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 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.
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 nineteenth-century 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 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
