The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910

by Ronald Briggs

Overview

Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award Winner, 2018, Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section

Moral electricity—a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century.

As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, "the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests." The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826521453
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	07/18/2017
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ronald Briggs is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College and author of Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar: Simón Rodríguez and the American Essay at Revolution (also published by Vanderbilt University Press).

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CHAPTER 1

Independence and the Book in Subjunctive

"Moral Electricity," or Writing and Reading Virtue

Charles Brooks's 1856 essay "Moral Education: The Best Methods of Teaching Morality in the Common Schools," appeared in Henry Barnard's American Journal of Education as part of an ongoing conversation on the role of books and reading in education. In a twenty-first century climate of educational debate centered on skills such as literacy, arithmetic, and problem solving, Brooks's easy link between reading and morality underlines just how much the grounds of educational debate have shifted in the century and a half since his essay was published. A staunch proponent of the common school movement and the notion of public education as a stay against political corruption, Brooks had, ten years before, asked the rhetorical question "What have the United States to fear from the kingdoms of Europe?" and answered it himself: "Little from their navies; less from their armies; little from their commercial competition; less from their political creeds." With nearly every measure of contemporary state power exhausted, Brooks concluded that it was only by bad moral influence — "their moral and political corruptions" — that the great European powers could ever threaten the United States (Remarks 38).

Having established the United States as a world power with nothing to fear from conventional statecraft (a line of argument Abraham Lincoln would take to great rhetorical effect in his declaration, in the years leading up to the US Civil War, that only internal disagreement could wreck the project of independence), the Brooks of 1856 nonetheless finds the US moral identity to be very much a work in progress. Asking himself another broad question — What kind of literature should the new nation be producing? — he rattles off an equally snappy and provocative answer: "We need books charged with moral electricity, which will flow by an insensible stream into the student's open soul" ("Moral" n. pag.).

Brooks's use of a electricity as a metaphor for a powerful but invisible form of transmission carries particular weight in a century whose early days had been enlivened by Michael Faraday's experiments designed to render electricity's effects visible to observers and by the macabre craze for galvanic experiments that attached electrodes to the corpses of animals and jolted them into lifelike motion. Brooks also highlights the reader/student's receptivity — "open soul" — and emphasizes the stealthy means by which the book's undefined moral message will reach it. The use of "student" rather than "reader" to describe the moral receiver suggests the book as a teacher, an anthropomorphized description that makes the book-reader relationship a personal one and that harkens back to the pre-print era when such a relationship would have been the only efficient means for communicating moral messages. The new book, by Brooks's lights, should not only be capable of transmitting morality and more of it than is apparent at any given moment, it should also be thought of as a teacher in search of students, a teacher whose worth depends on a moral message and the ability to transmit that message. Finally, by choosing to direct the electrical impulse toward the student's "soul" rather than a more prosaic "brain," Brooks suggests that the book will offer what he and his contemporaries called "education" and took to mean the learning of ways of being in the world, rather than "instruction" or the learning of useful skills.

Brooks's choice of metaphor united the vocabulary of empirical science with that of morality. Electricity's invisibility was an inconvenience to Faraday's experiments, one that prompted a number of innovations, as David Gooding has noted, designed to make the force visible to a not necessarily theoretically grounded public. For Brooks it was this invisibility that made electricity the perfect metaphor for the transmission of moral content sufficiently influential to effect real world changes in readers and societies. Germaine de Staël's 1799 treatise on the social import of the literary, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, had already defined the usefulness of "eloquence" as a connecting force that united a shared sense of virtue, a force writers could tap "if you know how to give that electrical commotion in which the moral being thus contains the principle" (381). Suzanne Guerlac has noted that Staël's argument emphasizes the synthetic quality of eloquence as a force that "touches both reason and the passions" and thus helps to bring about "the social affections of admiration and enthusiasm required for love of the nation" (48).

Staël, whose work had been translated into English by 1812, was above all intent on creating a revolutionary ideology that would replace the mythology and rhetoric of the preexisting order. For Brooks the occasion for taking up virtue and its invisible transmission is, in a practical sense, a moment of industrial development in which large-scale publishing is becoming part of the US reality. Any urge to wax triumphant on the young nation's rapidly developing industrial infrastructure is tempered by the fear that material prosperity has been accompanied by moral decline, a sentiment that runs through the discourse of US transcendentalism and is crystallized in Emerson's "The American Scholar" (1837). Spanish American thinkers such as Andrés Bello pronounced a similar need for moral and intellectual revival, not because they felt that too much prosperity had left their societies morally bereft, but because they believed public morality would be a cornerstone for republican stability.

