Wean back

For the record, the "Freudian slip" ascribed to a schoolgirl in Volume 1 of Herman Melville: A Half Known Life  (Wiley Blackwell, 2021) is the biographer's or nobody's. As shown herein, fifteen-year-old Augusta Melville correctly used the expression wean back in her essay on the poetry of Felicia Hemans. As it happens, the text of Augusta's 1836 composition is accessible on Melvilliana:

https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/02/augusta-melville-on-poetry-of-felicia.html

The expression in question occurs in a brief summary of The Sisters by Felicia Hemans. Augusta thus describes the pathetic central predicament of the poem, as one sister tries to keep her "broken hearted" sibling Leonor from leaving home:

"The Sisters," too abounds with beautiful ideas, most beautifully expressed. The broken hearted one is about to leave the tender and devoted sister, the companion of her childhood, who is using every persuasion that ardent love can suggest to wean her back, how touching her answer.

"Oh! woul'dst thou seek a wounded bird from shelter to detain,
"Or woul'dst thou call a spirit freed to weary life again? 

The desired "shelter" is a convent, although Augusta says nothing about the intention of the "broken hearted" Leonor to live the cloistered life of a nun. Augusta does reveal that the one being left behind, the "devoted one" of the poem, urges her traumatized sister not to go, hoping "to wean her back." In Hemans' poem the pleading sister succeeds in converting or reconverting her troubled sibling, who excitedly and appreciatively acknowledges, 

Oh sister! thou hast won me back!

John Bryant jumps on Augusta's wean as an "unconscious" spelling error for win, assuming I guess that Augusta must have intended to change the form of Hemans' verb won (past participle, technically) into the infinitive to win. With remarkable confidence in his feat of mind-reading, Bryant explains how Augusta wrote "to wean her back" when she certainly meant "win her back":

"The unconscious misspelling of “wean” for “win” — a Freudian slip suggesting a mothering kinship between sisters that hints, too, at an “ardent” same-sex love that would inhabit Augusta's future dreams — may not yield in the schoolgirl's essay any "full decided meaning," but it is an aspect of this half-known sister we shall continue to explore."  -- John Bryant, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley Blackwell, 2021) volume 1, page 291.

In his extended treatment of young Augusta Melville's writing and older brother Gansevoort's revising, Bryant advances a really interesting and original argument for a "sibling coterie of writers" that might have schooled Herman, too, after Augusta. Herman's juvenile school compositions are lost, but the coterie as Bryant conceives it has good documentary support in surviving letters and the partial manuscript draft of Typee, evidencing Gansevoort's crucial role in superintending the publication of Herman's first book.

But wait! Before we cosign on the promise "to explore" and keep exploring the heart, mind, and sexual identity of Herman Melville's sister, under the influence of imaginary "hints" from a "schoolgirl's essay," let's consult a good dictionary. Conveniently accessible online, Webster's Dictionary 1828 gives two main senses for wean. The first relates specifically to the elimination of breastfeeding. The second and also perfectly legitimate dictionary definition of wean generalizes from mother's breast to "the affections" and "the heart."

Noah Webster, A Dictionary of the English Language
London, 1832

 Another edition, via Google Books:

WEAN, v. t. [Sax. wenan, gewænan, to accustom; from the root of wone, wont; gewanian, to delay; D. wenan, afwenan; G. entwöhnen; Sw. vänja‎. See Wont.]

1. To accustom and reconcile, as a child or other young animal, to a want or deprivation of the breast. And the child grew, and was weaned. Gen. xxi. [Genesis 21.8]

2. To detach or alienate, as the affections, from any object of desire; to reconcile to the want or loss of any thing; as, to wean the heart from temporal enjoyments.

In commending Hemans' ballad of "The Sisters," Herman's sister Augusta Melville employed wean in the second dictionary sense of the verb, meaning either "to detach" one's "affections" from, or "to reconcile" to the "loss" of, anything desirable or enjoyable. Either or both ideas, detachment and reconciliation, may be denoted by wean. In Augusta's usage, the departing sister's heart is already weaned once, having been gradually "detached" from enjoyment of domestic affections along with her painful experience of unspecified private grief. The one being left aims to wean her sister back--that is, back to home affections, despite the emotional pain there exposed. So the "devoted" sister has to wean back, to detach or alienate the other from her new object of desire, the desperately embraced cloister. Put another way: as the mysteriously heartbroken, would-be nun appears reconciled to her imminent loss of home affections, the devoted sister must "wean her back" by persuading her to give up the convent cell. Leonor must somehow be reconciled to the loss of its lonely yet consoling solitude. 

In the ballad by Felicia Hemans, the devoted sister finally prevails by singing a favorite song from their childhood, marked by the repeated admonition, "leave us not." Thus convinced to stay Leonor exclaims, "Oh sister! thou hast won me back!"

As correctly used by Augusta Melville, wean back conveys the essence of the domestic drama as lyrically presented by Hemans. By singing an old familiar song, one sister weans back the other, back to the family circle where she once belonged. In a similarly domestic and religious context, Francis Parkman used Augusta's phrase "wean her back" to describe the attempt of a "passionately fond" father to dissuade his daughter, Madame de la Peltrie, from joining a convent:

Religion and its ministers possessed her wholly, and all her enthusiasm was spent on works of charity and devotion. Her father, passionately fond of her, resisted her inclination for the cloister, and sought to wean her back to the world; but she escaped from the chateau to a neighboring convent, where she resolved to remain.

--Chapter 14 on Devotees and Nuns  in France and England in North America (Boston, 1867).

Among Emily Dickinson scholars, Augusta's usage remained in play at the dawn of this our enlightened 21st century. In the classroom, confident about the superiority of manuscript study over badly edited texts, Annette Debo provides students with typescripts of Dickinson's poems

"initially, but I try to wean them back to the manuscripts."

Debo, Annette. “Dickinson Manuscripts in the Undergraduate Classroom.” College Literature, vol. 27, no. 3, 2000, pp. 130–43, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112540.

More 19th century examples

"Rebuke the sin, but yet in love rebuke,
Feel as one member in another's pain;
Wean back the soul that his fair path forsook, 

And mighty and eternal is thy gain." 

 

-- Hymn 203 on "Brotherly Kindness" in 
A Selection of Psalms and Hymns by Baptist Wriothesley Noel (London, 1832).

"But Jane, thou art gone—
Gone to the lonely grave—then fare thee well,
The eloquence of grief cannot wean thee
Back to life.—"

"To the Memory of Miss W——n." Auburn NY Free Press, March 20, 1832

At length those eyes, which they would fain be weaning
Back to old thoughts, wax'd full of fearful meaning. 

-- Byron, Don Juan Canto 4, 64

"Mabel was at last able to wean her back from her purpose."  --Love's Exchange: A Tale by Charles John Boyle (London, 1839).

Still there was one who clung to him with all the fond devotedness of woman's never ceasing love. In his early career, Julia had strove, by every art and persuasion which she was possessed of, to wean him back to his former mode of life.  -- "The Victims of Inebriation" by Joseph I. Matthias, The Ladies' Garland (Philadelphia, 1842).

She could not but look back to him, and determined again to see him—again to attempt to wean him back to self-respect and to himself. -- "Confessions of a Gambler" in The New York Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Art (New York, 1846)

But how are we to reclaim the wicked and immoral? How wean them back again into the path of virtue and peace?   --The Primitive Expounder, Volume 2 (Philadelphia, 1845)