Sentimental Heroine Research Articles

Intimations of Infanticide in Little Women

Abstract: This article reads Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) against nineteenth-century mothering manuals and the psychoanalytic object-relations theory to argue that the novel links maternal rage with infanticide. Feminist scholars have noted how Little Women , though ostensibly a story of family harmony, conceals a deep vein of anger. Jo March's trajectory, like that of other nineteenth-century sentimental heroines, stages a transformation from rebellious tomboy to self-controlled angel-in-the-house. Attending to the ways in which the text persistently links anger to infanticide, this article shows how the idealized angel-in-the-house functioned as an idealized solution to guard against the imagined dangers of female rage. Moreover, the binary between angel mothers and infanticidal ones was inflected with racial meaning that served to distinguish who was and wasn't included under the umbrella of national belonging. In recovering the spectre of infanticide subtending Little Women , this article asks us to re-evaluate the ways that cultural texts transmitted messages about love and rage and the political implications of how such relationships to affect determined the lives and developmental trajectories of children.

George Anne Bellamy as Self-Fashioned Sentimental Heroine

ABSTRACT Unlike popular actresses of the period who aligned themselves with virtuous femininity through close association with the socially condoned roles of wife and mother, George Anne Bellamy refused to rely on images of palatable domestic femininity to validate her place in the public sphere. Examining the unique portrayal of Bellamy in the periodical press as neither entirely virtuous nor completely immoral, this article proposes that she used her memoir as a publicity tool to refashion her public image and emphasize the legitimacy of her place in the public sphere on her own terms. Looking particularly at the relationship between her Apology and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), it explores the ways in which Bellamy characterized herself as a sentimental heroine. Drawing on the image of the sentimental heroine allowed her to align herself with other, more well-established and generally accepted avenues of female social participation for working women in the public sphere.

Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment

Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment

The Emancipation of Feminine Roles in Puccini’s Creation

The heroines represented in the operas of Giacomo Puccini often show diverse typologies of women, built during the 19th and the 20th centuries. The researches regarding the Puccini’s operas generally focus on a single category of feminine characters, the so-called ‘heroines of Puccini’. Starting from this finding, we wish to provide a different approach – a more original one, to include a comparative analysis of the heroine of Puccini typologies. The method proposed in this article is based on the analysis of the Puccini feminine characters in three distinct categories (the sentimental heroine, the fatal heroine, and the modern heroine) in a dynamic way. Some feminine characters are noted as evolving even within the same opera, reaching emancipation or a transformation until the end of the opera; consequently, they can be placed into two or three categories that define them.

