Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism

Jennifer A. Williamson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813570594
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Today’s critical establishment assumes that sentimentalism is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode that all but disappeared by the twentieth century. In this book, Jennifer Williamson argues that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, she explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.

Williamson covers new ground by examining authors who are not generally read for their sentimental narrative practices, considering the proletarian novels of Grace Lumpkin, Josephine Johnson, and John Steinbeck alongside neo-slave narratives written by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. Through careful close readings, Williamson argues that the appropriation of sentimental modes enables both sympathetic thought and systemic action in the proletarian and neo-slave novels under discussion. She contrasts appropriations that facilitate such cultural work with those that do not, including Kathryn Stockett’s novel and film The Help. The book outlines how sentimentalism remains a viable and important means of promoting social justice while simultaneously recognizing and exploring how sentimentality can further white privilege.Sentimentalism is not only alive in the twentieth century. It is a flourishing rhetorical practice among a range of twentieth-century authors who use sentimental tactics in order to appeal to their readers about a range of social justice issues. This book demonstrates that at stake in their appeals is who is inside and outside of the American family and nation.

1 / Introduction

Contemporary beliefs about sentimentalism or “the sentimental” are that sentimentalism is an outdated mode of appealing to readers and to the general public. This opinion is largely influenced by the cultural sway of twentieth-century modernism, which asserted that sentimentalism portrays emotion that lacks reality or depth, falling flat in its attempts to depict real life and achieving only feminine melodrama. However, narrative claims to feeling—particularly those based in common and recognizable forms of suffering—have remained popular throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contemporary authors continue to portray the struggles of working-class families to survive economic hardships as well as immigrants who seek to overcome obstacles and rise above poverty and intolerance. They depict women who suffer at the hands of abusive lovers or make constant self-sacrifice to care for others. They describe African American men and women who strive to transcend historical and present-day violence, racism, poverty, and discrimination. There continues to be a fascination with the suffering of vulnerable individuals whose identities render them cultural “Others.” Authors writing sentimentalized depictions of suffering not only generate sympathy for their subjects but continue the nineteenth-century project of arguing for their inclusion in American culture and connecting them to American sentimental ideologies of the “national family.”¹

Because of its roots in the nineteenth century, contemporary authors self-consciously struggle with sentimentalism’s seemingly outdated gender, class, and race ideals. However, its dual ability to promote these ideals and extend identification across them makes it an attractive and effective mode for engaging with political issues and extending social influence. Common sentimental themes such as vulnerable womanhood, motherhood and familial responsibility, caregiving and domesticity, death and the fear of separation, and Christian salvation to establish sympathy for Othered members of society were formed in the nineteenth century but continue to hold resonance in the contemporary era. Sentimental literature not only helped mark private and public spaces, but it also redefined the family as more than just a biological or economic unit—by focusing on the bonds of feeling and sympathy that transcended kinship obligations, it bound the family in terms of affection and love. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, contemporary authors expand definitions of family and kinship in order to develop sympathy for those who have been cast as outsiders and Others. Although the middle-class (white) nuclear family remains the atomic unit of American national identity, contemporary writers continue to demonstrate the ways in which Othered individuals and groups parallel that familial structure, suffer in like ways, and create sympathetic, affectional bonds that connect these units into a larger, cultural family.

Thus, the nineteenth-century American sentimental mode appears in more recent literature than previously thought, revealing that the cultural work of sentimentalism continues in the twentieth century and beyond. From working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” to promote a proletarian ideology to neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery, this study explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental tropes and ideals. Contemporary authors modify the sentimental mode through narrative appropriation—adopting the perspectives and voices of Others and figuring them as legitimate objects of reader sympathy. Many current sentimental works appropriate the subjectivity of the Other in a form of colonial or postcolonial sympathy that assumes or critiques a universal Western perspective that believes its power of sympathy to be so strong that it can effectively inhabit the Others it seeks to help and improve. Through these methods, authors such as Grace Lumpkin, Josephine Johnson, John Steinbeck, Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison apply the rhetorical methods of sentimentalism to the cultural struggles of their age.

