Two new studies, one focused on visual, the other on literary culture, offer stimulating, at times frustrating, and always provocative insights into nineteenth-century American literature's understandings of self and social relations.Sarah Blackwood's The Portrait's Subject charts the growing importance of the portrait and how it came to be representative of human emotions. Her subtitle indicates a disposition familiar since the 1980s: the nineteenth century constructed much of what we associate with the modern liberal subject. Blackwood contends that psychology is a nineteenth-century invention (in the same manner that Foucauldian critics contend that sexuality is a late nineteenth-century one). I should, following Blackwood, say “psychology,” since scare quotes abound here. Blackwood emphasizes that psychology was a medico-juridico nineteenth-century construct, and as such, closely parallels and informs the developing status of the portrait as emblematic of psychology, inwardness, and the subject generally: Arguing that “psychological” is a historically situated mode of description, I emphasize the extent to which the anachronistic use of the term “psychological” occludes suggestive alternative modes of description and understanding of what governs the human interior, of what the human interior consists. (17) Blackwood follows this line of argument all the way through the book. The penultimate chapter, for example, reads Henry James's masterwork The Portrait of a Lady as a novel that is not so much “‘anti-psychological’ as it is actively engaged in the process of defining what ‘psychological’ might come to mean” (118).In chapter 1, Blackwood writes that Hawthorne's “portrait fiction allows us a glimpse into a moment during which there was little consensus about what psychology looked like” (18). She begins with a discussion of Hepzibah's scowl, which for the critic points to the “way in which psychology is made, not found or expressed,” the scowl a physical phenomenon calling “the inner state into being” (17). I expected more discussions of actual portraits in The House of the Seven Gables, including the Malbone miniature, mentioned only once here (51). Indeed, Blackwood largely focuses on para-canonical Hawthorne tales (“The Prophetic Pictures” [1837] and “Edward Randolph's Portrait” [1838]) and on the introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse(1854). Hawthorne's work demonstrates the impact of photography's invention, which “generated new forms of interest in prising apart and renaming aspects of inner experience (from ‘soul’ to ‘mind,’ for example)” (47).Blackwood likewise provides valuable insights into the role that the visual, as well as new understandings of it as indexical of psychological realities, played for Black writers. As she puts it in her strongest chapter, “[N]ineteenth-century Black writers’ experimentation with, and commentary on, portraiture forms a major contribution not only to the archives of slavery but also to the archives of nineteenth-century visual theory” (77).I wanted more discussion of Hawthorne's interrogation of numerous forms of visual art, especially in a comparative context. For example, how do we understand the figurehead that seemingly comes to uncanny life in “Drowne's Wooden Image” (1844) within the context of the portrait's rapidly enlarging significance? My chief reservation about Blackwood's argument is that it proceeds from the basis of certain theoretical and historical stances taken by contemporary Americanist literary criticism regarding nineteenth-century socialization. The poststructuralist basis of Americanist literary criticism's critique of the subject frames social, cultural, and emotional phenomena as so many infiltrations of authoritarian power. Along these lines, affectional experiences and subjectivities themselves can only be understood as yielding to an ever-more pervasive and taxonomizing series of normative regulations. Admittedly, I view these assumptions skeptically (psychology is hardly a nineteenth-century invention). Nevertheless, I find much to admire in The Portrait's Subject. Blackwood offers an engaging, fine-tuned, subtle, thorough, compelling history of the centrality of the portrait to nineteenth-century American literature's depictions of interiority and psychology.One of the means critics have had for discussing nineteenth-century American literary works without falling into ideological abysses is the philosophical approach. Sharon Cameron's Impersonality exemplifies this method; so does Marianne Noble's new book, Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, an implicit response to Cameron and the inverse of her argument.1 While Cameron places her focus on the evacuation of personhood in texts by Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, Noble emphasizes the importance of human contact and sociability while restoring sympathy to its rightful place as a profoundly felt and maintained affective experience. Noble, in disagreement with critics such as Lauren Berlant, contends that sympathy is not a means of “erasing difference” but can, instead, emanate from a focus on “the other's independent value,” thus establishing sympathy as “antithetical to erasure” (4–5). Carefully distinguishing sympathy from the sentimental, drawing on thinkers such as the economist Adam Smith, and focusing on later works by Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, Noble discusses the efforts to establish human contact as one of the hallmarks of sympathy. She states her central argument with characteristic concision and force: In their later works, authors of the 1850s and 1860s develop past the Romantic belief that human contact is predicated on penetrating or annihilating masks and social persons and instead understand contact as a matter of coessence…. Sympathy is a good means of experiencing human contact because it is an attitude of benevolent skepticism toward social persons, understanding others always as more and unfathomable, and caring about their being so. (16) Noble begins with examples of authors who in her view do not pursue this line of experiencing human contact. Neither Emerson nor Henry David Thoreau provide models of sympathy as Noble lays out their views. Even Walt Whitman, the prophet of adhesive love, “remains within the Transcendentalist sphere” in his impersonal approach to “human contact,” one of Noble's pervasively important concepts (69). Louisa May Alcott, however, “critically engages core values and assumptions of Transcendentalist thought, ultimately placing far more stock in sympathy for persons than do her Concord neighbors” (68).Noble establishes Hawthorne as a writer invested in human contact and sympathy. She strongly contrasts her reading with that of J. Hillis Miller, a fellow commentator on Hawthorne's great tale “The Minister's Black Veil.” Like other deconstructive critics, Noble states, Miller views the self as “an effect of language only…. [D]econstructive thinkers emphasize the pernicious effects of logocentric quests for essences of people and things and try to teach us to embrace life without presence” (91). It is through