Sentimental Culture Research Articles

Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao

Reviewed by: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao Denise Wong (bio) Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Xine Yao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Ix + 291 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1483-6. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America marks an exciting turn in affect studies towards the radical affordances of unfeeling as a tactic of resistance. Xine Yao's debut monograph moves critical discussion beyond "the stifling imperatives of the political stakes of sympathy" to uncover "what we can apprehend" by "stay[ing] with the negativity of unfeeling and [End Page 105] suspend[ing] its rehabilitation" (3). Disaffection is both negative feeling and the negation of feeling as resistance but neither resolved nor subsumed by discourses of overcoming. It is a mode for understanding the extent to which cultural fantasies of justice and social change are contingent upon a politics of recognition and sympathy. Yao contends that the Western liberal project of inclusion demands sympathetic recognition and, though seemingly innocuous, presumes a false universality masking an insidious disparity between who gets to retain their subject status while refusing to feel. One of Yao's most generative provocations is her reading of sympathetic recognition as a colonial legacy originating in the culture of sentiment advanced by Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). She identifies four modes of disaffected unfeeling "in the cultural imagination deployed to flatten out and invalidate individual and collective subtleties" (6): unsympathetic Blackness, queer frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. Although Disaffected is concerned with how American literature and culture understands affect and politics, a paradigm with a disproportionately global impact, the scope of Yao's framework extends far beyond the geographic and historical specificity of her corpus which focuses on nineteenth-century fiction that "question[s] the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The primary texts include Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), Martin R. Delany's Blake; or the Huts of America (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Edith Maude Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). These writers "use the space of fiction to question the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The first two chapters explore unsympathetic Blackness as a mode of dissent from two contexts. In the first, the novella Benito Cereno illustrates how the false universality of white sentimentalism ensures that Babo, Melville's Senegalese slave-turned-rebel leader, remains an illegible and thus contemptible subject. Following philosophers Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter, Yao argues this falsely universal discourse of sentimentality is predicated upon racialised politics of recognition. In the second, Martin R. Delany's eponymous protagonist Blake rejects dominant white modes of feeling but, instead of being executed as an act of justice, he forms an alliance with the Indigenous community "to unmake the structural conditions of Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession that produce the modern world" (23). Borrowing Tiffany King's formulation, Yao reads "convergence without conflation" (73) in the way Blake "disrupt[s] the colonial dichotomization of Blackness and Indigeneity as antagonistic to each other" (77) by thinking through the historical and theoretical intersections of Black emancipation and Indigenous sovereignty. [End Page 106] The third chapter reads queer frigidity as a consequence of white middleclass women's entry into the medical profession. Yao takes Phelps's Doctor Zay as an example amidst a cluster of late nineteenth-century American novels which use the marriage plot to stage debates about the correlation between love and political desire for suffrage and other rights. The expectation for women to reappropriate "the masculinized authority of medical science's disciplinary detachment" (112) juxtaposes "the coercive affective imperatives of marriage and family" (25). Yao focuses compellingly on the homology between the invention of anaesthesia and the pathologisation and queering of female frigidity (diagnosed by sexologist Havelock Ellis as "a medical condition prevalent among women" [114]). Anaesthesia as a mechanism of controlled unfeeling for professional advancement parallels "the alleged abnormality of frigidity" (115) in the way detachment signifies agency...