Uncle Tom's (Ship) Cabin

Uncle Tom's (Ship) Cabin Cynthia Alicia Smith (bio) In Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life among the Lowly (1852), there are several curious, largely unexamined moments when Tom figures as a sailor. He assists the steamboat mariners with their labor, rescues Eva when she falls into the river, and is variously described as an "Italian sailor," a "mariner shipwrecked," and a "half-drowned mariner."1 Nineteenth-century readers and artists noticed such associations, so why have scholars missed this dimension of the novel?2 The absence of critical consideration of Stowe's maritime references may have to do with the way scholars understand Tom's relation to domestic fiction. Stowe's enslaved hero is known for exhibiting the traits of a nineteenth-century heroine through his "gentle, pious, chaste, domestic, long-suffering and self-sacrificing" nature.3 This feminization allows contemporary readers to resolve the tensions that arise from depicting a black male protagonist through sentimental characteristics.4 However, there is more than one sentimental tradition in Uncle Tom's Cabin. References to Tom as a sailor show that Stowe also used maritime sentimentalism. Stowe became familiar with maritime culture through her uncle, Samuel Foote, a sea captain who brought home nautical tales to his relatives, including his favorite niece, Harriet.5 In her [End Page 47] famous novel Stowe rewrites one prominent character from antebellum sea narratives: the "sentimental sailor," a figure who also appears in various nineteenth-century genres. Rescuing those in physical peril, the sentimental sailor—a name I take from Thomas Mercer's eponymous 1772 poem—converted others to the golden rule and advocated liberty, charity, generosity, and kinship. For example, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1826 short story "The Chivalric Sailor" chronicles the adventures of Frank Stuart, a heroic Christian sailor who rescues the distressed, particularly Perdita, a young British noblewoman who is forced to work in a Maryland sea captain's scullery.6 When Stuart hears about Perdita's predicament, he smuggles her aboard a British-bound ship and hides her throughout their journey across the Atlantic. Stuart's nautical prowess and charitable deeds enable Perdita to gain her freedom upon their arrival in England. Many years later when Stuart becomes a privateer for John Paul Jones during the American Revolution, he ends up rescuing Perdita again. Stuart's vessel captures a British ship that Perdita is on, and he safely brings her home. Shortly after this incident, Perdita's husband repays Stuart for his deeds by saving him from the British navy. Thus, Sedgwick emphasizes how the sentimental sailor's rescues surpass even conflicts among nations. Like Sedgwick, many antebellum writers used sentimental sailors to promote nonnational forms of personal and collective identity.7 The conversions that these sailors' rescues prompted acquired multiple meanings: while the sentimental sailor in religious tracts evangelized the rescued to Christianity, writers who advocated for humanitarian issues used the sentimental sailor to enlist readers' support for abolition and mariners' rights. Although the sentimental sailor rose alongside sentimental literature in early America, literary critics have essentially ignored these heroic mariners, partly because scholars have defined nineteenth-century sentimentalism through the passive heroines of domestic [End Page 48] literature who promote religious conversion within the home. Yet recovering the sentimental sailor reveals that the maritime world also had a sentimental literary tradition, one that contradicted the sentimental heroine's nationalist goals by encouraging readers to adopt humanist values and see beyond their communities' cultural prejudices. Although sentimentalism prototypically incites sympathy, nineteenth-century sentimental texts have nationalist and imperialist tendencies. Amy Kaplan notes that domesticity is an "ambiguous liminal realm between the national and the foreign" and that the ship, a mobile domestic sphere, situates the ocean as an imperialist space.8 Yet Kaplan's focus on the woman's sphere and domesticity as a nationalist force does not acknowledge maritime sentimentalism. While ships are indeed domestic spaces, they represent a different type of social geography from houses because ships combine both the public and private spheres. Maritime sentimentalism, then, presents an alternative sentimental tradition that encodes an international perspective as well as nationalism and imperialism. The sentimental sailor's popularity indicates Americans' deep cultural awareness that creating an empire is...

Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 252.

<i>Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example</i>. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 252.

Seduction's Offspring: Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells

Seduction's Offspring:Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells Sarah Sillin (bio) The story of American sentimentalism is one of literary bequest, wherein eighteenth-century seduction novels passed an aesthetic legacy down to nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Both pervasive genres relate stories about the need for American girls to restrain their passions and feel for others, punctuated by thick descriptions of characters' affect. Given this shared emphasis on how feeling shapes local and national communities, critics often interrogate sentimentalism's politics. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins famously debated whether the mode's valorization of suffering and sympathy proves conservative or progressive.1 Further, critics have explored the political stakes of sentimentalism's turn from seduction novels to domestic fiction and what that turn suggests about American culture. Does the shift from seduction novels' unruly desire to domestic fiction's well-regulated sympathy signal that women were gaining power to foster national cohesion (Baym)? Or did antebellum fiction perpetuate demands that women subordinate their own desires to serve the community (Barnes)? Meanwhile, Laura Romero argued that sentimental texts often integrate "radical" views (for instance, on gender or class) with "reactionary" stances (say, on race); thus, we would do well to consider how sentimentalism's turn affected various groups, such as white and black women, in disparate ways (4). In response to these uneven effects, a number of nineteenth-century writers entwine conventions of both genres to offer divergent views on sentimentalism's legacy.2 This essay argues that tensions in sentimentalism proved generative for nineteenth-century African American women writers who rethink familiar portraits of the shift from the seduction plot to domestic fiction. Prior scholarship elucidates how African American writers blend genres to create space for black voices. Slave narratives often play on sentimental conventions to claim authority for and direct readers' sympathy to enslaved peoples (F. Foster; Carby). Likewise, midcentury African American novels interweave autobiography and fiction to question whose discourse readers recognize as authentic (Andrews 24). We can see this engagement with slave narratives and sentimentalism in one of the first novels by an African American woman: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Scholars demonstrate that Wilson draws on sentimental conventions as rewritten in slave narratives (Carby 45) to fictionalize elements of her own life via a protagonist who resembles sentimental heroines and enslaved women (Peterson). Wilson found that the "sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings" of "white sentimental novels," "did not match [her] … constant struggle" (Gates and Wilson lix). In other words, she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls postsentimentalism: work that rethinks the mode's conventions by refusing to sublimate "subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy" (655). Sentimentalism often conflates all forms of pain and then redirects sympathy toward the privileged (Berlant 641). In contrast, Wilson questions whether powerful white women merit sympathy, given that claims of white moral sensibility mask antiblack violence. Beyond suggesting that the critiques that would define postsentimentalism emerged alongside sentimentalism, Wilson demonstrates that comedy can play a [End Page 277] vital role in such affective resistance. By entwining sentimental conventions with humor, she unsettles this mode's fantasy that benevolence superseded intemperate feeling. Nina Baym argues that antebellum writers of "woman's fiction" rejected sentimentalism that expressed "private, excessive, undisciplined, self-centered emotionality" (as in the seduction novel), while celebrating sentimentalism that reflected "Enlightenment advocacy of philanthropy and benevolence" (xxix, xxx). Wilson, however, satirizes these forms for their shared narratives of white feminine virtue that obscure African Americans' pleasure and pain.3 The white fallen woman's desires foster violence, rendering her undeserving of sympathy; Wilson invites readers to identify instead with her irreverently funny African American protagonist.4 Although antebellum culture valorized well-regulated sympathy, the illicit desires of the seduction plot did not dwindle away; instead, they became a nest egg, accruing interest in the domestic sphere.5 Wilson suggests that the white fallen woman and republican mother spend their unruly feelings in violent displays of power as they project their sins onto an African American girl. This rewriting elucidates a criticism that African American writers would level at sentimentalism across the nineteenth century: the...