Nineteenth-Century Sentimentalism

Nineteenth-century sentimental novels relied on depictions of the inherent goodness of human beings, the importance of emotional connection to others, and the power of feelings as a guide to right conduct for a vulnerable female protagonist as well as for the reader. They helped create the American Culture of Sentiment and placed women at its center by focusing on their extreme vulnerability and their inherent moral qualities—and, thus, their ability to guide others to religious and moral righteousness.² As Jane Tompkins, Philip Fisher, Shirley Samuels, and many other scholars have argued, sentimental novels do more than just tell tragic tales of women in distress or who find comfort in their Protestant Christian beliefs. Such novels enact a form of cultural work by relying on emotional appeals to generate sympathy in readers. This sympathy serves a key rhetorical function that allows a text to generate compassion for its subjects and subject matter to promote emotional and moral education for the reader. Sentimental novels attempt to teach readers to “think and act in a particular way” (Tompkins, Designs, xi). The function of the events, scenarios, and symbols in the texts are “heuristic and didactic rather than mimetic . . . they provide a basis for remaking the social and political order in which events take place” (xvii). Working as a set of rules for how to “feel right,” sentimentality is “a set of cultural practices designed to evoke a certain form of emotional response” in the reader; this empathy enables the text to produce “spectacles that cross race, class, and gender boundaries” (Samuels, Culture, 4–5). Thus, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) can convince its assumed audience of white, middle-class readers to sympathize with the separations and suffering of enslaved African Americans in order to argue against the institution of slavery, while Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855) witnesses the sexual politics and structures of male authority that inhibit women as it argues for women as cultural consumers and economic participants. As the reader sympathizes with the suffering and moral education of characters in a novel, she transposes those lessons upon her own life and onto the real world, creating a metaphor through which she views her role in society and her potential for transforming that society.³

Rather than attempt to depict or reflect a literal version of reality, nineteenth-century sentimental authors were casting the symbolic details, characters, and ideas of their historical moments in a rhetorically transformative mode. In so doing, they created representations that became culturally embedded and symbolically concrete. Not only did sentimental novels deliberately employ clear, simple language and familiar themes to make use of the social and cultural resonance an author expected a particular trope to hold for the reader—the use of stereotype was a form of cultural shorthand for conveying moral purpose in parallel ways to religious texts such as Pilgrim’s Progress—but those symbols eventually became deeply embedded within American culture. Thus, nineteenth-century sentimental fiction accomplished a social transformation by which “the unimaginable becomes, finally, the obvious” (Fisher, Facts, 8). Although contemporary readers may now scoff at depictions of orphans, abandoned wives, fallen women, tubercular girls on their deathbeds, and angelic Little Evas, the symbolic meaning of a nuclear family, living in middle-class comfort, headed by a benevolent fatherly provider and motherly moral guide with clean, obedient children, remains in full force, as does the repeated vulnerability and risk to those—particularly women—who lose familial connection or exist outside of established social norms.

It is this potential loss of familial and social connection that drives the plot tension of sentimental texts. While the development of the individual and the self-in-society have long been recognized as significant (masculinized) themes of American literature, sentimental literature values and operates within a different social structure. Instead, according to Joanne Dobson, sentimental literature “envisions the self-in-relation; family (not necessarily in the conventional biological sense), intimacy, community, and social responsibility are its primary relational modes” (“Renaissance,” 267). The core of the sentimental text “is the desire for bonding, and it is affiliation on the plane of emotion, sympathy, nurturance, or similar moral or spiritual inclination for which sentimental writers and readers yearn” (267). Whereas traditional texts derive their tension from the possibility that masculinized qualities of individuality, freedom, and independent selfhood are threatened, the tensions of sentimental texts are created through a feminized identity construct in which familial and affectional bonds are threatened through death or separation—divine consolation is the only reparative for earthly loss—and human connections are idealized. The driving force in sentimental texts is the fear of loss, emotional connection, and the formation of utopian relationships that are grounded in affection and sympathy.