social relations rather than language that “human contact [is] conceivable” (92). Hooper, the titular minister, insists Puritanically on complete and full disclosure from “coherent and stable selves,” and that is his mistake and downfall (92). Similarly, Arthur Dimmesdale “idealizes naked self-disclosure as the key to feeling real” (95). The manipulative, self-serving Dimmesdale exposes a truth significant to full understanding of sympathy; as Noble points out, “Shared feelings are not necessarily ‘some true relation,’ not necessarily human contact” (100). Dimmesdale's manipulations of the crowd, his ability to lull them as he looks down on them from his pulpit, “erases all of the singularities of experience” and forecloses “meaningful connection” (101).About The House of the Seven Gables, which Hawthorne claimed was more reflective of his true disposition than The Scarlet Letter, Noble concludes that the author “champions a fixed moral law that commands us to respect the other's infinite and dynamic individuality” (113). Despite its unsatisfying happy ending, the novel persuasively foregrounds “contact as warmly inclusive care” (114). If critics such as Lauren Berlant in The Female Complaint contend that sentimentalism “overvalues empathic connections” (115), the Hawthorne of Gables offers an “unmistakable” critique of sentimentalism (117). He demonstrates that human contact and sympathy are distinguishable from sentimentalism by emphasizing “the ethics of emotional freedom within relational being” (115). Though Noble does not engage with queer theory (or, save for Whitman, with the question of sexuality, which some might find an inevitable dimension of human contact), her work stands in interesting contrast to the anti-social thesis developed in the works of Leo Bersani, Jack Halberstam, and especially Lee Edelman.To be sure, Noble recognizes limitations in Hawthorne's sympathy. “To Hawthorne,” she remarks, “black human beings are so different from white human beings that what it means to care for them is remarkably different from what it is for white human beings.” Hawthorne expresses genuine concern for the suffering of slaves and condemns the system of slavery, and “[y]et he cannot sympathize; he cannot valorize the complex and capable interiority of black people” because he views them as sense-defyingly helpless (121). While I do not dispute Noble's views of Hawthorne's limitations on Black subjectivity, I do believe that Hawthorne offered in his late unfinished work his most daring treatment of racial subjectivity; across different drafts, Hawthorne treats the multi-racial characters Septimius Felton/Norton and his Aunt Keziah/Nashoba both sympathetically and complexly, and Septimius is also drawn in a manner consistent with Hawthorne's longstanding analysis of gender and sexuality and the hazardous anxieties inherent in both.2The question of feeling remains germane in the next chapter, which focuses on Douglass. Noble notes that he “does not emphasize affects as the cornerstone of black humanity, recognizing that such a definition of the human does not argue for emancipation” (125). Douglass shares Hawthorne's views nevertheless: he “seeks for enslaved Americans the kind of sympathy that Hawthorne promotes for Hester and Hepzibah. [Douglass] too studied Common Sense philosophy and deemed sympathy important in moral reasoning” (124). Noble contends that in works such as Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave (1853), he implies that “whites will see beauty in blackness when black complexity and agency manage to appear in their perceptual frame” (157).Providing perhaps her most revelatory readings in the chapter on Stowe, Noble focuses, not on Stowe's most famous novel, but on Dred (1856) and The Minister's Wooing (1859). Personally, I felt deprived of Noble's insights into Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), but she may have felt that she covered this novel in her previous book, on sentimentalism and masochism. In any event, Noble is particularly thought-provoking in her discussions about female characters in Stowe's later works; she charts this writer's developing and evolving views on sentiment and sympathy, arguing that Dred is the last time that Stowe speaks in a self-appointed-advocate fashion for Black people. Instead, she explores individual agency especially on the part of strong female characters who “defend their right to erotic fulfilment” and “assert their own subjectivity and defend that of others” (197). Noble impressively concludes with a deft reading of Dickinson, one of the central contentions of which is that the poet, through the speaker in her poems, “abjures any notion that her performance expresses a true self” (232). Dickinson's “idea of sympathy requires sweet skepticism, which is to say, loving, caring faith embraced in the face of not knowing” (238).Noble has written a rigorous, eloquent, and stimulating study that will provoke renewed interest in sentimentalism as well as sympathy, the latter being a topic the critic notably enlarges and complicates with numerous implications for the former. Noble provides some of the best recent commentary on Stowe that I have come across. While this is a work I will undoubtedly return to for its voluminous insights and for its quietly, movingly passionate beliefs in the ethical good of sympathy, I do feel that it presents an overly homogenous view of the works and authors under study. The philosophical approach employed here goes a considerable way toward leading the reader to fresh insights. But it also leaves behind a lot of the messy, conflicted, unreconstructed, unassimilable furor of nineteenth-century American writings, an upstart national literature defiantly asserting itself on the world literary stage and doing so in a provocative, dramatic, heady hurry. Though Noble has very admiring things to say about Melville, she does not write about him at length here, and I believe that this decision is no accident. Melville's work reflects the kind of anarchic, at times even amoral, energies that Noble's paradigms repress. Similarly, while I do respect the critic's nuanced reading of Hawthorne, his works foreground not only a longing for human contact but also a deep-seated fear of the very same, especially pronounced, as I have argued, in the experience of being seen, which Hawthorne depicts as one of denuding and devastation. These negative affects are not hindrances toward a utopian formation of sympathetic community but discrete experiences of shame, rage, ambivalence, sorrow, and grief that cannot be contained by the overall model of sympathy. I mean to suggest, not that Noble is unaware of these dimensions of Hawthorne's work—far from it—but that she ultimately jettisons considerations of their key significance.Both studies give one much to consider about well-considered texts. They incite a hunger to revisit them and argue anew about their complexities and provocations. They also indicate that the nineteenth-century construct of the subject continues to demand analysis. For these reasons and many others, Blackwood and Noble make valuable Americanist contributions.