Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Mary Louise Kete. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. xx, 280. Appendices. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) American literature specialist Mary Louise Kete presents an intriguing reevaluation of function of poetry and fiction in nineteenth-century American culture. Her book, which examines literary creations produced from War of 1812 end of Reconstruction, attempts connect and literary romanticism with consumerism by illustrating how fiction and verse (published or not) served as a gift-giving ritual. The sentimental collaborations exchanged by nineteenth-century Americans reflected a gift economy that established symbolic ties among separate persons (52). Kete thereby refutes Alexis de Tocqueville's well-known observation that each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in solitude of his own heart and instead argues that Americans were deeply social and very concerned about vulnerability of family and community cohesiveness. They expressed their anxieties through language of mourning and loss. Kete begins her discussion with private, unpublished of Vermont rural folk whom she discovered in Harriet Gould's keepsake album (included in appendix one), and then expands her thesis illustrate how their concerns were articulated by poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Sigourney as well as novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mark Twain. Harriet Gould's book contained poetry and remembrances written by Gould's family and friends between late 1830s and early 1860s. Kete utilizes this source illustrate how ordinary people made sense of their lives and concludes that their writings complicate, in important ways, many of our common understandings about nineteenth-century American literary (16). Kete believes contents of Harriet Gould's album reflected a collaborative individualism (56-57) that was strongly influenced by sentiment and a romantic sensibility that more accurately explains emotional locus of pre-Civil War Americans. She questions previous assessments by Gordon Haight, who argued nineteenth century's culture of sentiment reflected country's bad taste, as well as Ann Douglas, whose Feminization of American Culture (1977) suggests sentimentality represented feminization of national character. She also questions assessments of culture of isolated that was supposedly taking shape in early nineteenth century and found its fullest articulation in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Rather than collapsing into isolated egotism, or the degeneration of individual into an unstable and unsustainable unit of one, she asserts promise of sentiment enforce or coerce a joining of interests was one way of negotiating this threat (49, 54). Sentiment represented a form of mourning that broke down borders of death as well as physical separations caused by westward migration and thereby enabled its participants to establish connections through which one could understand and identify oneself' (32). The poems in Harriet Gould's keepsake book are not concerned with expressing or constituting an isolated, freestanding ego but a situated, dependent individual. …