that left ample room for inconsistent application in the first decades of the century. Yet the separation between the moral and political dangers of print rested on a spatial division between bookstores and lending libraries and by extension between elite and nonelite readers, particularly women and the less educated. Having separated the threats of print into two distinct categories, liberals could call for freedom of the press (to allow political expression) and still support regulations on the moral tone of print culture and public life.
Chapter 5 takes up one of the important continuities in nineteenth-century obscenity law: the tendency to define obscene texts and images in terms of their ability to damage or distort inner life. In its new guise as a sexual infraction codified in the criminal codes of Saxony, Hessen, Baden, and later Prussia, texts and images were deemed obscene if they damaged the reader’s or viewer’s “feelings of morality” (Sittengefühle) or “feelings of shame” (Schamgefühle). Following the promulgation of Prussia’s 1851 Penal Code, efforts were made to clarify these terms. How was the threshold for offense determined? What were the consequences of damage to the impulses of shame? What special characteristics adhered to shame that made its damage so potentially catastrophic? All these questions were debated at length in the 1860s and 1870s, both in official texts (legal briefs, court decisions, and the like) and in unofficial texts offered by physicians, psychiatrists, and various others who sought to add their perspectives to these discussions of interiority. If early nineteenth-century discussions of inner life were led by pedagogues and theologians—authors who had imagined inner life in a particular way—by the 1860s and 1870s visions of inner life were increasingly the domain of physicians. In this later period talk of exhausted impulses and distended nerves replaced earlier concerns about overactive imaginations and distortions of reason; the threat was depletion and apathy rather than zealotry and rudderless enthusiasm.
While reigning assumptions about the self changed decisively over the period of this study, concepts of obscenity continued to be rooted in visions of damage to inner life; in each case these interior changes were thought to be tied to actions in the world. It is these relationships—between texts and selves, between the shaping of selves and the constitution of the external world—that this book seeks to explore.
CHAPTER 1
Inventing Fragile Readers
The Origins of Secular Obscenity Law, 1788–1830
A police record has always been the object of a certain reserve, of which we have difficulty understanding that it amply transcends the guild of historians.
—JACQUES LACAN, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”
It has never been more necessary to shape and consolidate the inner form of character than now, when external circumstances and habits are threatened by the terrible power of universal upheaval.
—WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT (1797), quoted in James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866
In his 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of Novels, the reform-minded Catholic theologian and author Ignatz von Wessenberg expressed his concerns about pleasurable reading in terms of a carefully articulated topography of inner life. He found himself particularly absorbed with the vicissitudes of human fantasy: “It is something wonderful, amiable, and blissful to have clean, crystal-clear, untainted Fantasy. Through it, the mind views everything in the proper light, imparting moderation to fear and terror, and soothing one’s tendencies and desires.” Wessenberg was an influential administrator of the Catholic diocese in Constanz from 1802 to 1827 and a respected author. In his vision of a mind inhabited by the impulses of reason, intellect, imagination, and fantasy, he suggested that fantasy took pride of place, guaranteeing order if “clean and clear” but also capable of creating tremendous disorder. He explained, “Nothing is more wretched than perverse, disarranged, overgrown and polluted images of wickedness, nothing worse than Fantasy pregnant with baseness.” In the struggle to regulate the mind, two impulses—fantasy and imagination—were deemed capable of counteracting all other impulses, including reason. “Where Fantasy has ruled, Reason can no longer show its face. What else is madness but a breakdown of the Imagination?”1
In Wessenberg’s view, mental disequilibrium did not originate with an organic defect, a chemical imbalance, or the repression of human instincts. People’s minds were instead distorted by external stimulation that overwhelmed reason, leaving them vulnerable to disturbing visions and mental derangement: “How many lay sick in the hospital without the least inkling that they are exchanging phantoms for phantoms and dreams for other dreams?”2 For Wessenberg, solitary reading of secular texts, in this case the novel, was an act that created, shaped, and revealed inner life. Reading created an autonomous world of invisible responses that manifested themselves in external behavior. Novel reading opened up new possibilities for the cultivation of the self, but it also represented a serious threat to inner equilibrium and, by extension, to external behavior.
Wessenberg was not alone in his attempt to understand the nature of inner life. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century Romantic authors, early practitioners of psychology and psychiatry, theologians, and phrenologists were also busy exploring the uncharted spaces of the mind and soul. While they did not agree on the answers, they asked similar questions. What constituted the shape and substance of inner life? How was it cultivated or distorted? What were the causes (and potential cures) for mental distress and inner turmoil? How did the shape of inner life translate into actions and behavior in the world? Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Wessenberg and his contemporaries existed in a world in which human creativity, imagination, and excitability were linked to world-shattering events. He insisted that genres associated with fantasy and pleasure should not to be dismissed as trivial: “Even if [the novel] is seen only as the pasture of fantasy, or if reduced to a means of relaxation (allowing the reader to regain the energy released and depleted through work), or to entertainment, or to amusement—even from this perspective, [the genre] appears to be of decisive importance.”3
Wessenberg suggested that the study of inner life was best pursued through a careful investigation of popular reading habits, in particular the novel—a genre, he explained, that simultaneously shaped and revealed the inner life of an emerging middle-class reader. While reading was not new to the middle classes (German Protestantism had long linked literacy and religious practice) and eighteenth-century middle-class culture stressed the importance of reading as a source of cultivation and edification, it nonetheless struck Wessenberg that something was changing. It seemed that more people were reading than ever before and that they were reading for pleasure rather than edification, alone rather than in groups, and extensively rather than intensively. Women, he believed, were particularly voracious consumers of these new forms of entertainment. “How many small locales exist,” he asked, “in which a new novel does not appear every month—indeed every week—to meet the needs of the female inhabitant of a house, even among the lower classes?” Once they had the novels in their hands, he speculated, they looked for solitude—a particularly dangerous state. Women’s mental topography also made them particularly vulnerable to the magic of these new commodities: “In the case of the female sex, there exists in the inner world [Seele] a stronger tendency toward tender, enthusiastic [schwärmerisch] abandon.”4 Schwärmerei, a term that implies flights of enthusiasm, fanaticism, or a falling away from reason, was used liberally in the early nineteenth century as a form of cultural derision. The concept was used in a variety of contexts: in the eighteenth century the term described religious enthusiasm (its original usage); later it was used to describe nonreligious states of heightened emotionalism and “swooning.” In the wake of the French Revolution the term was appropriated to describe political enthusiasm and swooning, or “politische Schwärmerei.” In the age of German Romanticism and the “Storm and Stress” literary movements we often associate with men, Wessenberg