It is particularly significant to note that through a focus on sympathetic connection as a transformative social force, the loss of familial connection (and death, which is a form of family separation) as one of life’s deepest tragedies, and the idealization of affectional bonds, sentimental novels redefined the social structure of the family. Cindy Weinstein, in Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004), argues that the central project of all sentimental novels is the “making of a family” but that this construction is based on “an institution to which one can choose to belong or not” (8). Rather than define families on the basis of biology (or, to use Weinstein’s term, consanguinity), sentimental novels emphasize affection and adoption in the re-formation of the American family. Orphans, vulnerable children, and women move through difficulties in each novel, during which they form sympathetic kinship groups with new friends and adoptive families. These groups represent the ideal, sentimental family based on choice and affection, rather than biological imperative or economic obligation. Although many critics have credited the sentimental novel with producing the contemporary middle-class, nuclear family structure, Weinstein argues that sentimental texts also “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” (8–9). To make up for frequent paternal failure, the texts “advance a theory of mother love,” but most sentimental plots also require a protagonist child to be motherless (9). Thus, the sentimental novel must expand, through sympathy, the possibilities for who counts as family: as Weinstein draws it, “To extend the meaning of family is to extend the possibilities for sympathy” (9).⁴ This process of extending the definition of family to friends and adoptive families—to those with whom one forms affectional or sympathetic bonds—has radical transformative potential. The family has long stood as an ideological symbol for the national, political body, representing the units by which society is both formed and ordered. Extending the definition of family through sympathy—a process that crosses the gender, race, and class boundaries that delineate lines of Othering and nationalized social exclusion—also enables the transformation of the national family and national identity.

The Rise of Anti-Sentimentalism in the Twentieth Century

Because of its use of familiar imagery and simple language, because many of its tropes have become so commonplace, and because of its focus on feminized familial connection rather than masculinized individualism, nineteenth-century sentimental literature has often been labeled by contemporary critics as, plainly and simply, “bad” writing. Nathaniel Hawthorne may be the earliest, most famous critic of sentimentalism, writing in 1855: “America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied by their trash” (qtd. in Person, Introduction, 24). His assessment continued to be reiterated as a shorthand appraisal of sentimental literature or women’s writing in general. Throughout the twentieth century, the term sentimental has been used as a label for melodramatic, flat representations that are deemed unrealistic, unsophisticated, and unliterary. Furthermore, calling a work “sentimental” became a way to judge it, negatively, as feminine—whether written by a woman or a man—because of its association with emotion and other woman-linked themes such as domesticity or religion.

Perhaps the pinnacle of anti-sentimental critical assessments occurred with the publication of Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture in 1977. Although one of the first scholarly works to take sentimental fiction as a serious critical subject, it sees sentimental culture and fiction as failures because they use language that has “gone bad,” insofar as it has “utterly capitulated to the drift of its times,” and because they promote passive, domesticated Christian virtues that flatter women into accepting less powerful social roles within newly forming urban capitalistic societies dominated by men (255). Douglas’s criticisms have been subsequently countered by a focus on sentimentalism’s “cultural work,” but it is important to note that her judgment about the quality of writing is based upon a modernist critical perspective that changed the way literature was valued and cast sentimentalism as a particular violator of its aesthetic precepts.

Despite the phenomenal popularity of the sentimental novel and the cultural pervasiveness of sentimentalism in the nineteenth century, prevailing critical views hold that the twentieth century became increasingly hostile to the sentimental as a literary and political mode. Realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism set themselves in opposition to romanticism and sentimentalism, figuring the latter forms as feminized as well as lacking qualities necessary to understand contemporary life and the modern individual. Sentimentalism became viewed as the product of a bygone era, and twentieth-century writers consciously sought to move away from highly structured, moralistic presentations of social and religious life, de-emphasizing an individual’s ability to enact social change through moral rightness. Instead, modern authors tended to portray individuals with complex psychology who were subject to social and environmental forces that had overwhelming power to affect the course of their lives.

Rather than depict life in symbolic or idealized terms, realist fiction sought to represent faithfully the lives of ordinary people. Writers of realism engaged with and opposed the overtly symbolic and political stance of sentimental writing and reform novels, often figuring such debates in gendered terms. Naturalist fiction even more strongly opposed literary traditions labeled as feminine, including the sentimental novel. Such texts often depict the masculinized urban industrial world, city sprawl, and scenes of slum life through the experiences of the middle and lower classes. By portraying their modes of writing and their relationship to the social conditions of the new century as more real, more authentic, and more objective than sentimental writing, these writers argued that the sentimental novel no longer effectively captured either American experience or its cultural conditions. Despite realism and naturalism’s need for sentimentalism by which to define themselves against, authors of these genres self-consciously argued that sentimentalism had no place in the modern era.

