday Ideas, xvi. 55. Susan Kittredge to Betsy Waite, 24 March 1792; cited in Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 175. Scott Casper elaborates on readers’ tendencies to adopt the language of their reading in their letters and diary entries; see Casper, “Antebellum Reading Prescribed and Described,” in Casper, Chiason, and Groves, Perspectives on American Book History, 160. 56. Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, George P. Clark, and Merrell R. Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 25.

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57. Emerson, “Spiritual Laws,” in Essays, vol. 1 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 141. In his essay “Love” (1841), he questions similarly, “Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me?” (175–76). 58. Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays, vol. 2, 52. 59. Ibid., 79. See Silverman, “Sympathy and Its Vicissitudes,” 9–10. 60. Emerson, “Society and Solitude,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, Society and Solitude, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson and Ronald A. Bosco (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4–5. 61. Emerson, “Society and Solitude,” 4. In an 1840 journal entry, Emerson wrote, “In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.” Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 240. 62. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1(New York: Holt, 1919), 226. 63. 9 May 1850, Diary (1843–1852) of James Hadley, 54. 64. In March 1820, William Hazlitt wrote about the drama in The London Magazine: “Within the circle of dramatic character and natural passion, each individual is to feel as keenly, as profoundly, as rapidly as possible, but he is not to feel beyond it, for others or for the whole. Each character, on the contrary, must be a kind of centre of repulsion to the rest.” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt: Art and Dramatic Criticism, vol. 18, ed. P. P. Howe (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 305. 65. Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 10. 66. See Albanese A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 9–16, 214–18. 67. See R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3–39; Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 177–90. 68. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, The Crown of Thorns: A Token for the Sorrowing (1860; reprint Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1882), 195. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 69. On embodiment in the spirit world, see Peters, Speaking into the Air, 63–108; Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–71; and Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 70. W. P. Atkinson, Books and Reading: A Lecture (1860); partially reprinted in Casper, “Antebellum Reading Prescribed and Described,” 141. 71. Chapin, Duties of Young Men, 127. 72. Channing, Self-Culture, 65. 73. As the German scholar Matthias Rothe points out, the eighteenth century was characterized by a literary community of largely living participants—authors, readers, editors—who occasionally even socialized together. This was far less the case in the nineteenth century, when readers increasingly picked up texts by authors who had died. See Rothe, Lesen und Zuschauen im 18. Jahrhundert, 57–114. 74. Porter, Books and Reading, 22. 75. Despite his general distrust of communication discussed earlier, Emerson articu-

Notes to pages 67–70

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lates a similar vision toward books in “Society and Solitude”: “Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries. . . . The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.” Society and Solitude, 95–96. Here, as with Chapin, the actual author is inaccessible and remote, unknown even to those in physical contact with him—the “bosom friend.” But his thoughts, as written out in the book, are exposed and “transparent” to those “strangers” who succeed him by hundreds of years. In this way, books written by anonymous long-dead authors could potentially lead to more substantive dynamics (that is, both more meaningful and more material) than actual social interactions. The “transparent” words create a spiritual bond that is paradoxically experienced as more authentic and real (“uncovered”) than relations with the “bosom friend.” 76. Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 79. Richard D. Brown offers a similar assessment in his description of the “distant, impersonal” realm of print; see Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 286. 77. Porter, Books and Reading, 22; Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1154. 78. Porter, Books and Reading, 3. 79. Ibid., 53. 80. Ibid., 229. 81. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Moral Aspects of City Life (New York: Henry Lyon, 1853), 123–24. 82. “Self Culture: Uses of Books,” Meliora: A Quarterly Review of Social Science in Its Ethical, Economical, Political, and Ameliorative Aspects 9, 35 (1866): 201. 83. 30 January 1851, Diary (1843–1852) of James Hadley, 160. 84. 12 January 1850, Diary (1843–1852) of James Hadley, 30. 85. In “On the Sublime,” Longinus declares that “composition . . . seeks to introduce into the minds of those who are present the emotion which affects the speaker.” More, he adds, it “allures us . . . gaining absolute mastery over our minds.” Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 95. 86. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 3–17. 87. See Peters, Speaking into the Air, 89–94. Peters points out that the modern romantic phrase “to make a pass” may have originated from Mesmer’s manual “passes” over the hands of female patients (91). 88. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 190–95. 89. Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 10. 90. Quoted in Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 194. 91. On mesmerism’s popularity and its detractors, see Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls, 16–47. A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 190–206; Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1996), 117–39.

176

Notes to pages 70–76

92. Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, Brook Farm, 18 October 1841, in Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1839–1863 (Chicago: Society of the Dofobs, 1907; reprint Washington, D.C.: NCR Microcard Editions, 1972), 62. 93. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; reprint New York: Modern Library, 2001), 175. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 94. Meredith L. McGill and Peter J. Bellis also claim that in the “Governor Pyncheon” chapter, Hawthorne invests in his narrator the exultant authorial power that he denies Holgrave; see McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 262–69; and Bellis, “Mauling Governor Pyncheon,” Studies in the Novel 26, 3 (Fall 1994): 199–217. On the author as mesmerist, also see Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allen Poe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 93–125. 95. Joseph Cooke, “How to Preserve the Results of Reading,” in Hints for Home Reading: A Series of Chapters on Books and Their Uses, ed. Lymon Abbott (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), 78–79. 96. Hamilton W. Mabie, “The Art of Reading,” in Hints for Home Reading, 60–61. 97. Joseph Philippe François Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, trans. Thomas C. Hartshorn (London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1850), 11. 98. Ibid., 8. 99. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, Thoughts on Books and Reading (Philadelphia: Friends’ Book Association, 1881), 10–11, emphasis added. 100. Georges Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, 41–49 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 42. 101. Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8. 102. Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” 42. 103. Ibid., 43. 104. Ibid., 45. 105. Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 48. 106. William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), 33. 107. Charles Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 10. 108. Richard J. Gerrig and David N. Rapp, “Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact,” Poetics Today 25, 2 (2004): 265–81. 109. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” in The Second Common Reader: Annotated Edition, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 258–70 (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 2002), 268. 110. J. Brooks Bouson, The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 170, emphasis added. 111. Nell, Lost in a Book, 211. 112. Bennett, “Introduction” to Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (New York: Longman, 1995), 10. 113. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 142–48.

Notes to pages 76–78

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114. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 248, 255 115. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, by W. K. Wimsatt (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 3, 5. 116. Cleanth Brooks, “My Credo: Formalist Criticism,” Kenyon Review 13 (Winter 1951): 74. 117. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), 40, 43. 118. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148. 119. Ibid., 147, 148. For Foucault’s critique, see “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 101–20. 120. Nina Baym confirms that this kind of commentary was not characteristic of nineteenth-century reading practices, observing of reviewers: “never—not in a single instance— did they talk about the act of reading novels as one of producing meanings, interpretations, or readings,” Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 61. 121. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 169; Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), viii; Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 228; Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 96. 122. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, “Introduction” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 1. 123. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 8. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 7. This pleasure (what Barthes also describes as a “co-existence” between author and reader [7]) is, of course, very different from that which occurs when the reader rejects all authorial presence and becomes the “producer of the text.” Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 4. Barthes’s writing thus incorporates two different models of jouissance, one resulting from valuing the author, and the other being the consequence of killing him off. For a thoughtful rendering of this contradiction in Barthes’s writings, see Sean Burke, The Death and the Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 20–61. 124. For some notable exceptions, see Sean Burke, The Death and the Return of the Author; Eugen Simion, The Return of the Author, ed. James W. Newcomb, trans. James W. Newcomb and Lidia Vianu (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996); and Andrew Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005). 125. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977), 98. 126. Ibid., 97–98, 101. 127. See McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy, 23–33. 128. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, 113.

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Notes to pages 78–84

129. Ibid., 188. Also see McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy, 28–29. 130. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 292. 131. Maurice, The Friendship of Books, 12. For other accounts that privilege affective reading strategies over interpretive ones, see Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Bookof-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Lynn Pearce, Feminism and the Politics of Reading (London: Arnold, 1997); and Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State Press, 2003). 132. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), 16. 133. Charles Lamb, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1822), in The Essays of Elia, 1st ser., ed. Henry Morley (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1885), 136. 134. Lamb to Samuel Coleridge, 11 October 1802, in The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (London: Edward Moxon, 1841), 62. 135. Charles Sprague, “I See Thee Still,” in Voices from the Silent Land, Or Leaves of Consolation for the Afflicted, ed. Mrs. H. Dwight Williams, 88–89 (Boston: Jewett and Company, 1858), 88. 136. Lydia Howard Sigourney, “Ye shall seek me in the morning, but I shall not be,” in The Mourner’s Gift, ed. Mrs. M. A. Patrick, 54–56 (New York: Van Nostrand & Dwight, 1837), 55. 137. Mrs. Abdy, “The Widow’s Home,” in ibid., 160. 138. Zboray, Everyday Ideas, 233. 139. Mary Pierce Poor to Lucy (Pierce) Hedge, 18 April 1853; cited in ibid. 140. Porter, Books and Reading, 366. 141. Ibid., 6. 142. Chapin, Duties of Young Women, 147. 143. Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1909), 500. 144. Ibid., 205.

Chapter 3. Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre 1. Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17? November 1851, in The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), 142. 2. See, for example, Caleb Crain, “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels,” American Literature 66 (March 1994): 25–53; Monika Mueller, “This Infinite Fraternity of Feeling”: Gender, Genre, and Homoerotic Crisis in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Melville’s Pierre (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1996), 43. For an overview of criticism on the homoerotics between Hawthorne and Melville particularly in regard to this letter, see Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person, “Hawthorne and Melville: Writing, Relationship, and Missing Letters,” in Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 1–24. 3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 9.