Tender is the Night &amp; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities by Chris Messenger

Reviewed by: Tender is the Night & F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities by Chris Messenger Sunny Stalter-Pace Tender is the Night & F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities. By Chris Messenger. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. xi, 281 pp. $59.95. ISBN 78-0-8173-1853-6. I write this review in Montgomery, a little more than two miles away from the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum. Though the couple was notably nomadic, the museum resides in what was the Fitzgerald home for a brief time in 1931 and 1932. This was a period of dramatic transition for the Fitzgeralds: they returned to America in part because Scott had been invited to write for Hollywood, but then Zelda's father died and her unstable mental condition worsened markedly. She was moved to Johns Hopkins for treatment; after staying behind in Montgomery briefly, Scott took up residence north of Baltimore in a house called La Paix. This was also a particularly fruitful artistic period for the couple: Zelda wrote her novel, Save Me the Waltz, while Scott began the final version of his much-revised manuscript for Tender is the Night. Chris Messenger reads Tender is the Night in part as the outcome of Scott's immediate struggles with Zelda, both as a patient and as a fellow author. These intersect with and complicate his reckoning with longer-term family dynamics in his work. Throughout the [End Page 91] monograph, Messenger interweaves his biographical arguments with psychoanalytic and cultural ones. In this way, he comes up with occasionally frustrating, but always interesting, claims about Dick Diver as the nurturing but troubled center of Tender, his wife/patient Nicole, and the expatriate characters who move through their lives. But this is not merely a biographical reading of the novel. Messenger has written an ambitious and playful analysis of Tender is the Night as a vehicle for F. Scott Fitzgerald to work through his thoughts about feeling. Messenger calls him "the most accomplished and also most self-conscious sentimentalist in literary modernism" (p. 211). This is a particularly fraught topic for Fitzgerald as a male modernist writer, since sentiment and the sentimental were both rejected in that era due to their associations with Victorian moralism, particularly that of woman writers from the prior period. Sentiment is a deployed in this book as a way of thinking about the emotional connections among characters, the author, and the audience. As Messenger moves back and forth between biographical and literary analysis, he shows how Tender is the Night recombines Fitzgerald's own emotional affiliations in order to explore those of his central characters in a more complex way. The book is laid out in three sections. Part I, Identities, looks at Dick Diver's interpersonal relations in the novel in terms of characters' management of sentimental attachments. In Chapter 1, we see how different scenes in the book foster a felt connection among people that is constructed but still moving. Chapter 2, the one that I found the least convincing in terms of its argument, considers the ways that Dick Diver's repeated encounters with pairs of sisters and maternal figures might echo and help soothe his guilt about his mother losing two baby girls just before he was born. Chapter 3 reads Dick Diver's sympathy and charm as feelings that cross gender boundaries, placing him into homosocial relationships with many of the male characters. Where Part I focuses on Dick as a character, Part II attends to Nicole and her many female analogues and foils within the novel. Chapter 4 considers the ways that Nicole participates in and diverges [End Page 92] from the tradition of the sentimental heroine. Chapter 5 places her in dialogue with the other tragic women in the novel. This is the place in the book where Scott's relationship with Zelda really came to the fore and, as such, it was the one that interested me the most as a Montgomery resident and scholar of modernist women writers. At first glance, Chapter 6 seems like it might belong in the third section, which talks about literary influences and parallel references. Its discussion of surrealism and the uncanny, though, makes...

