Public sentiments: structures of feeling in nineteenth-century American literature

Abstract

Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Glenn Hendler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. x, 275. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.) Public Sentiments examines sentimentalism in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. For author Glenn Hendler, process by which people are asked to feel both like and with another person, constituted the narrative and core of a structure of (11). Hendler views this structure of feeling as affective processes of everyday life (11) that shape and organize experience. Taking a page from Raymond Williams, he argues that structures of feeling often first become visible in art and literature. For Hendler's purposes, novel highlights centrality of in nineteenth-century American culture. In contrast to other scholars who have written on this topic, however, Hendler rejects notion that was a primarily privatizing emotional exchange between reader, text, and author, arguing that sympathy in nineteenth century was a paradigmatically public sentiment (12). Drawing on work of JUrgen Habermas, he contends that structures of sympathetic feeling in literature helped to constitute a public sphere. Sympathetic identification with characters in novels, Hendler insists, prepared readers psychologically for participation in political public as well as reading public. Thus novels, in his view, were not just opportunities for rational-critical discussion characteristic of Habermasian public sphere, but instruments of subject formation, producing, through acts of identification, a publicly oriented form of subjectivity. Hendler refers to this joining of psychic and public, emotional and political, as sentimental politics of affect (22). To illustrate his points, Hendler examines a number of topics in nineteenth-century literature: Washingtonian temperance narratives, work of Martin R. Delany, Horatio Alger's novels, women's fiction, figure of dandy in writings of Henry James and others, and bad boy novels, of which Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is perhaps best known. Some of literary forms addressed early in book, like temperance narratives and Delany's novel, Blake; or, Huts of America, were allied to social movements whose advocates were, for reasons of class or race, excluded from bourgeois public sphere as defined by Habermas. Using a historicist approach to text and context, Public Sentiments displays an admirable sensitivity to difficulty of applying general models to specific historical circumstances. It posits that some literary forms deployed sympathetic identification to construct counterpublics that functioned alongside dominant bourgeois public sphere. Thus Delany's protagonist, Blake, is able to hatch a far-flung plan for a slave rebellion because of counterpublic communication based on identification and interchange of sentiments (79) among oppressed people of color. Later in book, Hendler shifts his analytical focus, deemphasizing historicist approach for close textual readings employing psychoanalytic terminology and concepts. He interprets bad boy novel, for example, as an instance of Althusserian interpolation of adult heterosexuality. The genre's contrast between boy-nature and self-- possessed male adulthood moves reader toward a masculinity that it assumes reader already possesses and yet represents as being constitutively in crisis (209) and constructs a heterosexuality that does not require women (210). …