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4. Robert Milder also reads the fantasy of “integration” articulated in this letter as inclusive of but not reducible to sexuality: “the sexual element is part of a larger constellation of factors—psychological, intellectual, spiritual—of almost unanalyzable intricacy: the love that defies being named” (“‘The Ugly Socrates’: Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience,” in Argersinger and Person, Hawthorne and Melville, 79, 91). 5. Melville to John Murray, 2 September 1846, Letters, 46. 6. Hawthorne’s own feelings on author-reader union are, I would argue, far more ambivalent. In the Introductory to The Scarlet Letter his narrator lightly chastizes those authors who “indulge themselves in . . . confidential depths of revelation . . . as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.” Addressing what he perceives to be the writer’s more appropriate relation to his reader, he adds, “it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then . . . we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; reprint Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001), 72–73. 7. For example, Melville wrote at one point, “Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page.” Although the original letter has long been lost, Elizabeth Renker has suggested that this line was written at the bottom of one sheet of letter paper and signaled Melville’s eager anticipation of Hawthorne’s turning to the next. Renker, Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), xx. Thus Melville imagines his reader interacting with the materiality of his letter in ways that reproduce Melville’s own physical movements as writer. 8. Melville to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1 May 1850, Letters, 106. 9. Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, Letters, 78. 10. For an account of how sentimentalism works by establishing affinity and similitude between subjects, see Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11. See for example Philip Fisher’s argument that for writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe “The political content of sentimentality is democratic in that it experiments with the extension of full and complete humanity to classes of figures from whom it has been socially withheld.” Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 99. 12. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Chicago: Northwestern University and Newberry Library, 1971), 250. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 13. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1164–65; hereafter referred to as Collected Works. 14. Elizabeth Hewitt reads Melville’s fluctuation between individualism and union as less about negotiating the affective pleasures of mutual understanding and more about Melville’s search for a “democratic poetics” that would adjudicate “between self-interest and the common good.” Hewitt, “Scarlet Letters, Dead Letters: Correspondence and the Poetics of Democracy in Melville and Hawthorne,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12 (Fall 1999): 297. For an alternate account of Melville’s vacillating tendencies toward literary self-reli-

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Notes to pages 86–87

ance and social dependency in Pierre, see Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 126–56. 15. Robert S. Forsythe, Introduction to Pierre, by Herman Melville, Americana Deserta Series (New York: Knopf, 1930), vii–xxxviii, was among the first to give an extensive reading of Pierre as parody. Also see William Braswell, “The Satirical Temper of Melville’s Pierre,” American Literature 7 (1936): 424–38; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), 309–13; David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Knopf, 1988), 292–94; and Sacvan Bercovitch, “How to Read Melville’s Pierre,” in Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Myra Jehlen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 116–25. For some important exceptions, see Charlene Avallone, “Women Reading Melville/Melville Reading Women,” in Melville and Women, ed. Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006), 41–59; Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 208–54; Tara Penry, “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in Moby-Dick and Pierre,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 226–43; and Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in NineteenthCentury American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 159–84. 16. See, for example, William Chavrat, The Profession of Authorship in America, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968); and Michael Gilmore, “The Book Marketplace,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott, 46–71 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 67. David Leverenz argues in a similar vein that Melville’s fiction mocks its “characterized” (female) readers and appeals instead to an “implied” (male) audience, whom Melville alternatively antagonizes and befriends. Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 16–19, 25–29). John Bryant argues against this “aesthetics of concealment” and emphasizes instead Melville’s desire “to teach readers how to read him.” Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23, 27. 17. Melville to Richard Bentley, 16 April 1852, Letters, 150. Harrison Hayford was the first to consider and ultimately reject the idea that Melville, in writing Bentley about his confidence in Pierre, was attempting to hoodwink or “mulct” his publisher; cited in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “Reading Pierre,” in A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant, 211–39 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 214. 18. Melville to Sophia Hawthorne, 8 January 1852, Letters, 146. David Reynolds suggests that in Pierre Melville attempted to broaden his readership by purposefully conjoining two popular novelistic genres—sentimental domesticity and subversive sensationalism (Beneath the American Renaissance, 159). Sheila Post-Lauria reads Pierre as inspired by the French sensational romance, “a genre that combined social analysis with sentiment, sensation, and erotic intrigue.” Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 132. 19. Fred Pattee, The Feminine Fifties (1940; reprint Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1966), 57. 20. My thinking here is indebted to John Mullan’s discussion of sentiment and parody; see Sentiment and Sociability, 136–43. 21. Leon Howard and Hershel Parker report that of the many reviews of Pierre to appear in nineteenth-century magazines, only two (Godey’s Lady’s Book, October 1852, and

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Putnam’s Monthly, February 1853) suggested that Melville was satirizing the conventions of the sentimental novel (“Historical Note,” 388, 391, 393). 22. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852; reprint New York: Penguin, 1981), 241. 23. For other examples of the ways sentimental and domestic writers (both male and female) incorporated humor and self-critique, see Gregg Camfield, Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 24. Lora Romero, “Domesticity and Fiction,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 111. 25. This is the move made by Gillian Brown in Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and by Waichee Dimock in Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), both of whom read Pierre as (in Brown’s words) “a keynote address to the program of literary individualism” (137). For a reading that stresses the imperfect and unfinished project of individualism in Pierre, see Ellen Weinauer, “Women, Ownership, and Gothic Manhood in Pierre,” in Melville and Women, 141–60. 26. Penry, “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities,” 234–35. 27. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 109–40 (1915; reprint London: Hogarth, 1957), 128, 130, 137. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes a related point when she writes, “Perhaps . . . there isn’t a differentiation to be made between sentimentality and its denunciation. . . . It may be only those who are themselves prone to these vicariating impulses who are equipped to detect them in the writing or being of others; but it is also they who for several reasons tend therefore to be perturbed in their presence.” Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 153. 28. New York Day Book, 7 September 1852 in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 436. 29. Albion, 21 August 1852, in Contemporary Reviews, 428. 30. American Whig Review, November 1852, Contemporary Reviews, 447–50. 31. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950); and Emile Durkheim, Incest: The Nature and Origin of the Taboo, trans. Edward Sagarin (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1963). 32. American Whig Review, November 1852, in Contemporary Reviews, 448. 33. Literary World, 21 August 1852, in Contemporary Reviews, 431. 34. Ibid. 35. I thank Michael Moon for his help in clarifying this point. 36. Southern Literary Messenger, September 1852, in Contemporary Reviews, 436. 37. According to Barthes, incest “is only a surprise of vocabulary”—the assigning of multiple nominative designations (sister, wife, mother) to one individual. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 137–38. 38. Literary World, 21 August 1852, in Contemporary Reviews, 431, emphasis added. In making this argument, I do not mean to suggest that Pierre’s relation to his sister is not libidinally charged, only that its erotics are bound up with and articulated through a fantasy of revised familial/social roles. 39. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–

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1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 22; Ruth H. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815,” Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 100–126; and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 40. William Alcott, Physiology of Marriage (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 13. 41. On the “spermatic economy,” see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the HalfKnown Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 179–88. 42. Alcott, Physiology of Marriage, 49. 43. This technique of discouraging salacious behavior through sororal associations became a popular device urged in marriage manuals of the nineteenth century. As Bryan Strong reports, Dr. Dio Lewis contrived a “card plan” in which men who complained of consistently lustful feelings were told to carry around a flashcard on which words like “mother” or “sister” were written. Strong, “Toward a History of the Experiential Family: Sex and Incest in the Nineteenth-Century Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (August 1973): 463. In Pierre, this device is at once invoked and turned on its head. Shortly after meeting his sister and consumed by the allure of her face, Pierre conjures up images of Lucy in an attempt to distract himself from the visage of Isabel. In this ironic reversal, then, the lover becomes the means by which lust for the sister is overcome. 44. William Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide (Boston: T.R. Marvin, 1846), 236–37. 45. Quoted in Strong, “Toward a History of the Experiential Family,” 462. According to Strong, Fowler was one of the few nineteenth-century writers to concede the “sexuo-maternal instinct” (Fowler’s phrase), that is, to describe “incestuous behavior as part of a mother’s natural instinct” (463). 46. Ibid. 47. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996), 327. On the incestuous relations of the nineteenth-century bourgeois family, also see G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. 36–75; and Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 113–28. For a discussion of incest that extends these dynamics into the contemporary context of bourgeois relations, see Gillian Harkins, “Surviving the Family Romance? Southern Realism and the Labor of Incest,” Southern Literary Journal 40, 1 (2007): 114–39. 48. Melville surely read The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man, which is conjectured to be the source for his own short story “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs”; see Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986), 328. Wyn Kelley has written that although there is no direct evidence that Melville read sentimental fiction, “it is hard to believe that Melville and his family did not participate in the ‘parlor culture’ of the day—the family circle reading aloud from current books and magazines.” Kelley, “Pierre’s Domestic Ambiguities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94. 49. Alfred Henry Huth, The Marriage of Near Kin (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887), 34. On incest as a model for social organization and class alliance, see Elizabeth Barnes, “Natural and National Unions: Incest and Sympathy in the Early Republic,” in Incest

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and the Literary Imagination, ed. Elizabeth Barnes (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 138–55. 50. Melville to John Murray, 25 March 1848, in Letters, 70. 51. My reading here is in part intended as an alternative to those that see the introduction of the authorial plot in the novel as a hastily conceived afterthought, perhaps a reaction to the negative Moby-Dick reviews that came trickling in midway through Pierre’s composition. See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Reading Melville’s “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). I would argue, by contrast, that the withholding of Pierre’s role as writer is wholly fitting within the logic of the novel. Because incest and imaginative writing are so thoroughly imbricated in Melville’s novel, the authorial plot of Pierre can only take on relevance once the incestuous plot has been established. 52. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Collected Works, 1154. On the entanglement of literary and paternal authority in Pierre, see Edgar A. Dryden, “The Entangled Text: Pierre and the Problem of Reading,” in Jehlen, Herman Melville, 100–115. 53. Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, in Letters, 78. 54. See, for example, Eric J. Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 28–35, 39–40; and Brook Thomas, “The Writer’s Procreative Urge in Pierre: Fictional Freedom or Convoluted Incest?” Studies in the Novel 11 (1979): 422. 55. Georges Bataille, “The Enigma of Incest,” Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Walker, 1962), 199. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon, 1969) and Emile Durkheim’s Incest: The Nature and Origin of the Taboo confirm that speculations about the degenerative effects of incest did not arise until the nineteenth century. 56. This is the title of a journal article published in 1858. It is cited in the bibliography in Huth, The Marriage of Near Kin, 434. 57. Huth, The Marriage of Near Kin, 186–241. 58. From “View of the Barnum Property,” a piece published in Yankee Doodle and subsequently attributed to Melville; cited in Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 161. Andrea Stulman Dennett discusses Barnum’s exploitation of the nineteenth-century fascination/repulsion with “improper” sexual pairing. Among Barnum’s attractions were the Original Aztec Children, publicized as brother and sister and married on 1 January 1867. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 80. 59. Michael Paul Rogin also suggests that Pierre’s book is the symbolic child of the hero’s union with his sister. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), 178–79. 60. Melville to Lemuel Shaw, 6 October 1849, in Letters, 92. 61. Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1? June 1851, in Letters, 128. 62. Boston Post, 4 August 1852; and Albion, 21 August 1852, in Reviews, 419, 427. 63. Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 209. 64. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, in Collected Works, 1048. 65. Jeffrey Steele, The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 168. 66. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 248.