Living to Labour, Labouring to Live: The Problem of Suicide in Charlotte Smith'sElegiac Sonnets

AbstractIn herElegiac Sonnets, Charlotte Smith presents the reader with a suffering poetic persona, one heavily burdened by a melancholic longing for death as a release from the ills of the world. Although this image of a despairing sentimental heroine cultivates a perception that this persona, or even Smith herself, harbours suicidal intentions, this essay argues that such desires remain inert throughout the sonnet sequence. In comparing Smith's imagining of Werther's suicidal experience – as articulated in a five‐sonnet sequence within theElegiac Sonnets– with the envisioned dejection of Smith's poetic persona, it is arguable that Smith is, instead, careful to delineate the ways in which these respective experiences diverge, and how the persistence of reason in particular, as both a blessing and a curse, prevents Smith's speaker from following Werther to the grave. Finally, it is a further reminder that (literary) suicide, often seen as the quintessentially transcendent Romantic destiny, was not a viable option for Romantic female writers who aspired to sympathetic identification and elegiac remembrance.

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.

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

Reading the Disabled Woman: Gerty MacDowell and the Stigmaphilic Space of “Nausicaa”

Reading the Disabled WomanGerty MacDowell and the Stigmaphilic Space of “Nausicaa” Angela Lea Nemecek (bio) As readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses, we first encounter Gerty MacDowell during “Wandering Rocks.” Joyce’s encyclopedic account of the activities of both major and minor characters on the afternoon of June 16, 1904 fleetingly presents a host of physical and cognitive differences. From the one-legged sailor patriotically singing on Eccles Street; to the blind stripling on his way to retrieve his tuning fork from the Ormond Bar; to the harried and eccentric figure of Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, who accidentally knocks the blind stripling down; to Gerty herself, carrying her father’s “lino letters” and walking too slowly to catch a glimpse of the vice regal cavalcade (U 10.1207), “Wandering Rocks” presents brief displays of difference matter-of-factly. Three episodes later, in “Nausicaa,” the state of physical difference with which Ulysses is heretofore peripatetically concerned finally becomes the object of more sustained engagement. Through Gerty’s brief relationship with Leopold Bloom, we begin to see that physical difference occupies a crucial position within the novel, helping to illuminate a space in which models of identity and social relations that rely on normative bodies can begin to be challenged and revised. While I am not suggesting that Joyce himself intended a radical critique of ableism, I believe that an examination of Gerty’s character reveals her crucial role in shoring up the novel’s implicit questioning of compulsory normativity. Far from being a conventional, sentimental heroine, Gerty MacDowell embodies a powerful resistance to eugenic ideologies of standardization that pervade the twentieth century, positing in their place an ethics of bodily particularity. [End Page 173] Modernism and Eugenic Ideology To examine Gerty’s relationship to ideologies of standardization, we must first understand the pervasiveness of eugenic ideology during the modernist period. Disability theorist Lennard J. Davis has written extensively about the development of the concept of the “normal” body, and its particular relationship to disability in the twentieth century. Davis traces the beginnings of corporeal norming to the rise of statistics—specifically, to the work of nineteenth-century French mathematician Adolphe Quetelet.1 Observing that “[s]tatistics is bound up with eugenics,” Davis notes the ways in which statistics seek to identify and manage deviations from the norm, thereby creating the notion of a “standard” body (26). Indeed, Sir Francis Galton, the British statistician who infamously coined the term “eugenics,” took Quetelet’s notion of the “normal distribution” one step further by ranking various deviations, which led to “[a] new ideal of ranked order [that] is powered by the imperative of the norm, and then is supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility and the elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be” (35, emphasis mine). In addition to being rooted in a fundamentally racist and classist fear of cultural “degeneracy,”2 this hegemonic vision of the normal body excluded a range of people with disabilities: the deaf, the mentally ill, the cognitively disabled, alcoholics, and those with congenital anomalies, among many others (Davis 38). This eugenic ideology of bodily perfectibility persisted well into the twentieth century in both America and Europe and, despite its later association with Nazi extremism, was a staple of mainstream culture during the 1920s. In 1927, the Supreme Court case Buck vs. Bell explicitly legalized forcible eugenic sterilization in the U.S., which, in some states, remained legal until the mid-1970s.3 Although less widely practiced in Britain, compulsory sterilization enjoyed a reasonable degree of approval within the scientific community (Davis 38). Many British health officials who were uncomfortable with compulsory sterilization vigorously campaigned for what they called “voluntary sterilization” during the 1920s and early 1930s.4 Scientists were by no means the only prominent cultural figures to support eugenic programs. The list of modernist writers on both sides of the Atlantic who subscribed to eugenic philosophy is a long one, including T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, and H. L. Mencken.5 Tellingly, Joyce was among a handful of authors to speak [End Page 174] out against eugenics in his...

