inner depths.” A close study of the novel provided tools to investigate the moral impulses of the modern subject, which were found in the depths of the human soul, not (at least not first) in actions in the world. This, then, was a vision of morality focused on thoughts and emotions rather than actions. Wessenberg’s vision of morality stressed the content of the soul; morality was not (or at least not initially) a matter of acts performed in the world. Because the novel played upon the fantasies and emotions of the reader with ease, it could distort an otherwise “clear” soul: “Indeed, the real element of the novel is the business of the heart. What a blessing [the novel] is when it functions like water and air, imparting clarity and order. Yet how pernicious it is, when it runs wild in the same space, bewildering and clouding [the heart].” The goal of art was to open the soul to light and air, thus making it more transparent. Wessenberg’s vision of morality was marked by a Christian view of the soul, rooted in intentions and thoughts rather than actions.65 The Prussian police also worked with this Christian-inspired model of morality, albeit grafted onto a secular context. Booksellers, peddlers, and lending library proprietors who passed on obscene and immoral texts were believed to be guilty of the crime of “corrupting the mind and soul” of the youth or of “spoiling [them] for real work or real study.”66 The police evoked the consequences of moral corruption (loss of productivity), but the real damage took place inside the reader’s mind.
Wessenberg devoted over ninety pages to detailed discussions of individual novels. While he took on a few novels individually—Sade’s Justine merited separate treatment—he often grouped texts together into loose and idiosyncratic categories: English novels in the style of Fielding, horrifying mysterious novels, and French tales of court intrigue. He read and interpreted each novel through the lens of moral development and insisted that the value of a text was strictly a matter of its effects on the reader and had nothing to do with the intentions of the author. Damage took place in the interior space of the reader’s mind and was prompted by several factors, including problematic depictions of female virtue or marriage and descriptions that mystified or aestheticized a straightforward description of events and characters. Far worse, however, were the texts that provoked and distorted the feelings and fantasies of the reader, and in this regard, Wessenberg had to admit, it was German authors who produced the deepest and most “soul-distorting” novels of all.
While French novels like Diderot’s The Nun might provoke the reader’s “feelings of shame,” and English novels like Fielding’s Tom Jones could be sexually explicit, they were nonetheless realistic and bracing depictions of human nature. Frankness about sex was not the problem. Commenting on The Nun, a novel that includes explicit references to sex between women, Wessenberg wrote, “As a painting, it shows deep knowledge of the human heart, and though it is painted in very strong colors, it is also executed with sensitivity, and summons moving tones from hidden chasms. It rewards the attentions of the observer of men.” Tom Jones, a novel filled with sex and seduction, presented “a masterful depiction of the raw side of human nature.” Though Wessenberg worried that it was dangerous to “show humans how closely they border on the animal world,” he defended Fielding’s novel on grounds that it was “the apotheosis of natural feelings, which constantly tend toward goodness and mildness, rather than toward the arrogance and pedantry of virtue.”67 Wessenberg did not take issue with depictions of sexual rawness (which he believed might in fact be a good thing, restoring health, vigor, and contact with the reality of human feelings). And though it may seem odd to find an early nineteenth-century Catholic cleric arguing for the benefits of frank literary depictions of sex, his position becomes clearer when we understand what really concerned him, namely, the move away from reason and objectivity toward the subjectivity and exploration of human emotions that accompanied Romanticism and the cult of sensibility. Romantic literature, rooted in a deep and unflinching exploration of the subjective states of human consciousness, was in fact what threatened the mental equilibrium of the German reader. Though the two movements were distinct, Wessenberg nonetheless grouped together Romanticism and pietist Schwärmerei because both explored interiority and embraced emotion and fantasy. It was the heightened emotional states associated with Romanticism and pietist “enthusiasm,” not the rollicking good times of Tom Jones nor the lascivious French denizens of the cloister in The Nun, that threatened to distort and disorder the soul. Indeed he preferred the bracing realism of “natural” and “real” physical desire to the frustrated love of Romantic swooning.
Accordingly Wessenberg saved his sharpest moral criticism for novels focused on frustrated and unconsummated passion outside of marriage. The popularity of Johanna Schopenhauer’s 1824 novel, Gabriele, was one example of literature in this style. The protagonist of the story enters into a loveless marriage to please her father, while remaining deeply in love with another man. This popular plot of frustrated love stuck Wessenberg as morally distorting. Responding to Gabriele, he expressed concerns about the depiction of love:
The most alluring, enticing deceptions of this relationship, based in the ignorance and misrecognition of nature, only serve to increase the dreadful unhappiness produced by the roguish Eros or love that exists outside the moral constraints that govern sexual urges. With forbidden love between two persons of the opposite sex, there is certainly also spiritual love [Seelenliebe]. Yet when have a girl or a young woman, an ardent youth or man sought only the soul of his beloved? The lessons of a chaste, ideal love … as consolation and substitution for all the suffering caused by an unhappy marriage … are among the most dangerous.68
Here we see Wessenberg’s attention to the proper cultivation of love, which might be achieved with the proper choice of novels. “Roguish Eros” requires cultivation and constraints, but the real problems are the illusions and false expectations that lead to a misrecognition of the realities of sexual love. Cultivating a taste for purely spiritual love, such novels distort reality, produce false expectations, and lead to “dreadful unhappiness.” Wessenberg advanced a surprising argument: the realities of sexual love, even in their rawness, are less immoral than strict virtue that leads to illusions and despair when faced with reality. From an unexpected corner we get an argument for de-repression on grounds that realism, even about sexual love, is preferable to virtuous illusions.
Wessenberg was especially critical of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel focused squarely on the unruly emotions (unrequited love, empathy, sorrow) of the protagonist. In Werther, he wrote, “love is elevated to an enraptured madness,” and the hopelessness of this love led to desperation and suicide. In the end Werther created inner disorder; the damage did not take place in the world of actions but in the space of souls: “What does Werther leave in the heart of the reader, except wretched melancholy? It only introduces discordant tones; it never resolves them.” The best thing about the book, Wessenberg concluded, was that it provided a “true mirror of the illnesses of the imagination that held sway in that era.”69
Good novels, by contrast, would act as “medicine for the soul” (Seelische Arznei). They would bolster the impulses of reason and intellect, providing traction against the dangerous impulses of imagination and fantasy. Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, for example, provided a warning about methods of seduction and painted a portrait of feminine virtue. Wessenberg also applauded Germaine de Stael’s novel Johanna, as “on the whole, it springs forth with vitality and clarity that all worthy happiness [Glückseligkeit] is based on inner unity and purity of heart.”70
Wessenberg’s vision of morality was rooted not in the performance of Sitten, or the external forms of manners and customs. Instead morality was found inside the often hidden folds of the human heart, which (depending on shape and substance) might result in happiness or despair. It mattered little if the individual had mastered the external forms of civilized behavior; more important, from Wessenberg’s perspective, was the state of the soul. By defining morality in these terms, he mirrored a shift taking place in early nineteenth-century German thought, expressed in the literature of German Romanticism and in the emerging human and