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67. Geoffrey Sanborn, “Whence Come You, Queequeg?” American Literature 77 ( June 2005): 250. Sanborn borrows the concept of “extension” from Leo Bersani. 68. John D. Seelye, “‘Ungraspable Phantom’: Reflections of Hawthorne in Pierre and The Confidence Man,” Studies in the Novel 1 (Winter 1969): 439. 69. James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s “Pierre” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 122. For an overview of similar readings, see Leland S. Person, “Gender and Sexuality,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 239–46. 70. On the importance of women to Melville’s literary imagination, see the collection Melville and Women; and Caroline Levander, “The Female Subject in Pierre and The Piazza Tales,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 423–34. 71. On letters and their relationship to different forms of “correspondence,” see Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 72. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Collected Works, 1158. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 73. Ellen Weinauer understands Melville’s fantasy of literary communion to be much more unstable than I do, claiming that it ultimately gives way to a defense of the Lockean proprietary self. Weinauer, “Plagiarism and the Proprietary Self: Policing the Boundaries of Authorship in Herman Melville’s ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses,’” American Literature 69 (December 1997): 697–717. 74. Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1? June 1851, in Letters, 126.

Chapter 4. Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative 1. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845); reprinted in Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 24. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 2. Houston Baker makes this point when he asks “Where . . . in Douglass’s Narrative does a prototypical black American self reside? . . . For once literacy has been achieved, the black self, even as represented in the Narrative, begins to distance itself from the domain of experience constituted by the oral-aural community of slave quarters.  .  .  . The voice of the unwritten self, once it has been subjected to the linguistic codes, literary conventions, and audience expectations of a literate population, is perhaps never again the authentic voice of black American slavery. It is rather the voice of a self transformed by an autobiographical act into a sharer in the general public discourse about slavery.” Baker, The Journey Back (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 43. Also see Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3–5, 26–27. 3. David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery: The Anxiety of Ethnicity in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, 118–40 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129. 4. Thad Ziolkowski, “Antitheses: The Dialectic of Violence and Literacy in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of 1845,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William Andrews, 148–65 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), 156–57. 5. Interestingly, Douglass indicates that these songs are not only meaningful to “some minds” (presumably receptive white northerners), they are also “full of meaning to [the

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slaves] themselves” (24). Thus, even as Douglass depicts himself as a listener, unable to grasp the significance of the songs, he imagines the composers of these songs as possessing this insight. The slave singers, then, represent, an anomalous phenomenon: black subjects who are at once “within the circle” of slavery and fully cognizant of its implications and meaning. In light of this, perhaps “authentic black subjectivity” is not fully absent from the Narrative, as Houston Baker suggests, but rather can be found in the artistic and aesthetic compositions of slaves. 6. For more on interracial intimacy in Douglass, see P. Gabrielle Forman, “Sentimental Abolitionism in Douglass’s Decade: Revision, Erotic Conversion, and the Politics of Witnessing in The Heroic Slave and My Bondage and My Freedom,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 149–62; and John Stauffer, “Interracial Friendship and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 134–58. 7. James Olney, for example, has argued that Douglass’s Narrative (and particularly the inclusion in the title of the words Written by Himself) is “an act of linguistic assertion and aggression.” Olney, “The Founding Fathers—Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, 1–24 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 5. Likewise, Robert Stepto has characterized Douglass’s literacy practices as demonstrating a “preeminent authorial control.” Stepto, “Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of 1845,” in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1997), 155. For an alternative reading that links literacy to ideas about community, see Daniel J. Royer, “The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass,” African American Review 28, 3 (Autumn 1994): 363–74. 8. In “African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority,” American Literary History 7, 3 (Autumn 1995): 415–42, Lindon Barrett argues that literacy practices are, for the nineteenth-century African American, necessarily connected to the body. For Barrett, however, this connection usually embraces an inverse logic, whereby literacy signals a heightened disembodiment: “Literacy provides manifest testimony of the mind’s ability to extend itself beyond the constricted limits and conditions of the body. To restrict African Americans to lives without literacy is seemingly to immure them in bodily existences having little or nothing to do with the life of the mind and its representation. Conversely, to enter into literacy is to gain important skills for extending oneself beyond the condition and geography of the body” (419). In keeping with this logic, Barrett describes Douglass as “increasingly disembodied” (433) as his Narrative progresses and takes on authority. By contrast, I am arguing that Douglass maintains a distinct embodiment in the Narrative, particularly in relation to the activities of reading and writing. For other accounts that emphasize Douglass’s disembodiment, especially as achieved through literacy or oratory, see Jeannine DeLombard, “‘Eye-Witness to the Cruelty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” American Literature 73, 2 ( June 2001): 245–75; and Robert Fanuzzi, “The Trouble with Douglass’s Body,” American Transcendental Quarterly 13, 1 (March 1999): 27–49. 9. Stepto, “Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control,” 152. For a similar analysis, see Barrett, “African American Slave Narratives,” 433. For an insightful critique of these

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readings, see Hester Blum, “Douglass’s and Melville’s ‘Alphabets of the Blind,’” in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, 257–78. 10. See Deborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” in Andrews, Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, 192– 211; Jenny Franchot, “The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine,” in Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 141–65; Gwen S. Bergner, Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 19–42; David Van Leer, “A View from the Closet: Reconcilable Differences in Douglass and Melville,” in Levine and Otter, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, 279–99. 11. On the dramatic and staged qualities of this scene, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–4; and Fred Moten, In the Cut: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–24. For a reading that emphasizes less Douglass’s distance than his profound implication (as a potential subject of male rape) in this scene, see Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 86–95. 12. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 165. 13. See John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, 201–17 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 205; and Forman, “Sentimental Abolitionism in Douglass’s Decade,” 161 n. 9. According to historian Preston J. Dickson, Douglass’s aunt was born Hester (not Esther) Bailey in 1810, although subsequent records sometimes refer to her as Esther or Easter; see Dickson, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 68–69; 221 n. 2. By contrast, Scott C. Williamson claims (less convincingly) that Douglass’s aunt was named Esther, but that Douglass refers to her as Aunt Hester to protect her identity; see Williamson, The Narrative Life: The Moral and Religious Thought of Frederick Douglass (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2003), 37 n. 23. 14. Priscilla Wald mentions this possibility as well; see her brief reference in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 83. 15. Susan K. Harris, “Responding to the Text(s): Women Readers and the Quest for Higher Education,” in Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, ed. James Machor, 259–82 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 260. 16. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 23. Jauss is primarily concerned with the reader’s “horizon of expectations,” but his comments are also an indicator of the authorial process. 17. See John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 66; and Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford, Mass.: Spinner, 2005), ix, 55–63. 18. The antislavery paper, The National Era, for example, printed a chapter of Melville’s Omoo and serialized Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in addition to publishing abolitionist

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speeches; see Wallace, Douglass and Melville, 63. Wallace points out that Melville and Douglass were also in physical proximity at various points in their lives (11), thereby raising the intriguing possibility that the two in fact met. For more on the overlapping lives and literary efforts of Melville and Douglass in particular, see Levine and Otter, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville; and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 10, 2 ( June 2008). On the intersection of black and white literary America more generally, see Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 19. See Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 324–25, 264–65; and Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 160–62. 20. Wallace, Douglass and Melville, 11. 21. My thanks to Cathy Ingram, curator of the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, for providing information on these titles. 22. Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63. 23. Ibid., 89. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; reprint Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001), 120. 26. Leland S. Person claims that Hester Prynne is an iconic representation of the slave woman, particularly in her status as single mother. He argues for the “Africanist presence” (Toni Morrison’s phrase) in Hester Prynne’s character and in Hawthorne’s novel more generally, suggesting that Hawthorne was sympathetically referencing slavery in The Scarlet Letter. Person, “The Dark Labyrinth of Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the Ironies of Racial Mothering,” Studies in American Fiction 29, 1 (Spring 2001), 33–47. Is it possible, then, that Hawthorne, in creating the character of Hester Prynne, was himself influenced by Frederick Douglass’s 1845 depiction of his aunt? Such a query poses the interesting possibility of a cross-directional intertextuality. 27. Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 201. 28. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 101. 29. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); reprinted in Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 175. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 30. Steven Connor, “Whisper Music,” lecture given at the Take a Deep Breath symposium, Tate Modern, London, 15 February 2007 and at Giving Voice, Centre for Performance Research, Aberystwyth, Wales, 28 March 2008, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/ whispermusic/, accessed 1 June 2011. 31. Ibid. 32. Quoted in ibid. Here it is interesting to note the graphic correlations between the H and the A, Hawthorne’s symbol of sexuality. The H functions in a similar manner as