Françoise de Graffigny’s Self-Fictionalization in Lettres d’une Péruvienne

When Francoise de Graffigny's epistolary novel Lettres d'une Peruvienne appeared in 1747, one of her close friends, French economist Jacques Turgot, praised native of region of Lorraine for crafting a subtle philosophical work capable of regenerating, if not revolutionizing, genre of novel itself. As Janet Altman points out in her article A Woman in The Enlightenment Sun, Turgot's enthusiastic reception was subsequently taken up not only in Enlightenment Encyclopedie--where several entries were devoted to Graffigny's heroine, Inca Princess Zilia--but also in portrait gallery assembled by D'Agoty in 1770, in which Graffigny figured as the deceased writer most capable of representing Enlightenment ideals (Altman 269). For Graffigny's contemporaries, writer's innovative contribution to French literature resided primarily in singular novelistic heroine she had invented by combining two allegedly incompatible types of characters sentimental heroine and cultural critic of oriental fictions. Over past two decades, Lettres d'une Peruvienne bave once again received increased critical attention. Like their predecessors, recent critics have also focused on novel's heroine. But question dominating more recent debates has tended to revolve around authenticity, or rather lack thereof, of Graffigny's representation of culture. (1) Graffigny's deviations from typical eighteenth-century representations of realities have generally been attributed to her supposed naivety or lack of familiarity with Peru, if not her insufficient mastery of literary conventions. However, like many writers of oriental fictions, Graffigny was not necessarily concerned with providing her readership with an ethnographic account of non-European culture she represents in her novel, i.e. Inca civilization. The preface of Lettres d'une Peruvienne indeed suggests that writer did not intend to craft her heroine according to received notions of Inca civilization; on contrary, Graffigny seems precisely to call into question such notions: Si la verite, qui s'ecarte du vraisemblable, perd ordinairement son credit aux yeux de la raison, ce n'est pas sans retour; mais pour peu qu'elle contrarie le prejuge, rarement elle trouve grace devant son tribunal. Que ne doit donc pas craindre l'editeur de cet ouvrage, en presentant au public les lettres d'une jeune Peruvienne, dont le style et les pensees ont si peu de rapport avec l'idee mediocrement avantageuse qu'un injuste prejuge nous a fait prendre de sa nation [...] Nous meprisons les Indiens; a peine accordons-nous une ame pensante a ces peuples malheureux. (249) As this passage makes clear, Graffigny consciously undermines stereotypical representations of Inca cultural identity, foregrounding Zilia's singular subjectivity instead by emphasizing her cultural agency (her literary style) and intellectual qualities (her thoughts), as opposed to an alleged naivety. The gaps between conventional representations of Inca culture and Graffigny's own, which critics have not failed to notice, thus appear to unmark heroine from her supposed Peruvianness rather than indicating any failing on writer's part. Consequently, such a displacement of Zilia's Peruvian identity problematizes literal reading of character. Departing from ethnographic approach of recent secondary literature, I wish to suggest an alternative reading of Graffigny's Inca Princess as a fictional double for writer herself. As Janet Altman bas argued, story of Zilia's exile and of conquest of Peru certainly provides a forum for a critique of European imperialism in third world. (2) But it also allowed Graffigny to work through effects of French imperialism more close to home: namely within her native Lorraine. Previously an independent duchy, Lorraine became a French protectorate at end of war of succession of Poland in 1738. …

