Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
256
Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
256Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521031264 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2006 |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #147 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.55(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cambridge University Press
0521842530 - Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature - by Cindy Weinstein
Excerpt
Introduction
Family, Kinship, and Sympathy expands the critical conversation about sentimental fiction by extending our understanding of sympathy, or what Harriet Beecher Stowe famously asked her readers to do at the conclusion of Uncle Tom's Cabin – to "feel right." The imperative to "see to your sympathies" is, however, not solely a feature of Stowe's anti-slavery polemic. "Feeling right" informs virtually all sentimental fiction, regardless of political intentions. Novel after novel tells the story of children learning how to feel right about their families, selves, nation, and God in the face of great pain, which almost always takes the form of parental loss. It should come as no surprise, then, that these texts often imagine their disfigured families in relation to the institution of slavery, whose donnée is the fracturing of domestic order. It should also come as no surprise that Melville's Pierre, our most profound literary analysis of sentimental novels and the families out of which they are made, is about a character whose primary occupation is ridding himself of the parents who prevent him from joining his sentimental cohorts in learning how to feel right about families, selves, nation, and God. Surrounded by one woman who functions as both sister and wife and another who appears to be a cousin (the subject of a later chapter), Pierre finds himself "utterly without sympathy." Is the family the site where sympathy is produced or annihilated, dispensed or withheld? Is it possible that sentimental novels are making the very unsentimental point that sympathy thrives in the absence of family ties?
It is no coincidence that out of the materials of mid nineteenth-century American culture, Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins, the literary critics most responsible for establishing the terms of the debate about sentimental fiction, produced sympathy as a litmus test for assessing a text's politics. This was, after all, the very test that many antebellum Americans applied to their daily activities and the principles around which their lives were organized. Mothers read advice manuals in order to learn how to be more sympathetic; the south was sympathetic, it insisted, because it cared for slaves; the north claimed that it was sympathetic because it opposed slavery and had a system of free labor; the law aimed to be sympathetic in its decision to uphold "the best interests of the child," a legal consideration developed during this period; the literature repeatedly deployed sympathy as one of the most reliable measures of characterological virtue. Thus, sympathy is, quite rightly, the starting point for many studies of sentimental fictions.
As successful as Tompkins's defense of Uncle Tom's Cabin and her putative canonization of what she calls "the other American Renaissance" has been in effecting a transformation in what constitutes the antebellum literary landscape, it has been less successful in altering the ideological judgments most often leveled against writers such as Stowe, Susan Warner, and "that damned mob of scribbling women," as Hawthorne famously put it in an 1855 letter to William Ticknor. Douglas would seem to have won that particular battle. To be sure, Douglas's critique of sentimental literature as "the political sense obfuscated or gone rancid" has been updated, cast in new theoretical terms, and expanded to include possibly even more trenchant accusations against sentimentalism. Her complaint is, nonetheless, sustained, time and again, as new texts are added to the canon, which then are read primarily for their political failings. Lauren Berlant's assessment of sentimentalism in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which indicts Stowe for her "not Marxist enough cry, 'But, what can any individual do?'" is an excellent case in point. To read much of the literary criticism about sentimentalism, one might conclude that the hundreds of novels comprising the canon of sentimental fiction is, in fact, a monolithic entity, a critic's white whale as it were, to be confronted and destroyed. Laura Wexler, for example, describes sentimentalism as an "expansive, imperial project … that aimed at the subjection of different classes and even races who were compelled to play not the leading roles but the human scenery before which the melodrama of middle-class redemption could be enacted." Amy Kaplan writes, "where the domestic novel appears most turned inward to the private sphere of female interiority, we often find subjectivity scripted by narratives of nation and empire." In a similar vein, Michelle Burnham charges Uncle Tom's Cabin with the "project of sentimental imperialism when it finally scripts Cassy and the rest of the Harris family into an exemplary model of domesticity." "Feeling right" always seems to be feeling (and doing) wrong. Why?