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

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

Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts

Reviewed by: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts Christen Mucher (bio) Keywords Settler colonialism, Primordialism, Indigenous peoples, Print culture Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 292. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $37.50). Edward Watts’s Colonizing the Past is one of the first monographs to apply a settler-colonial analytic to the well-worn materials of early American myth-making. Spanning U.S. literary production from 1780 to 1915, the book is a dazzling survey of the literary construct of “primordialism”— that is, “white fantasies” of the pre-Columbian past that seek to provide U.S. citizens with a whitened ancient history by displacing Indigenous pasts (4, 76). Watts divides his work into five case studies of primordialism, each of which “diminish Indians”: the myths of Welsh Indians, Lost Tribes, Mound Builders, ancient Irish colonists, and the Vikings and Normans of the Norse Revival (7). His texts range from novels and newspaper articles to poetic epics, tracing the iconic primordial figures over the long century. In the tradition of classic American studies per Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, Watts places print culture within its specific historical context while also, in the style of Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, John Carlos Rowe, and Amy Kaplan, attending to literary history as a vector of imperial violence.1 Colonizing the Past does not [End Page 491] merely assert that the narratives of “primordial whites” were connected to nation-building: It shows how they were central to it. Watts’s attempt to understand the tangle of racialization, white identity, and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century print culture is a clear, compelling, and original reading of familiar as well as non-canonical texts that “reveals the moral and racial precariousness of the settler nation” (46). While notable recent scholarship has focused on Watts’s broad subject, none has situated the production of ancient pasts in the paradigm of white supremacy and settler triumphalism as clearly and insistently as Watts has here.2 In the connections he draws between marginal texts and canonical writers, Watts also makes clear that the power of primordialism was not confined to the pens of “western” writers or removal apologists. Moreover, Watts’s deep knowledge of the print culture of the early republic and antebellum eras translates into a fascinating and useful guide to U.S. literary history. Watts’s first chapter provides a superb survey of writings on Welsh Indians, by which Watts also displays his unparalleled knowledge of the literary history of early America. Chapter 2 includes a particularly skilled reading of Lydia Sigourney’s 1822 poem Traits of the Aborigines in America and the culture of sentiment, intriguingly casting the New England writer’s anti-removal campaign as motivated not by the abhorrence of violence but rather by millennialism (75, 72). The third chapter is likewise noteworthy for its refreshing reevaluation of the “Mound Builder myth,” [End Page 492] which Watts frames in terms of the rise of industrialism and struggle over western and southern markets. Additionally, his analyses of colonialism and transatlantic folk and nationalist movements provide a thought-provoking reorientation for the immigration debates and anti-Catholic nativism of the mid-nineteenth century. Colonizing the Past is admirable in its forceful assessment of settler triumphalism—Watts boldly indicts, for example, the “genocidal print culture of Jacksonian America”—and for avoiding euphemism or under-statement (94). One of its most compelling, if subtle, arguments is that much of early nineteenth-century literary culture was engaged in developing “fiction[s] of absolution” to excuse white settlers from the theft and murder that enabled U.S. national settlement on Indigenous lands (46, 91, 128). Indeed, the book’s major contribution to the field is its clear-eyed attention to the operations of whiteness, and to the entanglement of racialization and settler colonialism. Moreover, it provides an accessible introduction to settler-colonial theory and delivers a compelling argument for the theory’s applicability to early American literature. The Atlantic orientation of the book, however, is a limitation that frequently led Watts to postcolonial...

남북전쟁 이전 흑인소설과 가정성의 국외 연구동향

This paper surveys recent studies in antebellum African American novels and theories on 19th century domesticity. Early canonization of 19th century American literature focused on novels written by white male writers. Particularly, in the 1950s, while establishing an American exceptionalist view of American culture, critics tried to invoke certain myths to define the American experience. White feminist critics of the late 1970s and 1980s have opposed to this male-dominant narrative that had been detached from specific socio-economic conditions of the literary sphere and reinstated the neglected works by white female writers into the literary canon. In this process, critical issues such as the problem of sympathetic identification in sentimental culture and the definition of woman and womanhood have come under scrutiny. In the recent scholarship, the notion of womanhood and domesticity have been reexamined, especially by black critical theory. In work done by Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, Claudia Tate, and Robert Reid-Pharr, domesticity has been redefined by a process in which subjects are constructed by both race and gender. Domesticity, in the historical context of chattel slavery, was used to protect white genealogy and property rights while subjugating slaves marked by their raced corporeality. In this regard, literary representations of motherhood, womanhood, marriage, and family have had different political implications in African American novels. In particular, the African American novels written by William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Martin Delany, and Harriet Wilson in the 1850s grapple with the literary representation of domesticity in relation to the question of slavery, black subjectivity, and the possibility of black citizenship.

