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 transforms 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. 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 face-to-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 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
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,