Staël, writing from post-Revolution France and soon to be exiled from it forever, was putting to literary use a metaphor that had first come to life as a description of the psychological effects of crowds on individual voters. As detailed by Pierre Rosanvallon, moral electricity referred to a special civic influence believed to reside in the physical presence of a crowd. Rosanvallon cites a commentator from the 1790s who referred to the capacity of a crowd, in the moment, to transcend individual selfishness: "By way of I know not what moral electricity compounded of elements of all sorts, the majority experiences a shock against which it is helpless" (44). He also notes a 1789 law requiring that public gatherings be held the evening before important votes in the presumable hope that the electric effect would carry over into the next day. The phrase cropped up repeatedly in the US and Spanish press of the early nineteenth century. In 1842 the Journal of the American Temperance Union looked toward the future and concluded that "the world has neither seen nor felt the strength and power of the moral electricity it will yet see and feel" ("Journal" 88). Six years later the Spanish progressive newspaper El Espectador translated the words of a social reformer in France who referred to "that moral electricity that is released in contact with associated men" ("Luis Blanc" 2). In the first case the effect is generalized. The temperance narrator believes in a chain of influence in which the work of a single reformer multiplies as "one heart kindled with a great moral idea, imparts it in a moment to a thousand, and that thousand to other thousands, and society is revolutionized" ("Journal" 88). For the French speaker, it was a group dynamic that produced the effect. In both cases the invisible electrical force became visible as a large-scale shift in public opinion. Here was an instrument of influence perfectly fitted for a republic and easily multiplied if the printed page could be turned into a conductor.

On the Western side of the Atlantic, the Puerto-Rican intellectual Eugenio María de Hostos employed electricity as a metaphor decades after Brooks, tying it to a stereotypical notion of sentiment as the female-gendered pairing of the emotion-reason binary, and arguing that female students might be the best possible conductors of "moral electricity": "Sentiment awakens the love of the truth in populations unaccustomed to thinking about it, because there is a moral electricity and sentiment is the best conductor of that electricity" (Ensayos 37). Paired with traditionally gendered notions of sentiment, this link between emotion and transmission becomes an argument for increased educational opportunities for women: "Sentiment is an unstable, transitory and inconstant faculty in our sex; it is a permanent and constant faculty in women" (37).

This particular spin on the relationships between reason, sentiment, and public morality would also appear in the writings of fin-de-siècle Latin American feminists of both sexes as an argument for why the Spanish American republics needed more women writers and intellectuals. Finding in Staël's sense of postrevolutionary crisis a connection with the reality of Spanish American political and social life a century later, women of letters such as Soledad Acosta and Aurora Cáceres would give Staël a prominent place in their own chronologies of noteworthy literary women while proclaiming the works of women writers as an antidote for a corrupt political culture. In 1895 Acosta, a Colombian novelist, critic, and editor, would acclaim her contemporary, the Peruvian novelist Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, not on the basis of her successful novel Blanca Sol, which had already run to several editions, but because she believed the success of Blanca Sol meant that Cabello was capable of writing another sort of book: "No one better than her to give birth to beautiful books, distinctly American, that were not sad pictures of very sad uncontrolled passions" (La mujer 410). Acosta includes this text in a collective biography that we will explore in more detail in later chapters, and early on she declares a sense of Spanish American crisis, referring to the "cataclysm of immorality, of impiety, of corruption that threatens it" (xi). Against this backdrop, it is to Spanish American women that Acosta entrusts "the great work of regeneration" (xi).

And while Acosta does not focus on books alone as the vehicles of this regeneration, she expects women to contribute, among other roles, "as writers who should broadcast good ideas in society" (386) and so evaluates Cabello de Carbonera as a writer who "could write very noble literary works that filled her readers with enthusiasm for the good and the desire to imitate the examples that she should write" (406). Acosta's elegant grammatical construction is difficult to reproduce in English. The books she describes and their effects on readers all take place in the imperfect subjunctive. They are hypothetical books depending on the condition that Cabello de Carbonera should choose to write them. Where Hostos envisions women as electrical readers, predisposed to receive moral content more reliably than men, Acosta asks her readers to see women authors as particularly electrical writers, writers capable of producing these hypothetical works that will have such clear and far-reaching moral influence. Against a moment of perceived crisis, Staël, Brooks, Hostos, and Acosta coincide in looking for resolution in a morally influential yet-to-be-carried-out act of writing, publishing, and reading. In Acosta's case this hypothetical moral influence serves as linchpin for a feminist argument based as much on practical necessity — the need for moral regeneration throughout the region — as on narrative of emancipation. She argues for the expanded education of women at least in part on the basis of the educational books these emancipated women will produce.

