Once More with Feeling

Abstract

national sentimentality project, following The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). Historically speaking, how ever, it is the second, covering the mid-nineteenth century through the 1980s. It is also the most satisfy ingly coherent of the series. The Anatomy of National Fantasy was brilliant but claustrophobic (can we really still be talking about Hawthorne?), whereas The Queen of America was the reverse, brilliant but scattered; it often read more like a collection of individually marvelous essays than a book (as indeed, its subtitle signaled). The Female Complaint is perfectly scaled, a series of interlocking case studies that together build a breathtaking account of U.S. women's culture. The book's cohesion is especially impressive considering that Ber lant began it in the late 1980s and published versions of many of the chapters as essays over the past fif teen or so years. Her archive and argument revisit that period's of ten heated discussions of the