The Sentimental Satire of Sophia Baddeley

The article explores the literary significance of Elizabeth Steele’s The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley (1787) and considers the relationship between satire and sentiment in the self-representations of late-eighteenth-century courtesans. The Memoirs establishes the courtesan Baddeley as a sentimental heroine and translates her experience of domestic violence and sexual double standards into a satire of fashionable society. Steele’s narrative therefore anticipates the sentimental self-portraits of nineteenthcentury women writers and looks back to an earlier tradition of the referential scandal chronicle. In addition, it reveals the impact of the commercial exchanges of the literary marketplace on female self-representations.

Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine: The Case of Amelia Norman

This article examines the notorious mid-nineteenth-century American trial of Amelia Norman, who was acquitted - very much against the weight of the evidence - of attempting to kill the man who seduced her. In particular, we explore the role in the trial and its aftermath of the affective energies and cultural expectations set in motion by best-selling American sentimental novels like Hannah Foster's "The Coquette" and Susanna Rowson's "Charlotte Temple." In Norman's case, once newspapers, defense lawyers, and reformers such as Lydia Maria Child recast the defendant as a sentimental heroine, the trial became about seduction, not attempted murder. The sentimental emplotment of Norman's life marshaled a powerful set of emotional responses and moral judgments on her behalf. For example, Norman claimed insanity. And since sentimental heroines are supposed to go mad when they are seduced and abandoned, the jury was prepared to interpret her symptoms according to her lawyers' very strategy for establishing her innocence. Ultimately, however, Norman embodied the plight of the sentimental heroine at the same time that she contested her fictional counterpart's fate. In this way, her trial spectacularized the disparity which the sentimental novel conjures up and displaces but never resolves. Going further, the common law theory of coverture, which severely limited the legal personhood of married women, has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Cases like Norman's remind us that unmarried women were also subject to draconian constraints on their legal personhood. The tort of seduction is a key example. Legal historians trace the development of the seduction tort from its common-law origins, when men's property interest in women's bodies formed the basis of the cause of action, to 1851, when Field Code authors (including Norman's lawyer, David Graham) persuaded several states to grant seduced women standing to bring their own cause of action. Consequently, courts were forced to reckon with the seduced woman as a moral agent capable of consenting to sex. As trials like Norman's demonstrate, sentimental novels helped lay the groundwork for this shift in the law by elucidating a subjectivity for the seduced woman. Yet the doctrinal implications of Norman's precedent-setting trial had a second, more ambiguous strain. Other women facing similar charges used the same legal strategy to gain acquittals in a substantial number of cases. Indeed, Norman's sentimental strategy proved so powerful that men on trial for killing their wives' seducers appropriated it to bring their own stories before juries and to reinforce male sexual norms through the so-called honor defense. In the end, then, Norman's trial fostered legal reform, but it also suggested - as Lydia Maria Child's fictionalization of the case in "Rosenglory" recognized - that only sustained and multifaceted efforts to change cultural as well as legal norms could improve the sexual status of women. In addition to its legal, literary, and historical insights that it provides, we also intend this article to contribute to debates on the nature of scholarship in law and literature. Scholars such as Wai Chee Dimock have argued for a focus on the historical and historically shifting relations between law and literature - a view we endorse. Where we differ from Dimock is in our diversion of attention away from abstract ideas of law laid out by treatise writers and philosophers in favor of law experienced and manipulated by individuals. So, too, we are interested less in representations of concepts such as justice in legal and literary texts than we are in the ways in which literature (broadly conceived) can create provisional and fragile opportunities for concrete instantiations of justice and even generate legal change (for good or ill). We would argue that to the extent legal change motivates rather than simply mirrors cultural change, it needs literature to be effective. This project, then, responds to Gregg Crane's call for attention to the complex and slippery historical interactions of law and literature that shape and are shaped by an ever changing cultural idiom of justice. The extended story of Amelia Norman, in short, not only constitutes a case study in the inescapable interaction between the overlapping and interdependent discourses of law and literature, but also reveals the literary and legal consequences of that interaction.

Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Reviews Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature CINDY WEINSTEIN (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) fter nearly three decades devoted to the re-evaluationof sentimental fiction , scholarship no longer dismissesthe genre with the cavalier condeAscension of earlier critics. Yet considerablework remains to appreciate the art and ideas of sentimental novels, including exploration of how the genre seriously engaged canonical writers such as Melville. In Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, CindyWeinsteinsets out to demonstrate that sentimental novels are neither as uniformly constricted in ideology nor as debased in form as its critics still conclude. To that end, she examines sentimental texts in the framework of a wide variety of the other discourses through which nineteenth-century Americans debated the question of family, showing ways that this body of fiction functioned among other agents that debated the shift from a definition of kindred based in consanguinity to one based in sympathy and contract. Pierre comes in for treatment as a failed sentimental fiction,but not in the way that modernist Criticssuch as E 0.Matthiessen famously had it, nor yet in the way that Tara Penry has it in her fine study of Melville’s attraction to sentimental masculinity (“Sentimental and Romantic Masculinity in Moby-Dick and Piewe,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, University of North Carolina, 1999). The book takes for its method an enterprising blend of contextual analysis and close reading (a courtesy all too seldom extended to the sentimental) to explore different ways that the era produced and circulated sentiment. Between an introduction and short afterward (treating Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson), six chapters compare the model of family represented in sentimental novels (and one journal) with, respectively, models in maternal advice literature, family relations law, the debate over slavery,the genre of slave narrative, and radical reform history. In addition to the essay on Pierre, two others focus on a pair of bestsellers and a slave narrative, now in the reformed canon of antebellum fiction - Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide Would, and Harriet Jacobs’sIncidents in the Life of a Slave L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S55 R E V I E W S Girl. Other segments extend the recovery of the antebellum sentimental, begun notably by Nina Baym, Jane Tomkins, and Susan K. Harris, through attention to lesser known texts of fiction and nonfiction - Caroline Lee Hentz’s novels, Ernest Linwood and The Planterk Northern “Bride”; Mary Jane Holmes’s‘Lena Rivers; Nehemiah Adams’sproslavery fiction, The Sable Cloud; Mary Hayden Green Pike’s mixed-genre fiction Ida May; Lydia Maria Childs Romance of the Republic; and nonfiction that includes Solomon Northrup’s slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave; Frances Anne Kemble’s A Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839;and Stowe’s A Key to Uncle TomS Cabin. Weinstein’sopening chapter, “In locoparentis,” presents an elegant reversal of the presumption that sentimental novels parrot the message of advice literature and thereby reinforce the priority of the biological family and the mother. Although the novels offer rhetorical endorsement of the emergent family ideology, their absent mothers, inadequate fathers, and alternative forms of the middle-class family all go to undermine the ideal of consanguinity . The second chapter’sdiscussion of The Lamplighter shows that in the productive ambiguity ensuing from such cultural tensions both Cummin’sfiction and the developing field of domestic relations law assert the precedence, in some cases, of adoption or contracted family relationships over blood-family and the rights of the father. As law developed the concept of the “best interests of the child,” Cummin’s fiction develops the concept of what Weinstein calls “judicious sympathy,”an individual’s capacity to distinguish and react to the several demands others make on one’s feelings with a sense of the relative importance of those calls. What this means for Cummins’s sentimental heroine , in a world where family...