Giulia Frasi: Singer of Sentiment

Abstract Handel and his artistic collaborators worked in an age that prized the moral potential of emotion, particularly as mobilized in artistic representation. From weeping comedies and moving she-tragedies on the English stage to sentimental novels in the private closet and even powerfully moving sermons from the nation’s pulpits, eighteenth-century audiences received a constant onslaught of emotionally charged rhetoric that aimed at inspiring virtue. This article provides several examples of how Handel’s music, particularly his works of the 1740s and 1750s, operated within this contemporary culture of sentiment; it uses the career of Handel’s last leading lady, Giulia Frasi (fl. 1742–72), as an illustration of the nexus between these ethical-aesthetic trends, Handel’s musical works, and this singer’s career. Examination of Frasi’s musical education, the works that she performed, and her public persona shows that she cultivated a place in the culture of sentiment, both on and off the stage.

Feline Alter Egos in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” and the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

This paper focuses on the role of the feline in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Circumstance” and three poems by Emily Dickinson (F529, F444, and F1064). In these texts, the feline becomes an alter ego for the woman writer, leading her to reflect upon her status as a female artist in the nineteenth century in connection to the sentimental culture of the time and to issues such as race, violence and power. At once me and not-me, the feline is racialized in the two writers’ works, and its function is akin to that of the “Africanist other” as defined by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. When the female self is in the claws of the feline, or compared to the feline, she grapples with multiple snares as her voice is entangled within the contradictory impulses she strives to negotiate. Singing from this nest of snares, the female voice that we hear in these texts showcases the complexity, elusiveness and protean capacity of identification of female writers in the nineteenth-century American literary landscape.

Moving Fortunes: Caribbean Women’s Marriage, Mobility, and Money in the Novel of Sentiment

A focus on the marriages of Caribbean heiresses to Englishmen in the novel of sentiment sheds light on a broader cultural impulse to discharge the tension between imperial acquisitiveness and sentimental culture. In these novels, Caribbean wealth is easily assimilated into English society, but the woman who provides a conduit to that wealth is contained outside of English domestic space. This exclusion of the Caribbean woman also excludes the stigma attached to the money’s origins in chattel slavery. Meanwhile, the plot attributes the woman’s exclusion to circumstances that are inevitable, thus licensing the novel to remove the reminder of the source of Caribbean wealth. Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), the anonymous The Woman of Colour (1808), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) illustrate this trajectory. Focusing on this plot uncovers the novel of sentiment’s attempt to resolve the tension between an imperial culture’s desire to benefit from Caribbean colonization and a sentimental culture’s desire to see itself as sympathetic to others’ suffering.

Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley

Reviewed by: Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley Kate Silbert (bio) KEY WORDS Susanna Rowson, American literature, American theater, Religion, Christianity, Hebrew Bible, Old Testament Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature. By Steven Epley. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Pp. 240. Paper, $34.95.) Susanna Rowson has commanded remarkable longevity within early American scholarship. Known first as a first herself—early actor and playwright on the American stage, writer of the nation’s first best-selling novel, and pioneer of women’s education—Rowson’s lifetime of transatlantic experiences, varied occupations, and diverse written works have continued to captivate historians of the early republic as well as literary critics. Scholars initially portrayed Rowson as an exception: the rare woman active and acclaimed in the early American public sphere. More [End Page 704] recent work, particularly Marion Rust’s deftly composed Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women, instead has framed the author and educator as a telling embodiment of the era’s gendered contradictions, one of many highly literate white women navigating the narrow channel of female empowerment and submission set forth by the “paternalistic social and political entity” of the early republic.1 Steven Epley’s Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature calls attention to another aspect of this prolific figure and her work: her sustained engagement with religious ideas, most especially those of the Old Testament. The intellectual possibilities signaled in Epley’s title—of casting Rowson as “sentimental prophet”—are tantalizing. How might she have drawn, in equal measure, on the eighteenth century’s transatlantic culture of sentiment, that era’s volatile sparks of prophecy and revivalism, and the longer tradition of prophetic biblical literature? What would such an interweaving of rhetorical modes have meant to her early American readers, themselves immersed in, or at least aware of, each of these traditions? And how might such a framework productively refresh scholarly thinking on the origins of American literature, the rise of the novel, or the gendered prescriptions of authorship? Epley, though, elects a different focus than his provocative title suggests. A literary critic with an intricate knowledge of Judeo–Christian theology, he selects a portion of Rowson’s works through which to explore hesed, the concept of covenantal loyalty laid out in Hebrew scripture. Deploying an approach that “blends religious studies, biblical hermeneutics, feminism, and literary analysis,” Epley argues that one can read in Rowson a greater engagement with themes of loyalty, obedience, and steadfast love—values he ascribes primarily to the book of Deuteronomy—than with the spiritual conversion narratives often associated with Christianity (31). Thus, the moral failing at the core of Charlotte Temple, Rowson’s most famous work and the text that Epley analyzes most extensively, is not the unmarried title character’s sexual transgressions, but the disloyalty she commits toward her parents in choosing to leave school and run away with her seducer in the first place. At the novel’s conclusion, the restoration of the covenantal relationship [End Page 705] between Charlotte and her parents, however brief, signifies God’s steadfast love for his chosen people; even with Charlotte’s death, her parents extend the promise of future blessings to her newborn daughter Lucy, just as God renews covenant with Israel. In addition to Charlotte Temple, Epley brings his framework to bear on Rowson’s Biblical Dialogues, a scriptural paraphrase; Reuben and Rachel, a historical novel set in North America; Lucy Temple, the posthumously published sequel to her bestselling work; and, to a lesser extent, the provocative stage drama Slaves in Algiers. Despite the absence of historical methodology in Epley’s approach, his work nonetheless makes claims about the past, and it is here, for a historically minded reader, that the project founders. At issue, to be clear, is not a literary critic seeking to contribute to historical scholarship, nor one choosing not to do so. The problem is in predicating a historical interpretation on a scholarly reading that includes neither robust engagement with current historiography nor substantial archival research. In the work under discussion, the most jarring of these historical assertions is two-fold: If Rowson, a “pioneer of Christian...