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Hawthorne’s A in Charles Felton Pidgin’s The Letter H: A Novel (New York: Dillingham, 1905), a bizarre tale in which the hero is branded on the forehead with a letter H as proof of his father’s adulterous paternity. 33. Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment Details: Theology, Natural History, and the Letter h,” Representations 61 (Winter 1998): 36. Also see Lynda Mugglestone, Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 95–134. 34. Cited in Richard W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 128–29. On the other side of the controversy were those who decried the increasing disuse of the letter H as a sorry consequence of an overly civilized society; see, for example, Alfred Leach, The Letter H: Past, Present, and Future (London: Griffith & Farran, 1880), esp. 80–81. For another defense, see Henry H., Poor Letter H: Its Use and Abuse (London: John Henry, 1854). 35. Sheehan, “Enlightenment Details,” 38. 36. Connor, “Whisper Music.” 37. See McDowell, “In the First Place,” 192; William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 224; and Ziolkowski, “Antitheses,” 160. 38. Suzanne Juhasz has made a similar point about the failure of the Lacanian scheme to acknowledge the extent to which women, from the psychic perspective of the child, are tied not to silence but to language and the symbolic production of meaning: “we need not take for granted that the symbolic is of necessity situated in and resultant from the Oedipal crisis. . . . language can be understood as an extension and renegotiation of the mother-infant bond, having everything rather than nothing to do with mother love.” Juhasz, “Adventures in the World of the Symbolic: Emily Dickinson and Metaphor,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, 139–62 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 147. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass somewhat revises this scene so that his slave mother is credited with his immersion into language: “I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I possess . . . to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother” (156). 39. On the maternal in Douglass, see Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, 1 (Summer 1987): 65–81; Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge, 1995), 129–75; Stephanie Smith, Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 111–33; and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 45–50. 40. Oxford English Dictionary, 1971 ed., s.v. “ell.” 41. Daneen Wardrop points to another crucial signification of “ell”—the letter L, which is, she remarks, the next consonant Douglass would need following A and B to spell the word “abolition.” Wardrop, “‘While I am Writing’: Webster’s 1852 Spelling Book, The Ell, and Frederick Douglass’s Positioning of Language,” African American Review 32, 4 (Winter 1998): 652. 42. Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13. 43. Poststructuralist feminists were perhaps the first to make explicit the link between language and eroticism. See, for example, Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in

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The Essential Feminist Reader, ed. Estelle B. Freedman (New York: Random House, 2007), 318–24. 44. Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (1810; reprint New York: New York University Press, 1998), 209. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 45. Ziolkowski, “Antitheses,” 163. 46. I thank Elizabeth Yukins for pointing out this parallel to me. 47. Roy Shafer, Aspects of Internalization (New York: International Universities Press, 1968), 21. 48. Rafia Zafar, “Franklinian Douglass: The Afro-American as Representative Man,” in Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 108. 49. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 127.

Chapter 5. “The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner 1. Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1909), iii. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 2. Oxford English Dictionary, 1971 ed., s.v. “attrition.” 3. Ann Douglas, for example, has rebuked nineteenth-century woman’s “unassertive and retiring . . . feminine faith”; see Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), 44; and Henry Nash Smith has criticized her “unquestioning submission to authority”; see Smith, “The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story,” Critical Inquiry 1, 1 (1974): 51. Feminist readers of The Wide, Wide World have responded to these charges in three important ways. First, they have challenged the assumption that Ellen Montgomery’s self-disciplining in the novel represents a full-scale concession to patriarchal forces, seeing it instead as an act of autonomy, a conscious struggle for power over the self; see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 147–85; Donna Campbell, “Sentimental Conventions and Self-Protection: Little Women and The Wide, Wide World,” Legacy 11, 2 (1994): 118–29; and Grace Ann Hovet and Theodore R. Hovet, “Tableaux Vivants: Masculine Vision and Feminine Reflections in Novels by Warner, Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton,” American Transcendental Quarterly 7, 4 (December 1993): 335–56. Second, they have pointed to subversive elements of The Wide, Wide World, contending that the narrative tension between the explicit message of the text and the more ambiguous depiction of various characters and plots reveals a subtext of “feminine discontent”; see Joanne Dobson, “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels,” American Quarterly 38, 2 (Summer 1986): 223–42; Catharine O’Connell, “‘We Must Sorrow’: Silence, Suffering, and Sentimentality in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World,” Studies in American Fiction 25 (Spring 1997): 21–39; Veronica Stewart, “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World,” Legacy 11, 1 (1994): 1–16; Jana L. Argersinger, “Family Embraces: The Unholy Kiss and Authorial Relations in The Wide, Wide World,” American Literature 74, 2 ( June 2002): 251–85; and Andrea Blair, “Landscape in Drag: The Paradox of Feminine Space in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World,” in The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, ed. Steven Rosendale (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 111–30. And third, they have focused on the ways Warner teaches her readers

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to negotiate masculine authority, insisting that The Wide, Wide World is a realist manifesto offering pragmatic, therapeutic advice for women; see Nancy Schnog, “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World,” Genders 4 (1989): 11–25; and Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 17–18, 145. While these interventions are crucial, what they share is a tendency to treat women’s self-resignation as inherently disempowering and politically suspect. Marianne Noble has challenged the soundness of these arguments in The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). While Noble is careful not to celebrate unequivocally what she reads as Ellen’s masochism, she contends that Ellen empowers herself not despite her tendencies toward suffering and self-subordination but through these techniques. This chapter shares with Noble a fundamental insistence that Ellen’s subordination does not necessarily indicate an absence of subjectivity, although in my reading, textuality rather than sexuality, or, more accurately, a text-based sensuality, is Warner’s preferred method for accessing the productive aspects of attrition. 4. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45–46. For other accounts that emphasize the importance of literacy (and in particular, scenes of reading) in Warner’s novel, see Elizabeth Fekete Trubey, “Imagined Revolution: The Female Reader and The Wide, Wide World,” Modern Language Studies 31, 2 (Fall 2001): 57–74; Suzanne M. Ashworth, “Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World: Conduct Literature and Protocols of Female Reading in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 17, 2 (2000): 141–64; Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 143–72; and Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in NineteenthCentury America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 135–53. 5. Quoted in Jane Weiss, “‘Many Things Take My Time’: The Journals of Susan Warner” (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1995), 29, 289. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. Weiss has transcribed all of what remains of Warner’s journals. Where possible, I have used this as the definitive source, but since much of Warner’s journal writing has been lost, I have also relied on Anna Warner’s excerpts of her sister’s journals quoted in her biography, Susan Warner. 6. On “true womanhood,” see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820– 1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74; and Ruth H. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815,” Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 100–126. On the necessity of women’s conformity, see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 56–107; and Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 99–103. 7. The Young Lady’s Own Book: A Manual of Intellectual Improvement and Moral Deportment (Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1833), 25. 8. Eliza Ware Farrar, The Young Lady’s Friend (Boston: American Stationer’s Company, 1837), 21. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 9. See Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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10. The Young Lady’s Sunday Book: A Practical Manual of the Christian Duties of Piety, Benevolence, and Self-Government, Prepared with Particular Reference to the Formation of the Female Character (Philadelphia: Desilver, Thomas & Co., 1836), 239. 11. On literacy as a tool for creating proper female subjects, see Jean Ferguson Carr, “Nineteenth-Century Girls and Literacy,” in Girls and Literacy in America: Historical Perspectives to the Present, ed. Jane Greer (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 51–77; and Claire White Putala, Reading and Writing Ourselves into Being: The Literacy of Certain Nineteenth-Century Young Women (Greenwich, Conn.: Information Age Publishing, 2004), 25–50, 115–41. 12. Horace Mann, Lectures and Annual Reports on Education (Cambridge, Mass.: George C. Rand & Avery, 1866), 64. 13. Ibid., 65. As Ronald Zboray points out, nineteenth-century reformers embraced reading both as a means of making children more tractable and as an alternative to more prurient uses of leisure time. He quotes a newspaper called the Flag of Our Union, which insists that, “Children amused by reading or study . . . are more easily governed. . . . How many thoughtless young men have spent their earnings in a tavern or grog shop, who ought to have been reading.” Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 126. 14. The Young Lady’s Own Book, 46. 15. Webster characterized anger, for example, as “expressed by rapidity, interruption, noise, and trepidation, the neck is stretched out, the head nodding in a threatening manner. The eyes red, staring, rolling, sparkling; the eye-brows drawn down over them, the forehead wrinkled, the nostrils stretched, every vein swelled, every muscle strained.” Webster, An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking (Philadelphia: Thomas T. Stiles, 1814), xi. 16. William Scott, Lessons in Elocution (1798; reprint Boston: Isaac Hill, 1917), 10. 17. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 40. Webster’s spelling books and dictionaries served a related end in their attempt to impose a “perfect uniformity” on language and orthography. Laws of grammar and spelling were for him inexorably tied to the larger law of religion and the state; as a consequence, teaching uniformity of cadence, along with subordination of clauses and placement of words, was part of a broader lesson on civic order. See Noah Webster, The American Spelling Book (Philadelphia: Johnson & Warner, 1816), iv. 18. See Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 15. 19. Webster, An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking, x. 20. Sandra M Gustafson, “Choosing a Medium: Margaret Fuller and the Forms of Sentiment,” American Quarterly 47, 1 (March 1995): 44. 21. See Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 126–55; Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 38–54; and Jane E. Rose, “Conduct Books for Women, 1830–1860: A Rationale for Women’s Conduct and Domestic Role in America,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, ed. Catherine Hobbs, 37–58 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 52–54. 22. Mann, Lectures and Annual Reports on Education, 62. On ambivalent attitudes toward childhood literacy, see Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3–40.

