Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson by Marianne Noble

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson by Marianne Noble Maria A. Windell Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. vii + 294 pp. $99.99 cloth/$80.00 e-book. “Sympathy is more complex than the first few pages of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the last few pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” writes Marianne Noble early in Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (4). The remark is spot-on. Studies of early American sympathy—or sentimentalism or sensibility—almost inevitably refer to Adam Smith’s prisoner upon the rack or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s instruction that one “see to it that they feel right.” These models have, in many ways, underwritten the recovery of early US sentimentalism as a field of serious inquiry. They have also been criticized for privileging the spectator/reader, as they depend upon the presumption that one knows what another is feeling—a presumption that essentializes the other and erases his or her subjectivity. Noble argues that the critique errs, however, in assuming that nineteenth-century US authors celebrated sentimentalism’s universalizing tendencies. Failing to look beyond Smith and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she asserts, has limited our understanding of how writers questioned and refined their own ideas about sympathy as a means of human contact. Looking at later works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson, Noble shows how these authors “surprisingly yet decisively anticipate our own emphases on difference, embodied subjectivity, and anti-essentialism” (4). Noble takes care to differentiate sympathy from sentimentalism. The distinction grounds her argument that scholars criticize sentimentalism for flattening difference but overlook how nineteenth-century authors also leveled this criticism. More importantly, she argues that they responded by developing sympathy as an alternative to sentimentalism specifically because they understood it as a model of “feeling . . . care that unites people not by erasing differences but by imagining an attitude that invites intimacies while also protecting differences” (35). Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson, she writes, relied more on J. G. Herder’s revisions of Adam Smith than on Smith, and they refused the idea that a person’s true self resides behind a social mask. Instead, they valued the other’s infinite complexity and unknowability without seeking to transcend individual particularities (as did transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, argues Noble in her first chapter). Even in the nineteenth century, she writes, Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson were [End Page 170] “[k]eenly attuned to” and sought to alleviate “the normative judgments invisibly folded into acts of sympathy” (31). Each of the book’s chapters meticulously contrasts an author’s earlier writings with his or her later works to illustrate how authors rethought and revised their approaches to sympathy as a means of processing individual, racial, class, and gendered difference. The Douglass chapter, for instance, powerfully juxtaposes a number of passages from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with their revised counterparts in My Bondage and My Freedom. Noble argues that My Bondage revises the very logic undergirding Narrative’s call for abolition: whereas the earlier autobiography highlights enslaved African Americans’ suffering and capacity for feeling, the latter centers the recognition of African American individuality. That is, My Bondage asks readers not to feel for the enslaved but to respect African Americans’ “plenipotentiary capacity for self-cultivation” (129). Noble’s compelling reading of Douglass also encompasses The Heroic Slave and “Letter to His Old Master,” but it does not extend to Douglass’s writings on Haiti, Ireland, or other places beyond the United States. It would be interesting to see how Douglass’s revised thinking on sympathy worked in relation to national differences. Regardless, Noble convincingly demonstrates how Hawthorne, Stowe, and Dickinson also rethought their own investments in sympathy, including her argument that Stowe came to reject as essentialist and appropriative the model of sympathy she had elaborated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The nineteenth century, Noble insists, had already responded to our critiques of sympathy as a basis for...