Hawthorne's Gifts: Re-reading “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in The Token

The essay recasts Hawthorne's tales, “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in the gift book, The Token, or Atlantic Souvenir where they were first published. Reading the tales alongside the neighboring entries, it seeks to show how Hawthorne's understanding of his own literary gift developed against the sentimental publishing culture of the 1830s.

The Global Village of the Damned: A Counter-Narrative for the Post-War Child

John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and the films it engendered ( Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned ) represent the Child as both the post-World War II promise of a new global community and the very threat that such a promise entailed. These Children are seemingly without race, class, or even gender, and possess preternatural intelligence with the ability for unfettered communication among the other children of their kind. While such racially and nationally transcendent self-possession was the basis for the dream of post-war global harmony, it also constitutes in the Children of Midwich the threat of global annihilation. As such, these counterfeit Children sustain an exploration of post-war childhood, its theoretical underpinnings, and the contesting narratives necessary to make “childhood” signify as a human category in the twentieth century: they produce a range of contesting narratives as to what the Child might mean, and what it might have meant within the new globalizing forces following the Second World War. These contesting narratives, I maintain, both depend upon the masterplot of the Child as our sentimental culture imagines it, and interrupt that masterplot to make of the Child a dangerous and fatal force. As our Children run askew, they become a counter-fit to the sentimental, political narrative, signifying instead the more primitive, psychoanalytic narrative of death’s inexorable drive.

The Puzzle of Nonviolence in Western Sahara

ABSTRACTWestern Sahara, a former Spanish colony that has been controlled by Morocco since 1975, has seen virtually no violent resistance by the indigenous Sahrawi people since the conclusion of a 1975–1991 war between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front. That lack of political violence is puzzling in light of several factors, including broad support for independence, socio-economic disparities between Moroccan and Sahrawi inhabitants and Morocco’s repression of Sahrawi culture, resistance, and expressions of pro-independence sentiment. This article examines the absence of violence and draws lessons from Western Sahara: why some populations resort to violent resistance and others do not, and how best to frame and to study politically charged subjects such as insurgency, terrorism, and sovereignty. In addition to advancing theories of nonviolence, this article makes a methodological contribution to the study of resistance movements and improves our understanding of the conflict through fieldwork that included approximately 60 interviews with Sahrawi activists conducted in Morocco and Western Sahara. Western Sahara is difficult to study for a number of reasons, including its remoteness, relative international obscurity, and Moroccan suppression of dissenting research.