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23. Jane Weiss writes that it is a misnomer to label Warner a “domestic” writer: “no novelist ever hated housework more; Warner is probably unique among domestic novelists in never having found anything good to say about housekeeping” (Introduction, 1–2). Susan S. Williams, Claire Chantell, and Stacey Margolis also question Warner’s commitment to a narrow domestic ethos. See Williams, “Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship,” American Quarterly 42 (Dec. 1990): 565–86; Chantell, “The Limits of the Mother at Home in The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter,” Studies in American Fiction 30, 2 (Autumn 2002): 131–53; and Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 62–88. 24. My thinking here is indebted to Marianne Noble, who has argued that nineteenthcentury women’s self-abnegating and masochistic practices were the only legitimate avenue for sensuous feeling in a culture systematically dedicated to expunging the female body. See Noble, Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature, esp. 26–60. 25. For example, Warner’s full description of forestallment reads as follows: “I had a nice letter from father this morning, which as Anna can tell you pleased me much. She brought it up to me before I was out of bed, and I made her kiss me upon the strength of it. Then I rose and dressed and didn’t break the seal of my letter till I had breakfasted. That is my way of enjoying my letters” (SW, 251). 26. Marlene A. Schiwy, for example, describes women’s journal writing as “not only a process of self-recording, self-exploration, and self-expression . . . [but also] a channel of selfcreation.” Schiwy, “Taking Things Personally: Women, Journal Writing, and Self-Creation,” NWSA Journal 6, 2 (Summer 1994), 234. Harriet Blodgett writes: “A diary is an act of language that, by speaking of one’s self, sustains one’s sense of being a self, with an autonomous and significant identity.” Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 5. Margo Culley writes: “Keeping a diary . . . always begins with a sense of self-worth, a conviction that one’s individual experience is somehow remarkable. . . . [T]he essence of the impulse to keep a diary is captured in ‘I write, therefore I am.’ And will be.” Culley, A Day at a Time (New York: Feminist Press, 1986), 8. By contrast, Karen Sánchez-Eppler has recognized the ways diaries reveal “the elements of compliance entailed in all efforts to speak” (Dependent States, 40, emphasis original). 27. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (1850; reprint New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 12. Citations in the text refer to pages in this edition. 28. This remains the case even once Ellen meets John Humphreys, her future husband. For example, Ellen’s relationship to the book given to her by John (Wiem’s Life of Washington) is notably far more erotic than her relationship to John himself: “The pleasure of that delightful book, in which she was wrapped the whole day; even when called off, as she often was, . . . in fifty little matters of business. . . . These were attended to . . . but the book was in her head all the while. . . . Even when she went to be dressed her book went with her, and was laid on the bed within sight” (329–30). Delighting in, undressing before, and sleeping with books are typical for Ellen, whose primary identity as a reader was subsequently confirmed by the publication of Ellen Montgomery’s Bookshelf—a series of volumes written by the Warner sisters and billed as books that Ellen had read and loved. See Edward Halsey Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 74. 29. Richard Brodhead has read Mrs. Montgomery’s behavior toward Ellen in a Foucauldian register, aptly labeling it “disciplinary intimacy.” Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 13–47. On the maternal role in fostering literacy, see Sarah Robbins, Managing Literacy, Mothering

Notes to pages 142–151

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America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). 30. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 120. Bersani’s full description of this phenomenon is especially apt for understanding Warner: “These correspondences of form, texture, color and volume trace designs of sameness in our relations with the universe; our bodily being ‘touches’ multiple other surfaces to which it is drawn, not necessarily by desire but perhaps primordially by formal affinities that diagram our extensions, the particular families of forms to which we belong and without which we would be merely . . . stranded consciousness” (120–21). 31. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 140. Patricia Crain makes a similar point when she writes about Ellen: “Her relation to the [Bible], as to her mother, is metonymic and synecdochic: she is juxtaposed to the book, she is inside of the book, the book is inside of her” (Story of A, 161). 32. Conduct books affirmed this idea that Christian readers were expected to subjugate their individual beliefs to the authority of the Scriptures. For example, in The Girl’s Weekday Book (New York: William Jackson, 1836), Dorothy White writes, “It is not enough that you speculatively believe that the Bible is true; you must yield your soul to its control and guidance” (226). Ronald Zboray points out that the evangelical societies of the antebellum period “emphasized the literal, not critical, reading of the Bible. . . . Too much interpretation could be doctrinally dangerous” (A Fictive People, 91). 33. Schnog, “Inside the Sentimental,” 20. Also see Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 164–65.

Epilogue: No End in Sight 1. Nicholas Carr, “How the Internet Is Making Us Stupid,” Wall Street Journal, 5 June 2010. 2. Marjorie Howard, “Surf at Your Own Peril,” Tufts Journal, 16 June 2010. 3. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July/August 2008. 4. Greg Garrard, “A Novel Idea: Slow Reading,” Times Higher Education, 17 June 2010. 5. Sven Birkerts, “Lost in the Blogosphere: Why Literary Blogging Won’t Save Our Literary Culture,” Boston Globe, 29 July 2007. 6. “Self Culture: Uses of Books,” Meliora: A Quarterly Review of Social Science in Its Ethical, Economical, Political, and Ameliorative Aspects, 9, 35 (1866): 201. 7. Sven Birkerts, “The Time of Reading: A Meditation on the Fate of Books in an Impatient Age,” Boston Review, Summer 1996. 8. Quoted in Patrick Kingsley, “The Art of Slow Reading,” The Guardian, 15 July 2010. 9. John Miedema, Slow Reading (Duluth, Minn.: Litwin Books, 2009), 1–2. 10. Birkerts, “The Time of Reading.” 11. Sven Birkerts, “Reading in a Digital Age,” American Scholar, 1 March 2010. 12. The classic work on this phenomenon is Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 13. Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, “Why a Distinguished Small Press Isn’t Publishing EBooks Yet: Godine Designer Speaks Out,” Tele Read, 25 July 2006, http://www.teleread. com/ebooks/why-a-distinguished-small-press-wont-publish-e-books-godine-designerspeaks-out/, accessed 3 June 2011.

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14. See Sven Birkerts, “Into the Electronic Millennium,” Boston Review, October 1991. 15. Bill Brown, “Introduction: Textual Materialism,” PMLA 125, 1 ( January 2010): 26. Also see N. Catherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–24. 16. Gary Frost, Futureofthebook.com Blog, http://futureofthebook.com/2010/07/ booknotes-45/, accessed 3 June 2011. 17. Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 10–11. Kindle’s website explicitly touts the ability of the device to aid in a process by which the book transcends its material dimensions: “Our top design objective was to make Kindle disappear—just like a physical book—so you can get lost in your reading, not the technology.” Amazon.com, “Kindle Wireless Reading Device,” http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015T963C, accessed 3 June 2011. 18. See Carl W. Scarbrough’s interview with Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, “Why a Distinguished Small Press Isn’t Publishing E-Books Yet.” 19. Sven Birkerts, “Resisting the Kindle,” Atlantic, March 2009. 20. Ibid. 21. Although not all e-readers offer connectivity features, most media scholars agree that the ability to link the reader to a larger informational ecosystem is the fundamental innovation of these devices; for a thoughtful discussion of this and related matters, see Matt Hayler’s blog “4 oh 4—Words not Found,” http://4oh4–wordsnotfound.blogspot.com/, accessed 10 June 2011. 22. Whereas the “fourth wall” is the term generally used to refer to the barrier between audience and actors, the “fifth wall” has sometimes been invoked to describe “that semiporous membrane that stands between individual audience members during a shared experience.” Glorianna Davenport, et al., “Synergistic Storyscapes and Constructionist Cinematic Sharing,” IBM Systems Journal 39, 3–4 (2000): 468. 23. Andre Codrescu, “E-Book Tarnishes the Reader-Book Relationship,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 7 March 2011. 24. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 11. 25. See Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, and Council on Communications and Media, “Clinical Report: The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families,” Pediatrics (28 March 2011); Maarten H. W. Selfhout, et al., “Different Types of Internet Use, Depression, and Social Anxiety: The Role of Perceived Friendship Quality,” Journal of Adolescence 32, 4 (2009): 819–33; and C. M. Morrison and H. Gore, “The Relationship Between Excessive Internet Use and Depression: A Questionnaire-Based Study of 1,319 Young People and Adults,” Psychopathology 43, 2 (2010): 121–26. 26. Steven Johnson, “Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing,” Time, 10 May 2010. 27. Kevin Kelly, “Technophillia,” The Technium, June 8, 2009, http://www.kk.org./ thetechnium/archives/2009/06/technophilia.php, accessed June 5, 2011. 28. Leah Hager Cohen, “Object Lessons,” New York Times Book Review, 29 November 2009, 1. 29. Jonathan Franzen, “Liking Is for Cowards: Go for What Hurts,” New York Times, 30 May 2011. 30. In the film The Social Network, the character playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reinforces this point about the exclusive nature of social media: “People came to Facemash [Facebook’s earliest incarnation] in a stampede, right? But, it wasn’t because they

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saw pictures of hot girls. You can go anywhere on the internet and see pictures of hot girls. It was because they saw pictures of girls that they knew. People wanna go on the internet and check out their friends.” The Social Network, DVD, directed by David Fincher, Columbia Pictures, 2010) 31. Annalee Newitz, “My Laptop,” in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle, 87–91 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 89–90. 32. These comments appeared on the Goodreads website, “Ladies and Literature,” to which I belong. They were posted as a response to a thread that I initiated and participated in called “What we mean by community.” Goodreads.com, “Ladies and Literature,” http:// www.goodreads.com/topic/show/559971?utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_ instant#comment_30862100, accessed 24 May 2011. 33. Ibid. 34. Goodreads.com, “The Haters Club,” http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/ 24879–alfonso-cultural-learnings-of-thc, accessed 1 June 2011. 35. David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway, 2010), 38. 36. Turkle, Alone Together, 26.

