Bodies and Books
Bodies and Books
Reading and the Fantasy of Communionin Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Silverman
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
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
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
Contents
Reading and the Search for Oneness
Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading
Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre
Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative
“The Polishing Attrition”: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner
Preface
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)
In 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 affiliations along national or demographic lines, but because it promoted a heightened connection to a specific