The Daughter's Desire in Dombey and Son

Whether or not the Victorians actually denied female sexuality, it has certainly generated (in the Victorian era and our own) a discourse of anxiety, scrutiny and fear. While they may disagree on whether or not denial was the primary problem, Wullschlager and Kincaid do agree on one thing: both women and children were constructed as sexually Other, invested with particular sexual significance while simultaneously idealised as pure and innocent. Enormous linguistic work went into the creation of literary heroines who seem to embody that most prominent of Victorian female myths, the 'angel of the house', while her infamous counterpart, the 'fallen woman', lurked ubiquitously in the shadows, always a mere word or thought away. Much critical work on Dickens has identified his dual novelistic obsessions with creating virtuous heroines and the marginalised 'fallen women' with whose fates theirs are entangled. In Dombey and Son, the sentimental heroine, Florence Dombey, and her father's second wife, Edith, ostensibly provide an example of this duality in Victorian womanhood, one which can be supported by the narrative and one which ultimately cannot. Yet the critical reception of Florence as a passive, victimised sexual object necessarily overlooks the subtle, often vexed traces of Florence's sexual agency that appear in the text. Although Florence certainly is constructed as a domestic angel more desired than desiring, her sexuality nevertheless seeps from its confinement, the repressed returning to demand recognition. The resulting contradictions and conflicts in the text in a more complex portrait of intermingled pleasure and pain than has been discussed in

The Occasional Triumph of the Moral Sentiments over Legal Technicalities: Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine

Our paper explores how affective energies and cultural expectations set in motion by best-selling American sentimental novels like Hannah Foster's The Coquette and Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple informed notorious mid-nineteenth-century American trial of Amelia Norman, who attempted to kill man who seduced her. Once newspapers, defense lawyers, and reformers such as Lydia Maria Child recast defendant as sentimental heroine, trial became seduction, and Norman was acquitted against weight of evidence. Sentimental novels turn contrast between passive victim status of heroine and active libidinal quest of rake-villain. As Cathy Davidson points out, this fiction is about silence, subservience, stasis (the accepted attributes of women as traditionally defined) in contradistinction to conflicting impulses toward independence, action, and self expression (the ideals of new American nation). The seduction plot diverts attention from this disparity by establishing an affective solidarity between heroine and reader and elevating ruined woman to tragic status. The sentimental emplotment of Norman's life marshaled powerful set of emotional responses and moral judgements her behalf. Norman claimed insanity. And since sentimental heroines are supposed to go mad when they are seduced and abandoned, jury was prepared to interpret her symptoms according to her lawyers' very strategy for establishing her innocence. Ultimately, however, Norman embodied plight of sentimental heroine at same time that she contested her fictional counterpart's fate. In this way, her trial spectacularized disparity which sentimental novel conjures up and displaces but never resolves. The common law theory of coverture, which severely limited legal personhood of married women, has received great deal of scholarly attention. Cases like Norman's remind us that unmarried women were also subject to draconian constraints their legal personhood. The tort of seduction is key example. Legal historians trace development of seduction tort from its common-law origins, when men's property interest in women's bodies formed basis of cause of action, to 1851, when Field Code authors (including Norman's lawyer David Graham) persuaded several states to grant seduced women standing to bring their own cause of action. Consequently, courts were forced to reckon with seduced woman as moral agent capable of consenting to sex. As trials like Norman's demonstrate, sentimental novels helped lay groundwork for this shift in law by elucidating subjectivity for seduced woman. Yet doctrinal implications of Norman's precedent-setting trial had second, more ambiguous strain. Norman's sentimental strategy proved so powerful that men trial for killing their wive's seducers appropriated it to bring their own stories before juries and to reinforce male sexual norms. In end, then, Norman's trial fostered legal reform, but it also suggested - as Child's fictionalization of case in Rosenglory recognized - that only sustained and multifaceted efforts to change cultural as well as legal norms could improve sexual status of women. Scholars such as Wai Chee Dimock have argued for focus on historical and historically shifting relations between law and - view we endorse. Where we differ from Dimock is in our diversion of attention away from abstract ideas of law laid out by treatise writers and philosophers in favor of law experienced and manipulated by individuals. So, too, we are interested less in representations of concepts such as justice in legal and literary texts than we are in ways in which literature (broadly conceived) can create provisional and fragile opportunities for concrete instantiations of justice and even generate legal change (for good or ill). Going further, we would argue that to extent legal change motivates rather than simply mirrors cultural change, it needs literature to be effective. Thus, we see no need to characterize - and indeed reject depiction of - law as a limited arena in which ideas of morality have little place. This project, then, responds to Gregg Crane's call for attention to the complex and slippery historical interactions of law and literature that shape and are shaped by an ever changing cultural idiom of justice. The extended story of Amelia Norman not only constitutes case study in inescapable interaction between overlapping and interdependent discourses of law and literature, but also reveals literary and legal consequences of that interaction.