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Index

h

abolitionism, 20, 106, 111, 119–23, 186–87n18, 187n26, 188n41 The Advocate, ix–x affect, 16, 55–58, 68, 77, 81–84, 87–88, 94, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 159n18, 177n131, 179n14 Albanese, Catherine, 62 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, 87 Alcott, William, 23, 27, 92–93 Alexander, Jacqui, 169n95 Amsler, Mark, 11 Anderson, Benedict, ix, 15 apocalyptic discourse, 25–26, 30–33, 37, 39, 42, 54, 99, 148–49 Atkinson, W. P., 25–26, 35, 60, 64 Augst, Thomas, 37 Austin, Mary, 42–50, 169n100; Earth Horizon, 42–50 Austin, William, 114–15 authorship, xii–xiii, 20–21, 52, 54, 59–60, 68–69, 71, 74–77, 84–89, 94–97, 99–100, 106–12, 122, 125, 132, 136–39, 176n94, 177n123, 183n51, 185n7, 186n16 Bacon, Francis, 55–56 Baker, Houston, 184n2 Barnum, P. T., 96, 183n58 Barrett, Lindon, 185n8 Barrett, Martha Osborne, 60 Barthes, Roland, 77–78, 90, 177n123, 181n37 Baym, Nina, 35, 177n120 Beardsley, Monroe C., 76 Beecher, Henry Ward, 34 Bellis, Peter J., 176n94 Benjamin, Walter, 48, 162n52 Bennett, Andrew, 76 Bernheimer, Charles, 75 Bersani, Leo, 18, 46, 50, 142, 170n106, 193n30

Bible, 51, 59–60, 81, 113, 131–32, 139–47, 173nn44, 47, 193nn31, 32 Birkerts, Sven, 149–50, 152 Blanchot, Maurice, 47 Bledstein, Burton J., 162n58 Bleich, David, 16 Blodgett, Harriet, 192n26 Bloom, Harold, 77 body image, 11–14 book: as dangerous, 5, 25, 33, 35, 50, 68–69, 74–75, 90–91, 117–18, 129–31, 139, 154, 193n32; as friend, 1–2, 19, 52–54, 58, 60, 68, 83–85, 101, 103, 107, 154, 171n16, 175n75, 179nn6, 7, 180n16, 194–95n29; as living object, 51–52, 107, 156, 160n25, 173n53; as material object, 4, 7–8, 11–14, 25, 27, 31, 35, 48, 51, 53, 62, 64, 74–75, 79–81, 132–34, 139–43, 151–52, 160n25, 162nn51, 52, 179n7; as prosthetic, 13, 141; reception of, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 48, 74–79, 86–91, 96, 104–5, 164n75, 177n120, 183n51. See also technology, of book Bouson, J. Brooks, 35, 76 Braithwaite, J. B., 26–27, 73–74 Brodhead, Richard, 112, 125, 192n29 Brooks, Cleanth, 76 Brown, Bill, 151 Brown, Gillian, 181n25 Brown, Matthew, 160n25 Brown, Richard D., 175n76 Bryant, John, 180n16 Burke, Edmund, 110 Burke, Kenneth, 157n2 (preface) Carr, Nicholas, 148–49 Case, Luella J. B., 1–3, 7 Casper, Scott E., 165n10, 173n55

220

Index

Cavallo, Guglielmo, 16, 77 Channing, William Ellory, 54, 64 Chapin, Edwin Hubbell, 25, 30–35, 51, 59, 63–67, 175n75; The Crown of Thorns, 63–67 Chartier, Roger, 16, 77 Child, Lydia Maria, 17–18, 36, 51–53 children, 43, 45–46, 63, 91, 95, 108–9, 116–17, 130, 139, 141, 144, 148, 158n11, 183n59, 188n38, 191nn13, 22 Christianity, x, 4, 25, 42, 51, 59–60, 63–64, 66, 68, 83–84, 97, 122–23, 138–47, 173n44, 193n32. See also Bible Clarke, James Freeman, 27–28, 42 Clewell, Tammy, 159n14 Codrescu, Andre, 153 cognitive science, 9–11, 59, 148 Cohen, Leah Hager, 153–54 communion, 2, 10, 14, 46–50, 54, 60–62, 74, 81–82, 86, 98–100, 102–3, 116, 121–22, 136, 138, 143, 154, 156, 157n2 (introduction), 159n19, 179n6, 184n73. See also reading conduct manuals, 19, 23, 25–26, 32, 38, 49, 127–29, 193n32. See also instrumentalist rhetoric; reading manuals Connor, Steven, 114, 116 consubstantiality, x, 2, 83–84, 101, 116, 156, 157n2 consumption, 23–24, 26, 30–34, 40, 42, 51, 83, 97, 121–22, 131, 134, 140, 149, 152, 158n10, 167nn49, 51, 182n43. See also digestion Cook, Joseph, 72–74; “How to Preserve the Results of Home Reading,” 72–73 corporeality, ix–xi, 2–3, 7–14, 20–21, 31, 34, 48–49, 56, 64, 66, 69, 79, 83–86, 99–100, 102, 105–10, 114–16, 118–19, 123, 125–29, 133, 135–36, 141–45, 151, 155, 160nn25, 26, 28, 162n52, 174n69, 185n8, 193n30 Crain, Patricia, 113, 193n31 Creech, James, 101 Culley, Margo, 192n26 Cummins, Maria, The Lamplighter, 43, 93 Darnton, Robert, 162n57 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 14 death, xii, 4, 18–20, 50–54, 61, 63–67, 70–72, 74–82, 101–2, 125, 145–46, 163n70; death of the author, 19–20, 54, 64–65, 74–80, 174n73, 175n75, 177n123 de Certeau, Michel, 77 Deleuze, Joseph Philippe François, 73 Dennett, Andrea Stulman, 183n58

desire, ix, 1–2, 5, 18, 92, 100–1, 110, 117, 121–22, 124, 135–37, 139, 166n31, 193n30 Dickson, Preston J., 186n13 digestion, 26, 31–32, 158n10. See also consumption Dimock, Wai-chee, 181n25 discipline, 6, 27, 36–41, 73, 93, 124–31, 134–47, 168n81, 182n43, 189–90n3, 191nn13, 17, 192n29. See also instrumentalist rhetoric disembodiment, 9–10, 185n8 domesticity, 25, 43, 55, 86, 90–93, 101, 113, 124–25, 128–29, 132, 180n18, 181n23, 192n23 Douglas, Ann, 189n3 Douglass, Frederick, 20, 82, 104–23, 125–26, 184n2, 184–85n5, 185nn6–8, 186nn11, 13, 187nn18, 26, 188nn38, 39, 41; My Bondage and My Freedom, 110–16, 121, 188n38; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 104–23, 184n2, 185nn5, 7, 8; reception, 104–6 Durkheim, Emile, 183n55 Dutoit, Ulysse, 46, 50, 170n106 Duyckinck, Evert, 85 Dwight, Elizabeth, 52 Earl of Iddesleigh, 26 Edelman, Lee, 37 efficiency. See instrumentalist rhetoric Eliot, T. S., 76 embodiment. See corporeality Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 60–62, 174nn57, 61, 174–75n75 enchantment. See mesmerism Engelsing, Rolf, 36–37 family. See reading, as familial bond; incest Farmer, Brett, 77 Farrar, Eliza Ware, The Young Lady’s Friend, 37, 127–30 Fels, Sidney, 162n48 feminism, xiii, 111, 137, 188n43, 189n3 Fern, Fanny, Ruth Hall, 87 Fetterly, Judith, 77 Fish, Stanley, ix, 15–16 Fisher, Philip, 179n11 Fliegelman, Jay, 22 Formalism. See New Criticism Forsythe, Robert S., 180n15 Foucault, Michel, 77, 192n29 Fowler, O. S., 92, 182n45 François, Anne-Lise, 49, 169–70n106

Index Franzen, Jonathan, 154 Frazer, Michael L., 171n29 freedom, 107–8, 119–20, 122, 149; and constraint, 16–17, 19–20, 35, 77, 79, 149, 163n68 Freud, Sigmund, xii, 4–5, 88, 141, 158nn10–12. See also psychology Frost, Gary, 152 Fuller, Margaret, 3–4, 131 Fuller, Robert C., 70 Fuss, Diana, 5 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 78 Garrard, Greg, 149 Garrison, William Lloyd, 121, 123 Gass, William, 75 Genette, Gérard, 160n27 Gerrig, Richard, 75 Gide, André, 17, 20, 164n74 Gilmore, William J., 52, 130 Grosz, Elizabeth, 10 Hadley, James, 60–62, 68–69 Haraway, Donna, 14 Harding, Susan, 26 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2, 20, 38, 61–62, 70–72, 83–84, 87, 96, 101–3, 110–14, 126, 176n94, 178n2, 179nn6, 7, 187n26, 187–88n32; The House of the Seven Gables, 29–30, 70–72, 111, 176n94; “The Minister’s Black Veil,” 61–62; Mosses from an Old Manse, 2; The Scarlet Letter, 110–16, 179n6, 187n26 Hawthorne, Sophia, 87 Hayford, Harrison, 180n17 Hazlitt, William, 62, 174n64 Heidegger, Martin, 8 hermeneutics,78–79, 105, 143, 150, 155 Hewitt, Elizabeth, 179n14 Hitchings, Henry, 150 Hochman, Barbara, 52, 164n75 Hodge, Hugh Lenox, On Diseases Peculiar to Women, 31 Holland, Norman, 16 homoeroticism, ix–x, 3, 77, 83–85, 100–103, 106, 121–22, 125, 172–73n4, 178n2, 186n11 The House of the Seven Gables. See Hawthorne, Nathaniel Howard, Leon, 180–81n21 Hume, David, 57 Husserl, Edmund, 8–9, 161nn31, 38