The Quarrel Forgotten?: Toward a Clearer Understanding of Sectional Reconciliation

Americans slaughtered one another in horrific numbers in the 1860s. According to the most recent estimate, at least 750,000 soldiers may have perished in the Civil War, while perhaps 50,000 noncombatants died indirectly as a result of military operations. (1) Yet by the end of the nineteenth century President William McKinley, a Union veteran from Ohio, was able to tour the reunited republic hailing the restored amity that supposedly prevailed between the erstwhile warring sections. In December 1898 he told spectators at a peace jubilee in Atlanta, Georgia, that it was time the U.S. government accepted responsibility for care of the southern dead-men who had given their lives to destroy the country he loved. Fifteen years later, a Virginia-born president, Woodrow Wilson, journeyed to Gettysburg, site of the most famous Federal victory of the war, to tell an audience of veterans and civilians that Americans had found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten-except that we shall not forget the splendid valour, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes. (2) This essay reviews a range of modern scholarship on the tangled process of sectional reconciliation-a process that greatly assisted the United States' emergence as a great power by reducing persistent and divisive internal tensions after the carnage of the Civil War. It contends that while historians such as Nina Silber and David W. Blight have been right to pinpoint construction of a sentimental culture of reconciliation as a primary source of North-South amity, their influential studies unwittingly conceal the persistence of smoldering wartime hatreds and tenacious partisan allegiances built on perpetuation of those animosities. During a period dominated socially, politically, and culturally by men and women who had experienced the turmoil of the Civil War era, sectional memories-northern as well as southern-countered and sometimes trumped the gushing rhetoric of nationalist politicians. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, most Americans certainly thought of one another as compatriots. However, the formidable strength of Civil War remembrance made the process by which they came to that conclusion both complex and uneven. The first modern scholar to sense that reconciliation between Americans was a genuine historical problem rather than an inevitable attainment requiring no explanation was Harvard professor Paul H. Buck, whose book The Road to Reunion 1865-1900 was published in 1937. (3) Born in 1899, Buck was himself a product of sectional reconciliation who regarded it as one of America's noblest achievements. Acknowledging that considerable animus existed on both sides after Appomattox, he charted the damaging impact of Reconstruction on sectional relations before explaining the rapid growth of reconciliatory forces primarily in terms of the development of a national market, the rise of a sentimental literary culture, the decline of sectionalism in mainstream politics, and a burgeoning soldiers' reunion in which ordinarily the mass of veterans on each side accepted an easy camaraderie. Although Buck noted the determination of politicians, especially northern Republicans, to sustain sectional hostility for selfish political purposes in the 1880s, he contended that reconciliation was virtually complete by 1898, when northerners and southerners joined forces once again to fight against Spain. Blacks, he conceded, were the losers from this process (he devoted several pages to the failure of federal voting rights enforcement) but he voiced no criticism of his fellow northerners' decision to accept racial segregation as part of the postwar settlement. Optimistically, he told readers that Jim Crow had permitted a degree of peace between North and South hitherto unknown, gave to the South the stability of race relations necessary to reconcile her to the re-united nation, and gave to the Negro a chance to live and to take the first step of progress. …

Garden Variety: Botany and Multiplicity in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Abolitionism

This essay, by paying attention to botanical language, reveals how Stowe's environmental sensibility affects her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. The theories of plant growth and vitality she draws on as her career develops refute the strict classification and cultivation practices associated with slavery, disrupting the logic used to segregate humans from each other and from the environment. Stowe's characterization of plants reframes our understanding of the relationship between antebellum science and sentimental culture, and upends the essentialist approach to nature by which many ethnologists classified race. Stowe comes to emphasize nature's mutability and interconnectedness, and invites her readers to consider human nature as part of this dynamic natural order.

Arbitration in Love

This article aims to address the Arbitration theme in Love. This theme will address the arbitration in loving side, according to the conflicts we experience in our daily lives, connected to our living and feeling for someone.We concluded that arbitration in love will always be influenced and dependent on the behavior and sentiment of the parties involved and the cultural context it appears as resolution method of loving conflicts or as a means of resolving emotional problems resulting from unrequited love, given that the will of one or both parties as well as the way they manifest depends on its sentimental culture which is also influenced by their cultural background.

