The Logic of Sentiment

Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville

Kenneth Dauber

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501357381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Logic of Sentiment is a study of sentimentality, a literary mode that aims to answer the question, "What hold us together?" Against the grain of cultural studies, which understands sentimentality as consolidating communities on the basis of material or historical foundations, Kenneth Dauber takes a philosophical approach. He argues that sentimentality is love conceptualized in denial of a skepticism--understood as the problem of people's otherness to each other--that material associations cannot dispel. Through close readings in the style of "ordinary language" criticism, Dauber analyzes mid-19th-century American novels, where sentimentality achieved its most complete articulation, with a focus on three novels published nearly simultaneously– Uncle Tom's Cabin, The House of the Seven Gables, and Pierre. Referencing a wide range of philosophical and literary texts, Dauber examines the response of sentimental writers to their growing awareness of love's lack of foundation, the waywardness with which individuals dispose themselves as they succeed and fail in achieving a viable "we." The Logic of Sentiment traces the movement from sentimentality to realism, the relation between epistemology and ethics, and the kind of investments that writers attempt to solicit from their readers.

1

Two Senses of Knowing: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

A vision of sentimental community lies at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For all its fierce abolitionism, that was its fundamental attraction, certainly in its time. No divisive attack, like William Lloyd Garrison’s or the other more belligerent abolitionist pronouncements of the day,¹ it called not for separation—of North and South, of abolitionist and slaveholder—but for a kinder, more genuinely communitarian society. As Stowe projects it, especially at the end of the novel, in that coming regeneration of hearts that sympathy will usher into the world, the slaveholder will join the abolitionist, and the slaveholder and the abolitionist together will join the slave as partners in the society of an all-embracing humanity that is still Uncle Tom’s attraction more than 150 years after its publication. The labor of Uncle Tom was to level the order of the slave South. It was to humanize the slave, to make whites see blacks as human, like themselves, and Uncle Tom was arguably more successful in that labor than any other antislavery document ever published.

That having been said, however, it must also be said that, 150 years after its publication, Uncle Tom’s very success remains its most troubling feature, and that is because it is hard not to feel that Stowe’s conception of community, and indeed of humanity itself, is almost as bad as the divisions it seeks to cure. It is hard not to feel, that is, that in the name of community—community in Christ, a point to which we will return later—the very differences between people that must be preserved if humans, too, are to be preserved are erased altogether in a sentimental identification of everyone of the sort we have seen it in Wieland, of the sinner and the saint, of the slavemaster and the slave, that is liable to make us, especially those of us who do find Uncle Tom moving, more than a little queasy.

“If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie … how fast could you walk?” (I: 65).² Stowe’s question, asking her readers to imagine themselves in the place of Eliza, a slave mother attempting to escape before her son is sold away from her down the river, is the moral thrust of the book, and the moral equivalency of the question leaves very little way out. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Have you stopped beating your wife yet? As with such questions, there is just no good answer. What can a mother, in good conscience, say? Of course, she would walk pretty fast. Working the scene for all that it’s worth, painting in excruciating detail poor Eliza’s state, and then asking every other mother to put herself in the same situation, Uncle Tom tries hard to make the reader feel as Eliza must have felt. Yet the question seems unfair, to the reader as well as to Eliza. For to the slave mother, it is just the point that it is her child who is being sold, and for the reader, that she might reasonably have a more lively fear for her own child than another’s seems nowhere allowed. After all, it is not your Harry, mother, who is being sold and separated from you, and to feel as if it were is to deny just that point, to elide the selfhood of the very slave for whom your feeling is being invoked.³ Indeed, it is to deny the very feeling of mothers for sons—particular, exclusive, a feeling for their own sons rather before other people’s sons—in the first place.