221

Huth, Alfred Henry, 93 Hutner, Gordon, 62 identification, xiii, 4–5, 10–11, 17–18, 22, 56–58, 76, 82, 84, 90, 103, 109–10, 136, 140, 147, 159n16 identity formation, 5, 7, 11–13, 17–18, 21, 24, 46, 50, 54, 62, 74–76, 79, 82, 91, 94, 104–5, 110–20, 123, 137, 146–47, 149–53, 160n23, 162n51, 186n113, 192n26. See also resistant reading incest, 81–82, 86, 88–96, 101–3, 181n37, 182nn45, 47, 49, 183nn51, 55, 58, 59 individualism, xi, 6–7, 20–21, 35, 60–62, 68–70, 75–76, 85, 88, 96–98, 100, 123, 125–27, 136, 149, 160n23, 162n58, 171n29, 179n14, 181n25 ingestion. See consumption instrumentalist rhetoric, 19, 20, 23–26, 33–42, 47–49, 97–98, 110–16, 125–31, 134–47, 163n68, 182n43, 189–90n3 intertextuality, 110–16, 187n26 Iser, Wolfgang, 16 isolation. See reading, as dissonant experience Jackson, H. J., 16, 162n51 Jagose, Annamarie, 48 James, Henry, 49 James, William, 61–62 Jauss, Hans Robert, 111, 186n16 Johnson, Steven, 153 Juhasz, Suzanne, 188n38 Kant, Immanuel, 76 Katz, Bill, 25 Kelley, Wyn, 182n48 Kelly, Kevin, 153 Kennedy, Alan, 14 Kittler, Friedrich, 52 Koestenbaum, Wayne, xi Kohut, Heinz, 5 Koselleck, Reinhart, 31 Lacan, Jacques, 116–18, 188n38 Lamb, Charles, 79 leisure, 6, 25–27, 31–32, 36–40, 94, 125, 129, 191n13. See also modernity Leverenz, David, 180n16 literacy, 20, 25, 82, 104–7, 116–19, 122–23, 125, 129, 139–41, 147, 160n25, 165n10, 184n2, 185nn7, 8, 190n4, 191nn11, 22, 192n29 literary marketplace, 20, 24–26, 30, 32–33,

222

Index

36–37, 41–42, 96, 110–12, 148, 152, 167n55, 180n17 Littau, Karin, 27, 166n29 Locke, John, 184n73 Long, Elizabeth, 162n58 Longinus, 175n85 loss, rhetoric of, 17–18, 20, 54, 60–61, 63–67, 74–75, 79–82, 105, 117, 139, 145–46, 155, 158n11. See also reading, as dissonant experience Mabie, Hamilton W., 38–39, 44, 72–74; “The Art of Reading,” 73 magnetism. See mesmerism Manguel, Alberto, 79 Mann, Horace, 129–31 Massumi, Brian, 31 maternity, xi, 44, 55, 75, 89–93, 95–96, 116–17, 126, 139–46, 158n7, 181n37, 182nn43, 45, 187n26, 188nn38, 39, 192n29, 193n31 Maurice, F. D., 51–52 Mays, Kelly, 32 McCarthy, Thomas, 78 McGill, Meredith, 160n25, 176n94 McHenry, Elizabeth, 77 Melville, Herman, 2–3, 20, 68, 81–105, 111–12, 125–26, 138, 178n2, 179nn7, 14, 180nn16– 18, 181n21, 182n48, 183nn51, 58, 184nn70, 73, 186–87n18; The Confidence-Man, 98; “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 102; language conventions, 89–90, 94, 98–99, 102–3; MobyDick, 38, 83, 87, 111–12, 183n51; Pierre, 20, 83, 86–103, 179n14, 180nn15, 17, 18, 180–81n21, 181nn25, 38, 182n43, 183nn51, 52, 183n59; reception of Pierre, 86–91, 96, 180–81n21 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9–11, 100, 161nn38, 40, 41, 43; Phenomenology of Perception, 10, 161nn38, 40; The Visible and the Invisible, 10–11, 161nn41, 43 Mesmer, Franz, 69–70, 72–73, 175n87 mesmerism, 35, 54–56, 68–74, 175n91, 176n94 metaphysics, 19, 38, 53, 62–64, 69 Meyer, Patricia Ann, 118 Miedema, John, 150 Milder, Robert, 179–80n4 Milton, John, 43, 51; Areopagitica, 51 mise en abyme, 20, 164n74 modernity, role in reading, 5–6, 19, 23–31, 34–39, 42, 48, 54, 148–56, 160n23, 162n58, 166nn24, 29, 31, 167n51, 168n84 morality, 12, 27, 30, 33–34, 37, 56–57, 65,

83–84, 95, 112–13, 130–31, 154 Morrison, Toni, 187n26 motherhood. See maternity Mullan, John, 180n20 Murray, Heather, 162n58 Murray, Lindley, 59 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. See Douglass Nell, Victor, 75 neuroscience. See cognitive science Newcomb, Harvey, How to Be a Lady, 34 New Criticism, 14, 16, 76–77, 162n55 Noble, Marianne, 5, 190n3, 192n24 occult. See spiritualism Olney, James, 185n7 Parker, Hershel, 180–81n21 Parker, Julia A., 22–23, 53 parody, ix, 86–88, 180nn15, 20, 181nn21, 23 Peabody, Elizabeth, 111 Peck, George Washington, 89 Penry, Tara, 88 Person, Leland S., 187n26 Peters, John Durham, 56 phenomenology, xi, 8–14, 59, 100, 132–33, 151–52, 161nn31, 38, 161n40. See also Heidegger; Husserl; Merleau-Ponty Pidgin, Charles Felton, 188n32 Pierre. See Melville Pilgrim’s Progress, 144 Poor, Mary Pierce, 80 Porter, Noah, 2, 12–14, 51–52, 58–60, 65, 68, 80; Books and Reading, 12–14, 58–59 Post-Lauria, Sheila, 180n18 Poulet, Georges, 16, 74–77 Poyen, Charles, 69–70 prescriptive reading. See instrumentalist rhetoric psychology, xi–xii, 4–5, 18, 70, 76, 81, 111, 121, 151, 158n12, 159n15. See also Freud; Lacan; reading, and psychology Puységur, Marquis de, 69–70 race relations, 3, 18, 20, 93, 95, 104–14, 117–23, 125, 185n6 Radway, Janice, 32–33, 167n51 railroad. See technology, of railroad Rapp, David, 75 reader: as altered, transformed, 4–5, 12–13, 34–35, 43–46, 49–50, 54–56, 68–69, 74–75, 144–45, 173n55; as autonomous, 16, 18, 21,

Index 49–50, 54, 69, 72–79, 118–20, 122, 148–50, 177n123 reading: and academia, xiii, 16–17, 47, 74, 78; as bodily, 2–3, 9–12, 14, 23–24, 31–32, 34, 38–39, 43–44, 48–49, 56, 65–66, 69, 79, 83–85, 99, 102, 105–10, 114–15, 117–19, 123, 125–26, 133–36, 139–46, 151, 155, 160n28, 167n49, 185n8, 191n15, 193n30; as dialogical, 52, 54, 58–59, 71–72, 99–101, 118–21; as dissonant experience, 17–18, 26–28, 60–62, 75–76, 88, 97, 109–10, 148–50, 155, 162n58, 175n76; embodied, ix–xi, 2–3, 7–14, 20–21, 31, 34, 48–49, 56, 64, 66, 69, 79, 83–86, 99–100, 102, 105–10, 114–16, 118–19, 123, 125–29, 133, 135–36, 141–45, 151, 155, 160nn25, 26, 28, 162n52, 174n69, 185n8, 193n30; as erotic/sensual experience, 3, 7, 24, 27, 32, 40, 50, 64, 67, 79, 83–84, 106, 109, 114–18, 125–26, 132–33, 135, 139–40, 151–52, 158n5, 188n43, 190n3, 192n28; as familial bond and negotiation, 83, 86, 88–96, 99–101, 103, 104–17, 125, 139–46, 181n38, 182n43, 183n59, 186n113; as fantasy of oneness, ix–xiii, 1–8, 10–12, 14, 17–21, 33, 39, 42, 47–50, 52–60, 62–69, 74, 78–81, 83–85, 103, 105–9, 119, 121–22, 125, 136, 138–47, 151, 155–56, 159n16, 175n75, 179n4; as intimacy, ix, xiii, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 15, 19–20, 22, 24, 46, 48–50, 52–54, 64–67, 74, 78–79, 83, 105–6, 114, 116, 119, 122–23, 125, 136, 138–39, 143–46, 153–56, 162n48, 185n6, 192n29; middle-class reading habits, 6, 19, 23, 25, 31, 37, 86–88, 91, 93–95, 102–3, 125, 127, 129, 131, 146–47, 182n47; and modernity, 5–6, 19, 23–31, 34–39, 42, 48, 54, 148–56, 160n23, 162n58, 166nn24, 29, 31, 167n51, 168n84; as paranormal experience, 19, 35, 51–54, 62–67, 75, 79–81, 173n53, 175n75; and passivity, 32–35, 55, 73–75, 131; and pleasure, 17, 24, 31–33, 52, 75, 78, 118, 131–36, 149–50, 155, 177n123, 192nn25, 28; as private act, x–xi, 6–7, 12–15, 21, 23–24, 60–62, 118, 139–40, 154–56, 162n58, 174n73; psychology of, x–xii, 4, 24, 75–76, 78, 148–49, 160n25; and railroad, 24, 38–39, 169n89; for self-improvement, 19, 23–24, 33–41, 45, 131, 167n58, 191n13; as sensory experience, ix, 8, 31–32, 43–46, 56, 132–34, 139–40, 151–52; as social act, 14–15, 19, 53, 67–68, 88, 130–31, 134, 139, 151–55, 162n58, 174n73, 182n48, 184n2; systematization in, 24, 26, 33–40, 72, 94,