Book Scarcity and the Book in Subjunctive

At roughly the same moment that Brooks was contemplating the United States' need for moral electricity, the Argentine politico and writer, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one of Spanish America's most assiduous readers of the educational press, had mentioned his own boyhood debt to Ackermann's catechisms, published in Spanish in London and distributed widely throughout Spanish America in the 1820s, with peak production falling between 1823 and 1828 (Roldán Vera, The British 24). Generally written by learned Spaniards or exiled Spanish Americans, Ackermann's catechisms covered everything from arithmetic to Greek mythology. Along with pure basic content — the nineteenth-century version of a MOOC with no active link — some catechisms also offered meta-reflections on the state of life and letters, as in Joaquín Lorenzo de Villanueva's Catechism of the Literatos (Catecismo de los literatos).

A humanist and priest by trade, like Brooks, who was himself a Protestant clergyman, Villanueva assessed the promise and dangers of literature in strikingly similar terms. In both cases the positive moral potential of books colors and is colored by a desired kind of reading. Villanueva, for example, notes the common critique of realistic works of fiction and theater as mimetic reproductions of life that thus risk glorifying the evils they wish to condemn because their formal structure forces them to represent those evils convincingly. While not discounting this danger altogether, Villanueva shifts the focus to the intentions of the reader rather than those of the writer. When the catechism's examiner asks "Can the truth be read out of pure curiosity?" the scripted reply distinguishes between superficial and morally directed readings, or to use Brooks's terminology, between brain readings and soul readings: "The truth deserves to be read to be engraved on the spirit: to be sought not for the pleasure of novelty, but rather the fruit" (Villanueva 96).

Villanueva makes it clear that he is writing from a position of knowledge about the contemporary book market and not as a reactionary opponent of progress. His questioner posits the morally positive novel as a concession to contemporary tastes and a product not of some moralistic cabal of reformers but of the market itself. As he puts it — "The masses want to learn morality in novels" — and if this condition is accepted as the novelist's point of departure, the only solution is to meet the public where it can be found: "Give it to them pure, and not corrupted: not in a ridiculous way, but rather with the decorum that society's most important science demands" (60). The aesthetic imperative to make morality reasonable and to present it within an aura of social importance becomes, in Villanueva's vision, the modest moral scope of the novelist's art. Here the task is not formal innovation as an expressive goal but taste and decorum, as a means of conserving morality as a topic of "serious" discussion even while presenting it as mass entertainment. Villanueva is framing the Aristotelian challenge to please and instruct in the context of what a perceived mass audience already desires.

There is an important difference between where Villanueva and Brooks place their own perspectives on the moral novel. For Villanueva, the Spaniard, writing several decades earlier, the literary market is a given, a condition of the novelist's world, and not something an individual novelist or theorist of the novel would presume to shape. Brooks, on the other hand, writes from a rhetorical point zero, calling, in effect, for a new industry that will make a new kind of product and with it a new buying public whose habits and expectations will presumably be molded by the hypothetical authors to come. Where they agree is in their identification of the book as medium defined by its ability to transmit moral messages to the reader even when the reader is not aware of receiving them. Villanueva's focus on purity, the injunction that novelists should give the public "pure" the morality it wants or thinks it wants, suggests the possibility of an "impure" delivery or a confused marketplace in which books are essentially "moral" but offer false and true versions of morality. Brooks's use of the term "electricity" renders morality, which he does not feel the need to define, as a content that can become not only transmissible but completely intermingled with the vehicle of the transmission. He speaks not of content rendered transmissible — that would be "electric morality" — but of a means of transmission rendered moral.

Perhaps the excessive "futurity," to borrow Carlos Alonso's term, of Brooks's vision of the literary industry and marketplace to come should not surprise us. Villanueva is, via Ackermann, effectively writing from a London that is not only the undisputed center of the English-language publishing world of the nineteenth-century, but a center of Spanish-language publishing as well, home to established communities of interlocking (and sometimes opposing) Spanish and Spanish American intellectuals in exile. Brooks's vision of a new continent in need of new books is colored by his own reflections on the intellectual relationship between the United States and Europe.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Aesthetics of the Cosmopolitan Teacher 1

1 Independence and the Book in Subjunctive 19

2 Exemplary Autodidacts 47

3 Collective Feminist Biography 74

4 Novelistic Education, or, The Making of the Pan-American Reader 107

5 Educational Aesthetics and the Social Novel 147

Conclusion: Publication as Mission and Identity 183

Notes 191

Bibliography 229

Index 247

Editorial Reviews

"By emphasizing Lima and the connections that linked intellectuals based there to debates and processes in Europe and the US, Briggs makes a seminal contribution to expanding hemispheric American studies from a Latin American (and a Latin Americanist) perspective. He does so through an ambitious reading of a broad group of sources across the Americas, with bold interpretations, always linking back to the Lima group. The narrative is graceful, clear, and direct, all characteristic of Briggs's style."
—William Acree, author of Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780-1910

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