No wonder that Uncle Tom continues to trouble long after The Clansman, say, or Gone with the Wind, sentimental novels of the South in Uncle Tom’s tradition, have ceased to be of any but antiquarian interest. Uncle Tom shares with The Clansman and Gone with the Wind, indeed with Stowe’s own Dred, the novel she published almost immediately after Uncle Tom, a set of racialized suppositions. Not without reason, many readers, most memorably James Baldwin, in a famous article on the protest novel, of which he takes Uncle Tom as a type, have found it a racist book.⁴ And although the racism is sometimes qualified, as it is, in fact, in the successors to Uncle Tom, as well, where races “mix” and racial qualities are exchanged, racial differences remain the reference point for what it is that is mixed in the first place.⁵ So as in these novels all the conventional differences are present—perhaps even more than in them, because in Uncle Tom, reversing the valence of her racial characterizations in order to praise blacks over whites, Stowe heightens the characterizations.⁶ Whites are active and blacks are reverent (which is why blacks are more properly Christian than whites); whites contract and blacks relate (which is why they are morally sound while whites excuse their failings by reference to the law); whites, in a word, are intellectual, while blacks are emotional (which is why some day Africa will teach America and Europe a more humane way of living). More importantly, however, how the slave feels is just not in question in the successors to Uncle Tom. It is not with the slave that we are asked to identify but with the slavemaster, and this is something we so little are inclined to do as hardly to be worth even attempting. But Uncle Tom asks us to identify across a divide it both invokes and denies, and it is difficult to know how to do this, how to be not only sensitive but just in our sensitivities and so to prevent sensitivity from quickly degenerating into a kind of quietism or, even, a sort of self-gratulation.

It is more than ironic that the renewal of academic interest in Uncle Tom in the last decades has been spurred by its enlistment under the banner of identity—the banner of the very sort of identity politics—that Stowe’s invitation to sympathy so problematizes. In the words of Jane Tompkins, who started it all, Uncle Tom was “a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view.”⁷ And “If it were your Harry, mother” undoubtedly is the voice of the “woman’s point of view.” It is the voice of one mother speaking to other mothers, the voice of what Stowe surely assumed was one of “us” mothers speaking, as her readers would have assumed she did, to us mothers, a stance she takes rather more flexibly in her later New England novels, where her subject is not slavery but housekeeping, child-rearing, young love in the culture of Puritanism, and other such homely matters. In those novels, the boundaries of womanhood, drawn as they are outside the straightjacket of the plantation economy, are more loosely defined. The sphere of woman, even as she must remain faithful to the idea of “true womanhood,” is expanded into spheres that overlap with each other and with spheres that men, too, inhabit. Here we might even see an early view of women’s worlds that it has been the work of more modern gender criticism to elaborate at least since Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s No More Separate Spheres!⁸ The nation, the broad Christian community, the local church, the family, even the relation between one man and one woman are variably constituted spaces that penetrate each other and reconstitute themselves as the occasion demands. It is only that Tomkins praises Uncle Tom because, as she sees it, in that novel such spaces are not constituted and reconstituted, and Tompkins’s comfort with, even her energetic defense of, the category of “woman” enables her to evade Stowe’s categorization of black women and white women, which in the most discomforting of ways Stowe too denies, but simultaneously asserts.

It is churlish, I know, to charge Tompkins in this way. Less churlish critics have rather complicated than attacked Tompkins’s view, in effect acknowledging her originary force even as they amend her. As the title of an important dialogue about the state of more current work on women’s writing puts it, women are rather such work’s “sponsoring category” than a category that can be drawn within fixed limits, and as Susan Fraiman, a participant in the dialogue notes, Tompkins is one of the chief sponsors, a claim acknowledged almost universally in the critical literature.⁹ After all, it is Tompkins, more than any other critic, who is to be credited with getting the scholarly community to look closely at Uncle Tom, and a certain polemical exaggeration in her style was perhaps just what was necessary to penetrate the hard carapace of the academy’s refusal to take the writing of women seriously. Indeed, as one early reader of this book has commented, I am not myself innocent of polemical exaggeration, in particular of taking Tompkins as paradigmatic of what is rather a more nuanced approach of feminists after Tompkins to Stowe even as I make Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin paradigmatic of a body of sentimental writing, including Stowe’s own, that is itself more nuanced than I seem to allow in Uncle Tom.