These negative assessments, in large measure, derive from a particular argument about the nature of "feeling right," which claims that sympathy in sentimental fictions has the same homogenizing meaning, the same stultifying and baleful effect, the same mode of production, regardless of the context in which it is cultivated, extended, and received. Sympathy becomes a form of appropriation structurally equivalent to the appropriations of slavery. Thus, Saidaya Hartman maintains that "in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is occluded by the other's obliteration," but is this a fact about sympathy itself or about a particular deployment of or, perhaps, a transitory stage in a process that then moves onward and outward? Must sympathy "ultimately bring us back to ourselves" in a "narcissistic model of projection and rejection," as Elizabeth Barnes has argued? And is it accurate to maintain, along with Karen Sanchez-Eppler that all "antislavery writing responds to slavery's annihilation of personhood with its own act of annihilation"? What about Stowe's claim at the beginning of the chapter entitled "The Unprotected" in Uncle Tom's Cabin: "no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances [the loss of a kind master]. The child who has lost a father has still the protection of friends, and of the law; he is something, and can do something, – has acknowledged rights and position; the slave has none" (457)? Doesn't this passage suggest that antebellum writers are capable of maintaining the difference between someone who is a slave and someone who is free? And if so, what are the implications for our understanding of how sympathy might work in their texts? Is it possible that the identificatory structure of sympathy that underlies so many recent critiques of sympathy (the "I sympathize with you only to the extent that you are like me" rule of thumb) is an insufficient description of how sympathy is generated and deployed?
My point in asking such questions is to suggest that much of the recent debate about sympathy in sentimental literature produces a monolithic and consistently pernicious account of sympathy for three reasons: first, it assumes that the structure of sympathy is the same, regardless of the context in which it is circulating; second, it fails to register how sympathy gets produced (and has effects) in these novels not only through a foundational moment of identification but through a recognition of difference; and third, it fails to take into account the extraordinarily rich and ideologically diverse debate about sympathy that was taking place in the antebellum period, most importantly, for my purposes, within sentimental fiction itself – a debate, interestingly enough, that anticipates the substance of current critiques. In contrast, I maintain that sentimental fictions delineate alternative models of sympathy which, when examined, enrich our understanding of the multiple ways in which sympathy was imagined and practiced. Southern expressions of sympathy on behalf of the slave, to choose the most obvious example, are structured differently from northern admonitions to "feel right" because the logic of southern sympathy disallows potential identifications across race (those who are slaves, the argument goes, have nothing in common with those who aren't) and installs difference as the foundational category of sympathy. An alternative model of sympathy is at work in the case of Mary Hayden Green Pike's novel Ida May, in which a white girl is kidnapped and made into a black slave. The text suggests that identification, though a necessary first step in the production of sympathy, must then be surpassed by a recognition of difference. Still different is Pierre, which posits the absence of familiarity, in this case understood as the absence of consanguinity itself, as the necessary condition for sympathy.
It should be apparent that I have several other objections to many of the current readings of sentimental fictions, not the least of which is a critical tendency to make very broad claims based on very few texts. Critics of this literature are as focused on New England as any conventional study of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson. The sheer quantity of antebellum sentimental fiction is enormous (Mary Jane Holmes alone wrote forty novels, E.D.E.N. Southworth's collected volumes add up to forty-two, and Anna Sophia Stephens wrote thirty books, to name just three of the genre's most popular practitioners), and critics have attempted to circumscribe it in any number of ways, whether by time period, elements of the plot, ideological import, and/or the gender of the author. My archive has been organized with several frameworks in mind. First, certain sentimental texts, such as The Lamplighter and The Wide, Wide World, have achieved canonical status (at least within the canon of sentimental fictions). My analysis of these texts, therefore, acknowledges their prominent place in recent accounts, at the same time as I demonstrate how influential readings of these canonical texts have laid the groundwork for misreadings of the genre. Second, I have chosen to focus on a particular set of novels that reveal, with exemplary force, both the genre's profound awareness of the relative fragility of the biological family and a commitment to strengthening and redefining it according to the logic of love. My goal has been to demonstrate through readings of what I take to be representative sentimental texts this heretofore unobserved yet very powerful aspect of the genre. Third, my interest in authors such as Holmes and Caroline Lee Hentz speaks not only to the ways in which their texts respond to the pressures of close reading, but also to my desire to open up the canon of sentimental fictions. Precious little commentary is to be found on some of the most widely read sentimental writers, including, for instance, the Kentucky-born Holmes, who according to Mary Kelley was "next to Harriet Beecher Stowe probably the biggest money-maker of the literary domestics," and Hentz, who grew up in New England and then spent most of her adult life living in the south and defending its institutions. The lack of attention toward Hentz speaks to a crucially missing link in our sentimental archive – the south. Moreover, it is not my contention that certain sentimental texts are not imperialist or racist or sexist in precisely the ways outlined by critics of this literature, but rather that these allegations should not be taken to be the final word on the genre. The limited usefulness of these generalizations is, in part, a consequence of the limits of the archive, but it is also the case that much criticism on sentimentalism seems unable to imagine its practitioners as operating within discrete and disparate contexts that might produce a number of competing interventions. My analysis offers an account of sentimental fictions that not only acknowledges the linkages between novels, whether thematic, structural, or political, but illuminates the surprisingly diverse ideological and aesthetic contributions made by individual texts.
Indeed, much criticism on the subject of sentimentalism seems incapable of considering this body of literature for its aesthetic qualities. It is as if the Douglas/Tompkins debate has taken such concerns off of the critical radar screen, as if questions of ideology and more conventional matters of literary form were mutually exclusive. Tompkins animated our interest in Stowe and Susan Warner, but at the same time, her argument has made it extremely difficult to talk about the distinct aesthetic investments (other than stereotype) of the "other American Renaissance." Being "other" has hindered our understanding of their works in terms of irony, ambiguity, character, and narrative voice. Thus, another one of my goals is to present new readings of sentimental fictions by subjecting them to more traditional methods of literary analysis.
My critical practice is guided by an attentiveness to the verbal playfulness and complexity of these texts, which I believe provides a more satisfying account both of their ideological variability and aesthetic contributions. What is absent from many of the most influential analyses of sentimental fictions is a sustained consideration of the language of these texts. In not attending to the specifics of language, critics have missed the ways in which sentimental novels are fascinated by the material implications of words and figures, including pronouns, possessives, characters' names, analogies and euphemisms, and, as a result, have simplified (and homogenized) the genre. Once these verbal features of the novels are made apparent, it becomes clear that they are conducting their thematic analysis of family through a linguistic focus upon the words designating family relations. For example, a fundamental component in many of these texts is an ambiguity about proper names, which when subject to close reading, enables us to see how the novels are working out issues about identity and family.
Family, Kinship, and Sympathy thus proposes that we must first recognize that sympathy is produced, dispensed, and received in a variety of contexts, whether regional, political, reformist, judicial, literary, that goes beyond the framework of the biological family. And each of them helps to constitute sympathy differently. As I have already suggested, pro-slavery advocates conceive of the operations of sympathy quite distinctly from anti-slavery activists. Or, writers of domestic manuals represent sympathy in the family very differently from the Perfectionists of Oneida, or the Shakers. Second, I contend that new terms are needed (or, in certain cases, a revitalization of old ones) with which to analyze sympathy's material and/or psychic effects as well as its ideological implications. The tears that often precipitate and accompany acts of sympathy have, with good reason, drawn a great deal of critical attention. For Douglas, they exemplify the bad faith at the core of sentimentalism, inasmuch as they "provide a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated" (12). For Tompkins, they (along with prayers) comprise "the heroine's only recourse against injustice; the thought of injustice itself is implicitly forbidden." For Philip Fisher, "weeping is a sign of powerlessness." When Ellen Montgomery, protagonist of The Wide, Wide World, cries at her relatives' house in Scotland, she is, indeed, powerless to do anything about her situation. However, when Fanny Kemble weeps over the conditions of the slaves at the Georgia plantation over which she is mistress, her next step is to break the law and teach one of them how to read. My larger claim, here, is that weeping and acting need not be cast as mutually exclusive. Tears and reason don't have to cancel one another out, an observation made by Nina Baym, who puts it this way: "woman's fiction … believes in effective virtue." The concise phrase, "effective virtue," registers the point that sentimental fictions don't discriminate between sympathy and action, feeling and doing, but rather the two processes are inextricably linked. Many of these texts also allow us to see that irony and sympathy don't have to be conceived of in opposition to one another. One need only read the first line of Uncle Tom's Cabin – "Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine" (41) – to realize that Stowe's irony (these gentlemen are not gentlemen) is a fundamental strategy in her critique of slavery.
I also argue that not all sentimental fictions unself-consciously reproduce formulaic requirements (the child suffers the loss of her parents and is recompensed at the novel's end by getting a spouse), but rather they have the capacity to interrogate their generic foundations. Slavery is central to this self-examination as sentimental fictions register the ways in which their tales of parentless children both intersect with and diverge from the narratives of children made parentless through slavery's legalized acts of what Orlando Patterson has identified as "social death." Although much critical attention has been paid to what Sanchez-Eppler calls the "hybridization of slave and domestic narrative forms," the analysis is usually centered on the slave narrative's incorporation and subversion of the domestic narrative. This book shifts the emphasis and explores how sentimental fictions incorporate features of the slave narrative in order not only to represent the suffering of their (white) heroine, but to hierarchize her temporary suffering in relation to the slaves' potentially unending abuse. In other words, even as the analogy between white women and black slaves gets deployed, what gets written into some sentimental novels is an awareness of the racial (and racist) conditions that make the freedom of their white protagonist a convention of the genre.
There are several recent studies of the genre that have complicated the ideological, authorial, and interpretive polarizations of the Douglas/Tompkins debate in an attempt to reveal how the cultural work of sentimental fictions need not travel in one straight path. For example, Julia Stern argues that "mourning is the central subtext of much American sentimental women's writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; multivocality plays a crucial role in communicating what such sublimated narrative material represses." Gillian Brown's reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin demonstrates that while Stowe's "reformulated domestic virtue" combines "love and protest, maternal duty and political action," those progressive formulations depend upon a racist ideology of what Brown calls "sentimental possession" that requires an erasure of all signs of the market economy in the middle-class home, including slaves. Glenn Hendler challenges the very discursive foundations of the Douglas/Tompkins debate by "countering theories and histories of nineteenth-century sentimentality and domesticity that describe these modes as 'private' and place the domestic sphere in binary opposition to an economic realm defined as public." In one of the most powerful critiques of the limits of binary analysis as applied to this fiction, Lora Romero makes the point that sentimental texts can occupy a variety of positions on the ideological spectrum: "we seem unable to entertain the possibility that traditions, or even individual texts, could be radical on some issues (market capitalism, for example) and reactionary on others (gender or race, for instance)." The place called home, she argues, is the place that seems to transcend such ideological variability, that permits us (as it did antebellum Americans) to stabilize the "incommensurability of political visions" that are at play in these texts.
Events in sentimental novels, of course, take place in the everyday world of the home. If literary critics agree on anything (even as they assign diametrically opposed value to it), surely it would be that the everyday experiences of the domestic drive the plots, the characters, the scenes, and the meanings of sentimental literature, domestic literature, women's literature, whatever one wishes to call that body of fiction whose primary subjects, one can only conclude, are feelings and families. Fisher eloquently observes: "Certain forms of life, and with them, certain underlying economic systems – obviously, that of slavery in this case – become suicidal and temperamentally deadlocked in the face of the few inviolable facts of family and feeling to which sentimentality with its enlightenment version of a common human nature is bound" (123). Baym also makes this point in Woman's Fiction: "[the fiction] assumes that men as well as women find greatest happiness and fulfillment in domestic relations, by which are meant not simply spouse and parent, but the whole network of human attachments based on love, support, and mutual responsibility" (27). It is also the case that "in novel after novel, a network of surrogate kin gradually defines itself around the heroine, making hers the story not only that of a self-made woman but that of a self-made or surrogate family" (38).
The making of a family is the task that awaits most sentimental protagonists, but what makes this endeavor so interesting and important, to my mind, is that in the process of making a family, the family is being redefined as an institution to which one can choose to belong or not. Indeed, a sense of consanguinity's insufficiencies is pervasive, but it is accompanied by a productive rush to fill in the void. Generically speaking, sentimental fiction is about the relative merits of consanguineous and elective ties in the emotional life of the child, but the value and meaning ascribed to those ties is contingent upon the context in which those families are situated. A widespread cultural examination of the family is being conducted in a variety of antebellum realms, including the field of domestic relations, the debate about slavery, and the many utopian efforts to reform the family. Not only are sentimental fictions similarly absorbed in this project of redefinition but the novels are intimately connected to the larger cultural conversation about domestic reform. Although we may be accustomed to thinking about these novels as conservative exempla of bourgeois ideology, many of them fiercely challenge the patriarchal regime of the biological family by calling attention to the frequency with which fathers neglect the economic as well as emotional obligations owed to their children. To counter paternal failure, advice manuals of the period advance a theory of mother love, but the plots of most sentimental novels require that the child be motherless. The child's survival, in other words, demands that the possibilities for who counts as family be expanded. In the process, the criterion by which families are deemed capable (or not) to raise a child shifts from considerations of economy to those of affection. Sentimental fictions are about finding the right place where sympathy flourishes and understanding that place and those people as one's home and "family." They tell the surprisingly pragmatic stories of these other "parents" and their ability or lack thereof to have sympathy for children who are not, biologically speaking, theirs. To extend the meaning of family is to extend the possibilities for sympathy.
Perhaps the most sweeping claim in what follows is that the cultural work of sentimental fictions is nothing less than an interrogation and reconfiguration of what constitutes a family. This is a monumental task, a paradigm shift, whose trajectory is neither even nor consistently successful. Although sentimental fictions longingly look back to a time when families were understood as consanguineous units, novel after novel is engaged in ridding itself of the paternalism of consanguinity by replacing it with a family that is based on affection and organized according to a paradigm of contract, by which I mean that individual family members have rights that must be guaranteed and protected and that these rights increasingly come to be understood in affective terms. The generic goal is the substitution of freely given love, rather than blood, as the invincible tie that binds together individuals in a family, thereby loosening the hold that consanguinity has both as a mechanism for structuring the family and for organizing the feelings of the people in it. That most of these texts conclude in marriage and, presumably, the reproduction of the biological family would seem to suggest that their inquiries leave the institution untouched, if not even more powerful for having been investigated and pronounced worthy of another generation. Moreover, many of these novels seem capable of ending only when the biological father is reintegrated into the life of the heroine (the biological mother is usually long gone), an element of the plot which would appear to reinstall the priority of blood relations and weaken the claim for the authority of love. The fact is, however, that consanguinity becomes one more choice to be made.
It would be unreasonable, of course, to expect sentimental fictions to figure out how to demolish the biological family and patriarchy once and for all, and not all of them wish to do so. More often than not, their analysis is founded in a desire to reform the family rather than dispense with it altogether (Pierre being a notable exception). But the plots do such a convincing job of demonstrating the inadequacies of family that it is difficult, especially for twenty-first-century readers, to understand why its future is guaranteed in the endings of the texts. To judge these novels solely on the matter of the consistency with which they sustain their critique of the family (they would all fail because their protagonists marry) is to miss the intellectual creativity, the humor, and the difficulty of their intervention.
The strategy they share for challenging the rule of consanguinity is the application of an ideal of contract, sometimes literal but more often metaphorical, to the expression of love. This linkage helps to explain why adoption and marriage play such crucial roles in the plots of virtually all sentimental novels. Selecting a parent, in many of these texts, requires intellectual and emotional skills not unlike those necessary for choosing a spouse. Having learned how to choose a parent out of necessity (dead mom, deadbeat dad), perhaps the child protagonist will do a better job of finding a loving mate and have the happy marriage that has eluded practically every adult in her world. It is important to stress, however, that while the novels consistently explore the impact of contract on family, they do not permit a unilateral conclusion about what contract means in a sentimental novel. For example, to be free of consanguineous relations in The Lamplighter is to be free to make contracts that eventuate in self-possession. By contrast, to free oneself of consanguinity in Pierre so as to establish bonds based on contract is a fable of self-possession that leads to self-destruction. Still different is the case of The Wide, Wide World, where to be free of the obligations of consanguinity is to find oneself wanting to reproduce them in one's contractual relations. The privileging of contract, in other words, has diverse ideological implications, which are dependent upon the specific context from which the critique of consanguinity is launched. The unhinging of consanguinity as the definitional heart of the biological family produces very different ideological results.
This spectrum of interpretive possibility, however, doesn't begin to take into account what happens when sentimental novels consider slavery, where the affective value accorded to consanguineous relations has been rendered irrelevant (from the perspective of slave masters) by virtue of the economic value assigned to children born of slave mothers. Sentimental fictions' insistence on the marriage contract as the embodiment of an ideal of family based on choice also takes on different meanings when understood in relation to the fact that slave law mandated marriage as a contract
© Cambridge University Press