Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and NineteenthCentury American Literature. By Lori Merish. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 389. Illustrations. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $21.95.) Almost twenty-five years ago, in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas posited connection between antebellum sentimental culture and the rise of an ethic of mass consumption. The pairing, however, came almost as an afterthought in Douglas's analysis of Calvinist decline and remained suggestive but largely undeveloped theme of her study. Nor have subsequent scholars of sentimentalism-Jane P. Tompkins, Mary Kelley, and Karen Halttunen, to name few of the most prominent-really explored the connection. Powerful scholarship, including Douglas's own work, on the emergence of separate male and female in the antebellum period may have rendered links between the apparently feminine realm of sentimental culture and the apparently masculine realm of economy difficult to discern. But building on recent revisions of the separate spheres thesis and picking up the thread of analysis that Douglas left dangling, Lori Merish, in Sentimental Materialism, has now provided bold and thoughtful investigation into the relationship between sentimentalism and consumption in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century America. Rejecting the once dominant idea that the culture of sentimentalism marked an escape (capitulatory or otherwise) from market discipline and bourgeois competition, Merish places sentimental discourse at the center of an emerging liberal capitalist economy and middleclass social order. The results, though not without problems, are provocative and promising for future study. Merish argues that sentimental discourse instated new feminized self, or what she calls new political subjectivity (2), for which affective ownership of commodities served as the basis for personal refinement and the model for social relations. By weaving commodity consumption into the very fabric of middle-class subjectivity, sentimentalism, according to Merish, made capitalism `habitable' (117) in democratic society and legitimized white men's proprietary interest in persons, both black slaves and white women. Thus Merish intervenes in debates over the liberatory potential of sentimental fiction for middle-class women. She maintains that the apparent validation of feminine desire in sentimental discourse was illusory because circumscribed within domestic ideologies, and, worse yet, that it naturalized and psychologized fundamental relations of inequality in American society. Merish begins her study with the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, finding in the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, John Millar, William Robertson, and Lord Henry Karnes a representational matrix that (re)defined the ways in which ... consumption ... could be 'thought' in the new [American] republic (31). In short, Merish argues that Scottish discourse refigured sympathy and conscience as sentiments constituted, rather than undermined, by intimate proprietary relations with luxury goods. Scottish thinkers maintained that commodities and their exchange brought refined sensibilities; respectful, even loving, relationships across status groups; and broadly egalitarian social cohesion. Merish then discusses briefly-and with perhaps too little attention to the process of transmission-the ways in which late-eighteenth-century American writers of advice literature and sentimental fiction picked up this Scottish discourse, situated it within emerging ideologies of domesticity and femininity, and attached it to rising American middle class. In the second and third chapters, Merish addresses writings from the three decades preceding the Civil War. Focusing on the work of Caroline Kirkland, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, these chapters use the argument developed in the opening chapter to explicate set of well-known texts and to elaborate on connections among sentimental ownership, domesticity, and middle-class identity. …