223

152, 168n78; and women, 18, 31–32, 42, 60, 77, 80, 86–87, 94, 125, 129–32, 135, 139, 141–47, 158n7, 165n10, 166n43, 180n16, 184n70, 189n3, 190n3, 191n11, 192n24. See also book, as dangerous; instrumentalist rhetoric; mesmerism reader response, 47, 75–79 reading manuals, 24–25, 27, 36–37, 41–42, 72, 92. See also conduct manuals; instrumentalist rhetoric Renker, Elizabeth, 179n7 resistant reading, 16–18, 54, 74–79, 122–23, 149, 189n3 Reynolds, David, 180n18 Ricoeur, Paul, 159n15 Riffaterre, Michael, 16 Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, 93 Rogin, Michael Paul, 183n59 Rollin, Charles, 40 Romanticism, 3–4, 49–50, 76, 78, 88, 175n87 Romero, Lora, 88 Rothe, Matthias, 52, 174n73 Royle, Nicholas, 173n53 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 100 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 192n26 Savage, W. H., 115 Scarbrough, Carl W., 151 Scarry, Elaine, 7–8 Schilder, Paul, 11 Schiwy, Marlene A., 192n26 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 78 Schnog, Nancy, 143 Scott, Sir Walter, 3–4 Scott, William, 130 Schwenger, Peter, 74 The Search for Oneness, Lloyd Silverman, Frank Lachmann, Robert Milich, xi–xii. See also psychology Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man, 93, 182n48 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 181n27 seduction, 69–71, 92, 132, 140, 149–50 Seelye, John D., 101 Sellers, Charles, 6 sensationalism, 131, 180n18 sentimental fiction, 3, 40, 55, 85–88, 93–94, 159n16, 180n18, 181nn21, 23, 182n48 sentimentalism, 3, 55, 83–88, 93–99, 101–3, 107, 179nn10, 11, 180nn18, 20, 181n27 sexuality, 92, 108–9, 112–18, 158n12, 179n4, 182n41, 183n58, 186n11, 188n32, 190n3

224

Index

Shakespeare, William, 59, 68, 172–73n41 Sheehan, Jonathan, 115 Sicherman, Barbara, 167n58 Sigourney, Lydia Howard, 27, 33, 178n136 Skinner, Thomas, 60 Slatoff, Walter, 168n70 slavery, 104–11, 113, 117–23, 184n2, 184–85n5, 187n26, 188n38 Slow Reading (Slow Movement), 150 Smith, Adam, 56–58, 84, 171n29 Smith, Henry Nash, 189n3 Sontag, Susan, 17 soul, 2, 17, 19, 51–56, 59–61, 64–66, 78, 84, 97, 100, 102, 105–6, 118, 121–22, 154, 193n32 Southworth, E.D.E.N., The Hidden Hand, 87 spatiality, role in reading, 9–10, 19, 41, 43–50, 54, 65–67, 75, 104–6, 110, 118, 122–23, 131–32, 141–42, 185n5, 194n22 spiritualism, 19–20, 53–54, 62–69, 71–72, 80–81 Stephens, John L., 22 Stepto, Robert, 108, 185n7 Stewart, David M., 167n49 Stewart, Kathleen, 26 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 30, 52–53, 87, 111, 171n13, 179n11, 187n18; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 43, 58, 87, 187n18 Strong, Bryan, 182n43, 182n45 subjectivity, x–xi, 3, 5, 8–9, 18, 40, 43–49, 59, 68–69, 74–75, 78, 83, 98–99, 103–4, 116, 139, 146–47, 149–50, 156, 159n14, 160n25, 162n48, 169n96, 185n5, 190n3 sympathy, 55–58, 60–64, 69, 71, 75, 78, 83–86, 100, 102–3, 105, 109–10, 113, 153, 159n16, 171n29, 172nn38, 39, 179n7, 187n26 technology: of book, 6, 14, 19–20, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32–37, 39, 48, 54, 85, 95, 110–11, 148–56, 162nn48, 57, 186n16; of e-book, 151–53, 194nn17, 21; Internet, 21, 27, 148–56, 194n17; of railroad, 19, 23–25, 27–30, 38– 39, 53, 149, 153; role in reading, 5, 14, 23–28, 30–31, 34–35, 37–39, 148–56, 159n19; social networking, 153–55, 194–95n29, 195n31; urban-industrial, 19, 23–28, 30–31, 34–39, 48, 70, 91, 96, 129, 159n19, 167n51, 168n81. See also modernity temporality, 19, 22–23, 30–31, 35–38, 40–50, 54, 59, 67, 142, 150, 168n81, 169n96 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 43, 60 Thomas, M. Carey, 41–42, 49–50 Thoreau, Henry David, 42, 47–50; Walden, 47

Tompkins, Jane, 143 trains. See technology, of railroad Turkle, Sherry, 153 Van Leer, David, 105 Wald, Priscilla, 186n14 Wallace, David Foster, 156 Wallace, Robert K., 111 Wardrop, Daneen, 188n41 Warner, Anna, 8, 81, 124–26, 132–36, 138, 190n5, 192nn25, 28 Warner, Henry, 133–34 Warner, Michael, ix, 15 Warner, Susan, 8, 20, 40–42, 49–50, 81–82, 87, 93, 124–27, 131–47, 189–90n3, 190nn4, 5, 192nn23, 25, 28, 193nn30, 31; refinement through suffering (attrition), 124–28, 131, 134–47, 189–90n3; The Wide, Wide World, 20, 40, 43, 87, 93, 125, 138–46, 189–90n3, 192nn28, 29, 193n31. See also discipline wayward reading, 19, 22–24, 40–50 Weber, Max, 36 Webster, Noah, 130, 191nn15, 17; Lessons in Reading and Speaking, 130 Weinauer, Ellen, 184n73 Weiss, Jane, 190n5, 192n23 White, Dorothy, 193n32 Whitman, Walt, ix, 7, 155, 160n26; Leaves of Grass, ix, 7, 155 The Wide, Wide World. See Warner, Susan “The Widow’s Home,” 80 Williamson, Scott C., 186n13 Wilson, Frank, 162n48 Wimsatt, W. K., 76 Wirt, William, 54–56 Wolf, Maryanne, 148–49 womanhood, ideology of, 126–27, 189n3, 190n6, 191n11 Woolf, Virginia, 75–76 Wordsworth, William, 1–3 Zafar, Rafia, 122 Zboray, Ronald, 15–16, 53, 80, 191n13, 193n32 Ziolkowski, Thad, 105, 120 Žižek, Slavoj, 166n31 Zuckerberg, Mark, 194–95n29

Acknowledgments

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This book—a very long time in the making—has been aided by the support of numerous institutions and individuals. For their help in the very early stages of this project, I thank Cathy Davidson, Michael Moon, Toril Moi, Karla Holloway, and Michael Hardt. I am especially grateful to Jan Radway, who first introduced me to the discipline of the history of the book and whose own work provided me with a model of rigorous, meaningful, and accessible scholarship. My work was further encouraged by the support of the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where I spent three enjoyable years, and by my wonderful colleagues in the English Department and in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Colorado Denver. I am grateful for a year-long fellowship at the Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder and for the sponsorship of the Dean’s Office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UCD. For his support for this project from the very beginning, I thank Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press. I also thank Caroline Winschel, Alison Anderson, and Marian Rogers for their keen editorial insights as well as my research assistant, Amanda Hardman, for her excellent and patient work in formatting and indexing this study. Earlier versions of portions of Chapter 3 appeared under the title “Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and Authorship in Melville’s Pierre” in American Literature 74, 2 ( June 2002); it is reprinted by permission of the publisher. Earlier versions of portions of Chapter 5 appeared under the title “‘The Polishing Attrition’: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner,” Studies in American Fiction 33, 1 (Spring 2005): 3–28; copyright © 2005 Northeastern University; reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Acknowledgments

For their enthusiastic conversations about this project, incisive comments on earlier drafts of chapters, and unwavering support, I thank Julia Rothwax, Julie Byrne, Liza Yukins, Julie Crawford, Allison Pease, John-Michael Rivera, David Glimp, Valli Rajah, John Plotz, Dan Itzkovitz, Jonathan Grossman, Leah Price, Michelle Comstock, Pompa Banerjee, Kent Casper, Jake Adam York, Nancy Ciccone, Jennifer Peterson, Marjorie Levine-Clark, Margaret Woodhull, Maria Elena Buszek, Chaela Pastore, Jana Portnow, Lisa Soltani, Hallie Stosur, Julie Post, Kim Miller, Karl Kister, Mary Caulkins, Janet Robinson, Adam Lerner, Elissa Auther, Helen Thorpe, Phil Weiser, Heidi Wald, and Matthias Rothe. I am especially grateful to Susan Linville and Brad Mudge, both of whom read the manuscript in full and offered invaluable feedback. Many thanks as well to Gordon Hutner for helping me to navigate the world of academic publishing and to the anonymous readers at Penn Press, whose thoughtful insights helped to make this a far better book. Finally, my family—in all its incarnations—has been a source of boundless generosity. I thank my mother, Doris Silverman, for her undeviating belief in me and for her font of knowledge about all things psychoanalytic. My sisters, Ilena and Mara Silverman and my brother Stefan Silverman kept me grounded by reminding me that, overpowering though it can sometimes feel, writing a book is only a small slice of existence. My life is infinitely happier and saner for their presence. I thank Gary and Micki Joseph, Dan Joseph, Tracy Smith, Alexis Silverman, Brian Lloyd, Sam Stoloff, and Herb Dembitzer for giving me an ever-enlarging sense of what family can mean. I am immensely grateful for my b-joys—Desi, Jules, and Gideon—who fill my days with mayhem, music, and laughter. My biggest debt is to Philip Joseph, who read every word of this manuscript (sometimes 2 or 3 times), who offered tough criticism and expansive support, and who is, simply put, the smartest, funniest, best man I know.