Yet it is not exaggeration per se for which I would take Tompkins to task. There is a good case to make for paradigmatic reading—it is clarifying; it makes assumptions visible; it does “work,” in Tompkins’s own formulation—which in referring instances to a generality, revealing an underlying sensibility, is inevitably a kind of exaggerated reading. As Faye Halpern has argued, the very force of Stowe’s unqualified style, her unshakable commitment to the cause of abolition and the sweeping away, in her rhetoric, of the kinds of scholastic distinctions made by the Ciceronian male orators of her era, are just what commend her to this day.¹⁰ So the exaggerations that I see in Stowe are to me not a fault, but the gauge of her deep understanding of a fundamental human aspiration, something like the aspiration, say, of Fenimore Cooper in giving us, in the hero of the Leatherstocking tales, that impossible but nevertheless compelling hybrid of the naturally civilized man. Or it is like the passionate but conflicted republican knot Cooper tangles in the Littlepage trilogy such that all the learned discriminations of a work like The American Democrat can not quite untangle it. And so, just as Tompkins finds Uncle Tom’s paradigm the strongest thing about it, I find Tompkins’s paradigm the strongest thing about her work on Uncle Tom, as well.

Still, to counter polemic with polemic, I also find that Tompkins’s paradigm obscures the paradigm that seems to me more basic to Stowe, the paradigm of a sentimentality that, qualify it as we might, remains too powerful to be obscured. Blaming individualist males for critical ambivalence about a book she thinks ought wholeheartedly to be endorsed, castigating a loner aesthetic, or even a capitalist commodification of the notion of authorship, Tompkins marks a line between an us and a them that is not Uncle Tom’s line at all. For to say, as Tompkins does, that Stowe offers a vision of a “new matriarchy … more disruptive and far-reaching in its potential consequences than even the starting of a war or the freeing of slaves”¹¹ is to resolve Stowe’s problem by changing her subject. Or, as we might put it, between Tompkins’s “new matriarchy” and Stowe’s “If it were your Harry, mother” is the distance of identity and division itself. Stowe invites her readers to engage a contradiction that in Tompkins’s reading simply vanishes. The impossible identification that Stowe demands becomes an only too possible identification of self, virtually, with self. Accordingly, to celebrate Uncle Tom as woman’s work requires a certain blindness to the collapsing of distance between different women that Stowe’s work rather assumes at its very core. And this collapsing, the collapse of what is true in it—that is, the truth of its ethical aspiration, the desire for a better world, for better human relations, of which it is the expression—into what is false in it—the mistaken conception of relations under which it labors, the fear of skepticism, as we termed it in our introduction, that humans, left to their own desires, might just not relate, which it attempts to suppress—will be the subject of this chapter.

I wish to discuss three major points: (1) the epistemological foundation of Uncle Tom’s sense of community, including the ways in which that epistemology is elaborated aesthetically; (2) how it is that, given her epistemology’s naiveté, Stowe can get away with it—that is, how Uncle Tom, for so many of us, is nevertheless moving or why, as my students confess, they really do cry despite their embarrassment at crying; and (3) the return of the repressed, Stowe’s confrontation with intractable doubt, with waywardness, with that love which is beyond epistemological reach, which has nothing to do with knowing what the other knows or, in the language of sentimentality, feeling what the other feels, and which thus paves the way for discussion of community as it is projected by the other novels with which we will subsequently deal.

“It Is Treated as a Reality”

Let us begin by looking at the oddity of what, in a strictly historical view, might appear as a straightforward enough matter, the controversy, upon its publication, that erupted over Uncle Tom’s factualness, in which Stowe herself was a chief participant. Given the political atmosphere, the furor might seem to follow almost as a matter of course. The essential dispute was over Stowe’s accuracy, with charges by slaveholders that she was too harsh in her portrait of slavery met by countercharges by abolitionists that she was too lenient and, not unexpectedly, by Stowe’s defense of herself that she was portraying things exactly as they were.¹² Clearly, each party wanted to put its understanding of slavery in the best light. Each wished to marshal such facts as it could command for its position, and surely, if one is arguing about slavery, one should get the facts about slavery right. Yet there is something disconcerting in the terms of the argument, a nicety rather beside the point that suggests a more fundamental confusion. And there is a confused something beside the point, too, in arguing a question of fact in relation to what, after all, is a novel, as if the distance between novel and document were another of the distances that Uncle Tom would seem to collapse. For attempting to adjudicate the particulars of slavery, even for the sake of objecting to them, is a strange direction of moral energy, and it is problematical at the levels both of ethics and aesthetics, and for related reasons.