Like proponents of realism and naturalism, critics view modernism as inherently anti-sentimental, disdaining the overtly moral and feminized novel of the previous era. Modernism—developed as a rejection of conservative realist values—encompasses the work of artists and writers who felt that traditional forms of art, literature, religion, social organization, and daily life were outdated because of changes in the economic, social, and political structures of the rapidly industrializing twentieth-century world. Although not a broadly antireligious movement, many modernists questioned the existence of an all-powerful, compassionate Creator, and one feature of modernist writing was to interrogate the accepted beliefs of the previous age. As an artistic movement intent on capturing the zeitgeist of the new era, modernism not only sought to embody the energies and experiences of the fast-paced industrializing twentieth century, but it also worked to dismantle previous understandings of art, literature, and society that loomed large at the start of the new age. One of its largest targets was sentimental literature, which had adapted Enlightenment values of sensibility in the nineteenth century and shaped the world through a feminized, religious, middle-class lens of Victorian mores.

The legacy of the modernist movement continues to affect literary criticism as well as popular understandings of art and literature today because texts are judged within a largely masculine tradition that values attempts to achieve “a timeless, universal ideal of truth and formal coherence” (Tompkins, Designs, 200). Sentimental texts fare poorly within this critical perspective and are often evaluated as lacking artistic value, only able to be judged as an artifact of popular, trite women’s culture, thus enabling a dominant scholarly narrative that twentieth-century authors all but turned away from sentimental forms and tropes, abandoning them under the censure of modernism’s growing influence.⁵

From Marxism to Sentimental Proletarianism: “All That Feel the Same, They Are Together”

By the mid-1930s, communist ideologies about social welfare and universal human responsibility to a collective well-being were broadly circulating in the United States because of an influx of radical left thinkers as well as the stranglehold of the Depression.⁶ Communism as a political movement was closely linked to the contemporary arts and literary scene throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. Proletarian literature was the term officially adopted by the American Communist Party to describe writing from the late 1920s and the 1930s that addressed concerns of the working class, the destructiveness of capitalism, and the potential for revolution. From the outset, Marxist literature and criticism were infused by communist class ideologies, integrating literary aesthetic with political theory. However, as the 1930s progressed, modernism’s influence began to affect the views of Marxist critics, spurring debate and creating a divide between those who focused on Marxist philosophy and those who increasingly emphasized Marxist aesthetics.

It might at first seem that Marxist critical emphasis on a text’s relationship to historical and material conditions as well as its political and social intent would have brought about a renewed appreciation for nineteenth-century sentimental writing because of its strong association with social reform. However, Marxist critics belittled women’s writing of the previous century—as well as the “sentimental”—for a number of reasons. For one thing, Marxists opposed sentimental fiction’s strong emphasis on Protestant Christian values and the social structures based on Christian belief systems that the novels often promoted. Marxism questioned religion as a bourgeois social institution that—along with legal, philosophical, and political systems—keeps unequal economic power structures in place. Even more damning from a Marxist perspective was sentimental fiction’s focus upon, promotion of, and—many scholars argue—creation of the American middle class. By repetitively insisting that women occupy certain kinds of spaces and perform specific behaviors and social identities, sentimental novels “both recommend and perform a middle-class . . . way of being in the world” (Baym, Woman’s Fiction, xxii).

Like the modernists and realists, Marxist writers and critics also participated in a gendered devaluation of sentimental writing. As proletarian writers responded to early twentieth-century economic crises and promoted social reform, they tried to capitalize on the rising influences of literary naturalism and realism to argue through fiction, poetry, and reportage that social and environmental factors—systemic abuses sanctioned and promoted by capitalism—lay at the root of working-class human misery. Such realism, however, was heavily masculinized: writers focused on male-dominated work spaces such as factories, mines, and fields, and the oppressed or triumphant worker was typified by a muscled, sweating, laboring male body that served to represent all workers and all parts of the working class. Sentimental fiction’s emphasis on the middle-class, bourgeois domestic space was considered feminized and trivial and was placed in opposition to the serious, masculinized, working-class struggle of proletarian texts.

This push for hard-hitting literary realism, however, left many proletarian writers open to charges of overdoing their depictions and of emotional falseness in their characters and plots. They were accused of writing sappy melodramas instead of what modernist and subsequent crit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread: Standing Together, Side by Side
• 3. Josephine Johnson’s Now in November: Not Plough-Shares but People
• 4. Caretaking, Domesticity, and Gender in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “His Home Is Not the Land”
• 5. Margaret Walker’s Jubilee: “Forged in a Crucible of Suffering”
• 6. Octavia Butler’s Kindred: “My Face Too Was Wet with Tears”
• 7. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Feeling How It Must Have Felt to Her Mother”
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author