From Amelia to Calista and Beyond: Sentimental Heroines, ‘Fallen’ Women and Handel’s Oratorio Revisions for Susanna Cibber

AbstractThe history of singer and famed tragedienne Susanna Cibber (1714–66) demonstrates the influences of the British theatre and the culture of sentiment on Handel’s oratorios. Throughout Cibber’s long career, audiences lauded the ‘natural’ qualities of her performances, conflating her onstage and offstage identities as both deeply moving and holding great potential for moral instruction. In the late 1730s and early 1740s this presumed symbiosis was challenged by a highly publicised sex scandal that had profound effects on Cibber’s roles in the spoken theatre. At the same moment, Handel began crafting parts for Cibber inMessiah,Samson,HerculesandBelshazzarin ways that showed awareness of the new complexity of her image. This article both illustrates the nature of Cibber’s evolving public identity and explains Handel’s revisions of pre-existing parts for her. It shows that Handel recognised the challenges of Cibber’s troubled public image and continued to highlight her greatest skills, setting her the task of harnessing the power of sympathy, drawing audiences in by appealing to them as fellow men and women of sensibility.

A Model Heart: Public Displays of Emotion in Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale

A Model Heart: Public Displays of Emotion in Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale Catherine Q. Forsa (bio) Catharine Maria Sedgwick was an affect theorist. This description may seem surprising given a tradition of criticism situating her as a religious reformer in which her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), is typically read as an attack on Calvinism. But religion comprises only one part of Sedgwick’s didactic novel. It gives “social virtues” as much attention as religious virtue in presenting emotions as powerful social tools.1 The novel’s heroine, Jane Elton, elevates her position within her New England town by displaying emotions in ways that others admire. Yet, despite the importance of emotions in the novel, this aspect remains mostly unexamined, perhaps because Sedgwick’s message deviates from a well-documented tradition in nineteenth-century women’s writing, especially in the sentimental novel, that encouraged women to cultivate emotions such as sympathy, compassion, and love. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous direction in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to “feel right” exemplifies this tradition in urging readers to show sympathy to others.2 This direction reflects a contemporaneous “culture of sentiment,” which celebrated feelings that signaled selflessness.3 Writing when this culture was developing, Sedgwick explores the complexity of feelings.4 She encourages readers to espouse emotions such as sympathy, [End Page 411] but she also shows how it is impossible to always “feel right” and to always be selfless. Her heroine often feels the “wrong” emotions such as anger and pride that do not facilitate sympathetic bonds; however, she appears to “feel right.” In making this distinction, Sedgwick describes the nature of emotions as having a split, two-part structure with interior, automatic, corporeal responses that are separate from exterior, controllable, social expressions. She introduces this model in the novel and then develops it in a series of conduct manuals published from 1822 through the 1840s.5 In understanding how emotions animate, readers could manage their expressions of emotion and ultimately use them, as Jane does, to improve their reputations. While this advice on social advancement may be expected from conduct books, Sedgwick also features this compelling prescriptive theory in her early novel A New-England Tale. I argue that emotions—and not more traditional means such as wealth—emerge as a major reason for characters’ changes in social position. Jane, Bet, and Mrs. Wilson feel many of the same emotions, including anger, pride, grief, and sympathy, but only Jane’s expressions signal selflessness and self-possession, qualities that her neighbors value. And only Jane gains respect. Her expressions, and not her actual feelings, are integral to her rise in position. In one example that illustrates this model, Jane explains how she chooses which emotions to display. Speaking with her friend Mary Hull, she shares that she often feels anger, an emotion inconsistent with “feeling right.” She becomes aware of this emotion by feeling her “temper rising” within her body, and, although she cannot prevent it, she can manage it and conceal it from others.6 In one strategy, she diverts her attention from the anger. She regularly practices other ways to “restrain” certain emotions. For example, “Jane was making a strong mental effort to subdue that longing after liberty, that lurks in every heart. Habitual discipline had rendered it comparatively easy for her to restrain her wishes” (NET, 63–64). Then, she [End Page 412] explains, “I sometimes feel the rising of a pride in my heart,” but she takes measures to appear humble (NET, 64). In each case, Jane’s appearance matters most, as Mary admires how Jane presents herself, believing her emotions to be markers of good character. Mary’s reaction underscores how emotions are not epiphenomenal but rather have a pragmatic, social function. This function can be illuminated in examining contemporary affect theory. Originating in the body and occurring independently of thought, Jane’s anger and pride are corporeal and automatic. For contemporary theorist Brian Massumi, affect has an “irreducibly bodily and automatic nature.”7 It is an “intensity” that is “embodied in purely automatic reactions most directly manifested at the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things.” 8...

Class Sentiments: Putting the Emotion Back in Working-Class History

The article argues that the unstable emotional cultures of nineteenth-century America can help explain the dynamic labor conflicts of the century. Further, it argues that the Civil War, and the strike waves of the postbellum period, be considered emotional revolutions. Drawing on examples from the history of enslavement, and the discourse surrounding wage labor strikes, particularly the Homestead strike, the article shows how workers in different settings, used their emotions to guide themselves toward the emotional liberty promised by the American Revolution. Enslaved people faced a remarkably restrictive regime, but the combination of the emotional refuge of the quarters, and the opportunities provided by sentimental culture, fuelled a resistance movement. Northern workers, who faced a regime less restrictive than twentieth-century wage workers would encounter, similarly relied on the interplay between sentimental emotional ideas and their more tempestuous emotional culture to mount a protest movement. Both movements relied on anger, but one difference was that middle-class northerners were less receptive to waged workers’ anger than they had been to enslaved anger. The article concludes by suggesting that emotions should be integrated more fully into discussions of class politics in history more broadly, with greater analysis of how emotional regimes, communities, and resistance movements, evolve along with the political economy.

Drowning (in) Kittens: The Reproduction of Girlhood in Victorian America

Following Donna Haraway’s concept of the “killable” animal in When Species Meet, this essay looks at the social conditions and literary conventions that render ostensibly “priceless” objects, like pets and children, disposable in the Victorian period. Through the Victorian trope of the drowned kitten, Barnes shows how sentimental culture’s alternative “economy of feeling” colludes with, rather than opposes, a market economy chiefly concerned with reducing populations. The essay’s primary example is the female bildungsroman, where anxieties over female biological reproduction are obscured by the reproduction of an idea of the generic, iterable, and ultimately “killable” girl.

Twentieth-Anniversary Reflections on <em>The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America</em> edited by Shirley Samuels

Twentieth-Anniversary Reflections on <em>The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America</em> edited by Shirley Samuels

David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Logic of Sentimental Terror

This essay departs from the scholarly tradition that equates black violence with revolutionary selfhood in order to return to the rhetoric of terror that is so emblematic of Walker’s Appeal . By situating slave rebellion within an eschatological framework (and not a revolutionary one) and insisting that acts of insurrection were part of apocalyptic prophecy in which God commissions violent retribution against slaveholders, Walker attempts in the Appeal to inspire a profound sense of fear that would motivate Southern readers to take action against slavery. Indeed, fear operates as a powerful organizing sentiment in Walker’s text, and the strategic deployment of apocalyptic terror is central to the political and ethical interventions it undertakes. Surprisingly, this particular use of terror aligns Walker’s text with an unexpected tradition: sentimentality. In fact, as I will argue, the Appeal is a foundational text within a particular style of nineteenth-century sentimentality that is rooted in the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening and that emphasizes fear as an essential affective dimension of moral reform. Scholars who take for granted that nineteenth-century sentimentalism is based exclusively on sympathetic love and compassion or who maintain that the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition grows solely out of the Scottish Enlightenment and as such is antagonistic to Calvinism, overlook sentimentalism’s indebtedness to early nineteenth-century Calvinist ideas. Within the nineteenth-century culture of sentiment, Calvinist warnings of apocalypse were used to accomplish many of the same reform goals that love and compassion were meant to achieve, including the inducement of sympathy, the breakdown of social hierarchies, the intensification of familial bonds, and, in the case of antislavery writing, the humanization of Negro slaves. I read Walker’s Appeal , then, as an influential prototype for later sentimental writers working within an abolitionist context whose accounts of sentimentality are as dedicated to apocalyptic fear as they are to sympathetic Christian love.