First, at the level of ethics: surely it is unnecessary at best, insulting at worst, to argue any—at least any moral—position on slavery on the basis of anything other than slavery in its very idea. To worry the peculiar details of the “peculiar institution,” as the South called it, is to worry at shadows. It is already to miss the mark. If nothing can palliate slavery, nothing can vilify it either. Evil slave drivers are as little to the issue as happy darkies, and it is as irrelevant to the question of slavery’s legitimacy to argue the kindness of slavemasters as it is—say as in Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom—to argue the economic inefficiency of slave labor, as Stowe herself basically knew, which is why she is not afraid of giving us good slave-owners and racist abolitionists.¹³ But second, then, at the level of aesthetics, if the particular facts of slavery are not quite irrelevant to the legitimacy of slavery’s representation, neither are they quite identical with it, as Stowe also knew, which is why she wrote Uncle Tom as a fiction rather than as a history. Accordingly, that Stowe did, nevertheless, find the facts of such consequence bespeaks an odd displacement in the terms of her defense of herself, a displacement born, as we have seen it in Wieland, of identification itself. For it is as if knowing the facts and knowing the fiction, what Stowe would not—or, better, as a sentimentalist could not—know is that legitimacy is not a matter of knowing, or at least not a matter of the knowing of facts, at all. Facts, not the substance of ethics or aesthetics, are rather their condition. Perhaps we might say that facts are their object, their materials, or what they work upon. But they are not their subject. And so to confuse fact and fiction is to confuse everything, undermining, by entangling the criteria of their evaluation, the legitimacy of both.

To put this in other terms, what Stowe could not quite know is that the facts about slavery cannot be known in the same way as the fact of slavery. To know the fact of slavery really means, in the language of Stowe’s own new-light Protestantism, to be “convicted” of it. Indeed, representation—at least such a representation as we call the novel—is the expression of such conviction, the putting of fact into a certain human relation. But to express such an expression as a fact of the same order, to represent representation as itself what is represented, is to deny the importance of relations altogether. It is to identify the representer with the representation and the representation with the represented, so that the writer who writes about slavery and the slave about whom she presumably writes, no longer standing on either side of the work, disappear into it.

As Donald Pease has pointed out in connection with The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, it is thus notable that in the best actually factual accounts of slave lives of the period, the narratives written by ex-slaves themselves, the facts are distinguished most of all by their relative scarcity.¹⁴ This is something that most of us, perhaps attracted to sentimental community ourselves, have generally avoided registering. Any fact about slavery ought to be facts enough. Still, it is important to register the truth that, as opposed to the as-told-to narratives churned out by the various abolitionist agencies, these narratives display a reticence as remarkable in the opposite direction as is Stowe’s detailed rendering in hers. So, for example, in the very first scene of his account, the whipping of his Aunt Hester, Douglass turns away, so that he cannot report all of its particulars. Or later, as he comes to report the details of his own trials, he insists that because, for the most part, he was a house-slave, he did not suffer slavery’s worst outrages and cannot personally describe them. Strong on voice and weak on event, Douglass’s Narrative was a famous disappointment for the abolitionist movement. The tension between Garrison’s Preface, with its highlighting of slavery’s “instances of murderous cruelty,” and the body of the text, with its highlighting, rather, of “how a slave was made a man” (ch. 10) is palpable. Douglass refused to be an object lesson. Perhaps we should say he simply refused to be an object, refused to define himself in accordance wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Introduction
• 1 Two Senses of Knowing: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• 2 The Politics of Representation: The House of the Seven Gables
• 3 For Love Alone: Pierre
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint