Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Christine Gerhardt, Christine Gerhardt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110480917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America's most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ? including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

Part I

Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul

1Sentimentalism

Abstract: This essay delineates the conceptual underpinnings of sentimental fiction and reviews some of the most popular sentimental novels of the nineteenth century, including Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Maria S. Cummins’ The Lamplighter to outline the main features of the genre. Beyond conceiving sentimental writing simply as formula fiction, the essay considers sentimental texts as powerful interventions into social, cultural, and political discourses of the time with a particular focus on constructions of race, gender, domesticity, and women’s role in society. It identifies the “cultural work” (Tompkins) of sentimentalism in nineteenth-century American culture and fleshes out the ideological maneuvers it was enlisted for – the sentimental repertoire ranges from abolitionist slave narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to fictionalized vindications of slavery, such as Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride. In the sentimental vein, social reform and political change have been advocated and refuted. Finally, this chapter surveys the scholarship on sentimental writing – from the initial dismissal of women’s domestic novels as trivial and sensationalist to its recuperation by feminist critics and its more recent re-evaluation in the wake of the so-called turn to affect. Sentimentalism continues to be relevant in American literature and (political) discourses and is not (and never has been) limited to women’s culture.

Keywords: Sentimentalism; popular fiction; women’s writing; affect; reform

1Introduction

In U.S. American literary history, sentimentalism has frequently been used as a moniker for mid-nineteenth-century popular literature. Especially fiction written by women that focused on matters of familial concern/conflict and relied on a range of rhetorical strategies to create compassion, to foster sympathetic identification, and to emotionally appeal to its ostensibly mostly female readership has been subsumed under the arc of sentimental writing. The phenomenon, however, encompasses much more than the successful literary productions of what Nathaniel Hawthorne termed that “d—d mob of scribbling women” and spans a much longer time frame. Sentimentalism has its roots in eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, moral philosophy, and the cult of sensibility as it coalesced around the notion of the ‘man of feeling.’ At a distance to Enlightenment philosophy proper but still intertwined with the emergence of new forms of human subjectivity, sentimentalism envisions less the autonomous subject in the world than the “self-in-relation” and “the desire for bonding” (Dobson 1997, 267). It rose to prominence in the U.S. in the nineteenth century and interacted in vexed and intricate ways with the ‘cult of domesticity,’ its gendered and racialized regimes, (civil) religious discourse, and its national ramifications; ultimately, it became a “nearly universal discourse” (De Jong 2013, 2). In fact, one could argue that “[s]entimentality is literally at the heart of nineteenth-century American culture” (Samuels 1992, 4). U.S.-American sentimentalism is enmeshed in, though not necessarily fully aligned with, the ideology of separate spheres and the ‘cult of true womanhood’ (Barbara Welter) as it tends to position white middle-class women as the moral center of the family, community, or even the nation but, at the same time, securely within their ‘proper’ – read: domestic – realm. As such, sentimentalism has been primarily associated with women’s culture and popular entertainment and has in the past often been treated with neglect if not outright disdain by literary scholars.

Yet, as Nina Baym, Jane Tompkins, Glenn Hendler, and others have shown, neither is sentimentalism simply predictable, trivial, and sensationalist entertainment nor is it limited exclusively to women’s cultural productions of the nineteenth century. In fact, sentimentalism “runs through all political rhetoric in the United States” (Wanzo 2009, 17) and it continues to shape U.S.-American popular culture, literature, and political discourses to this day. And, despite its recuperation in literary and cultural studies, clichéd and dismissive notions continue to resonate in contemporary discourses on sentimentalism, as the highly gendered 2001 controversy between Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey shows. The controversy ensued after Franzen had criticized Winfrey’s pick of “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” (i.e. sentimental) novels for her book club while referring to his own writing as “solidly in the high-art literary tradition” (Franzen qtd. in Lea 2010). Even as this verbal exchange was quickly smoothed over, Franzen’s comment was reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century dismissal of feminine literary culture. That sentimentalism remains a useful category not only for gendered taste cultures but also for literary and cultural analysis is evidenced by contemporary scholarship on post-9/11 American literature and culture. Whereas Till Werkmeister, for example, examines the comeback of sentimentalism in American literature, specifically in the so-called 9/11 novel, Elisabeth Anker’s work reveals the inducement of “orgies of feeling” in the recent formation and articulation of a melodramatic political discourse (Anker 2014; Werkmeister 2013). The turn to affect in the social sciences and cultural studies has led to a reappraisal of sentimentalism and to an interdisciplinary broadening of scholarship on the sentimental in the last two decades (cf. Clough and Halley 2007, Gregg and Seigworth 2010).

2Characteristic Features and Sentimental Bestsellers

The recent resurgence of critical debates about sentimentalism can only be understood in the light of its nineteenth-century beginnings. The changing meanings of sentimentalism certainly make it hard to define sentimental fiction, even if one only focuses on its heyday in the nineteenth century. As Mary De Jong argues, “[s]entimentalism takes a multitude of forms, accommodating multiple internal contradictions and inconsistent manifestations that can reduce a scholar to tears” (De Jong 2013, 2). Understood as a rhetorical mode, elements of literary sentimentalism can be found in texts primarily and commonly categorized as romantic, naturalist, realist, or even (proto-)modernist. Sentimental literature is frequently defined through its use of rhetorical and literary devices that serve to generate compassion and seek to contribute to the moral education of its readership. These devices include direct address, clear and simple language, display of intensely affective states/ conditions, etc. and common tropes and themes such as “idealized intimate bonds, love won or lost, scenes of suffering and death and shared beliefs about human nature and morality” (De Jong 2013, 2) or “depictions of inherent goodness of human beings, the importance of emotional connection to others, and the power of feeling as a guide to right conduct for a vulnerable female protagonist as well as for the reader” (Williamson 2014, 3). In order to ‘move’ their readers, sentimental novels frequently use mediating figures (often women and children) to convey emotions, especially those of suffering. Sentimentalism at large develops its affective, social, and political power from a “fantasy of experiential equivalence,” which might foster processes of identification to create compassion but which might, at the same time, also obscure the very ‘real’ differences between, for example, a white female reader and an enslaved African American woman (Hendler 2001, 7). Readers may indulge in this imagined equivalence and indeed feel sympathy, but as several critics have noted, the texts always run the risks of not only bridging differences but rather negating them for the sake of embracing the idea of a common humanity and at potentially great cost for the ‘objects’ of compassion. It is for this reason that James Baldwin has famously referred to sentimental writing, somewhat counter-intuitively, as “cruel” and “unfeeling” (cf. Baldwin 1955, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”).

Sentimental fiction not only seeks to ‘move’ its readers affectively through a highly emotional appeal but also uses the display, creation, and calibration of feelings as a means to emphasize its strong claim to moral truth and authenticity. Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple was first published as Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) and opens with a warning and advice to its (female) readers: “For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of Truth is designed; and I could wish my fair readers to consider it as not merely the effusion of Fancy, but as a reality” (Rowson 2011 [1791], 5). Even as these kinds of paratexts may be read as strategies of legitimation in a larger cultural context shaped by skepticism toward fiction and its rather insignificant cultural capital, they nevertheless reveal a deep investment in didacticism. Their gesture of familiarity and even intimacy is often coupled with the epistolary form (though Charlotte is not itself an epistolary novel), which allows for intimate, even sensationalist and potentially transgressive disclosures to the reader in a quasi-oral mode. Throughout the novel, however, its heterodiegetic narrator repeatedly turns directly to the implicit reader and translates Charlotte’s experiences into lessons to be learned (cf. Herget 1991, 7), lessons in life and sensibility. The novel paradigmatically showcases the formula of the sentimental novel as it had been transported from England to the U.S. (Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, had popularized the term) and turns it into a specifically U.S.-American script of cultural work and social critique. Rowson’s novel of seduction also introduces cultural types, among them the British seducer and the French villain. It narrates the story of the 15-year-old schoolgirl Charlotte who elopes with the British Lieutenant John Montraville to America and then is left by him and his even more villainous accomplice Belcour to walk the streets of New York. Pregnant and destitute, Charlotte writes to her parents, yet her father can only reunite with her on her deathbed. As her baby, a daughter named Lucy, is born (the daughter survives and is taken back to England by her father), Charlotte herself dies. Montraville, upon his return to New York and upon hearing about Charlotte’s death for which he ultimately is/feels responsible, is remorseful, seeks out Belcour and kills him in a fight. He then turns melancholic for the rest of his life and thereby proves his own sensibilities with feelings of guilt and regret. In the end, it is suggested, justice is done to those at whose hands Charlotte has suffered, thereby creating a moral equilibrium and an affirmation of the proper kind of sentiment. The novel interpellates its readership into favoring a long-term commitment to moral virtue and compassion over short-term gratifications of a baser nature. Whereas the former is based on altruism and fellow-feeling, the latter gives in to selfishness of the kind that is manifested most profoundly in Belcour’s character, a man with a liberal education and wealth, but who lacks religious sensibilities and a moral education: “Self, darling self, was the idol he worshipped, and to that he would have sacrificed the interest and happiness of all mankind” (29). Belcour’s death, then, mirrors Charlotte’s downfall; both evidence “a striking example that vice, however prosperous in the beginning, in the end leads only to misery and shame” (90). In contrast to Charlotte breaking away from the guidance of her parents and teachers in the novel and thus experiencing her downfall, the narrative voice attempts to firmly guide the readers and to control them into having those ‘preferred feelings’ (phrased in analogy to Stuart Hall’s concept of a “preferred reading”) that the sentimental novel seeks to elicit from Charlotte’s tragedy. “I am writing a tale of truth: I mean to write it to the heart” (74). The huge popularity of the novel (superseded later in the century by two other sentimental novels, The Wide, Wide World and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; ↗15 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is reflected in a veritable Charlotte Temple-cult: Charlotte Temple turned into an iconic figure, and her fictional grave in Trinity Church became the destination of pilgrimages. Consequently, Leslie Fiedler referred to the book as a “subliterate myth” (Fiedler qtd. in Douglas 1991, viii) and Elizabeth Barnes attributes its success to its investment in new world nation-building (1997, 60).

Beyond a set of characteristic features, sentimental fiction holds a special place in the literary history of the U.S. as a “domestic genre and the first major mass-cultural genre in America” (Hendler 1991, 686). The genre’s U.S.-American history is usually narrated as beginning with the publication of William Hill Brown’s epistolary novel The Power of Sympathy in 1789 and thriving throughout the nineteenth century to become epitomized by books such as Susan Warner’s extremely popular The Wide, Wide World (1850), Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter (1854), or Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868/69; ↗21 Alcott, Little Women). Warner’s Bildungsroman “established the formal conventions of the classic orphan girl novel” (Sanders 2011, 24). It puts forth one of the prototypical narratives of sentimental fiction of family separation – “that of a young woman struggling to make her way in life without the support of a traditional family” (Crane 2007, 113). Ellen Montgomery, the protagonist of The Wide, Wide World, moves from urban to rural settings and back and forth across the Atlantic in her self-sacrificial journey toward a “feminine ideal of moral purity and selflessness,” (Crane 2007, 116), which provides her with moral agency though not with (civil) rights or power. While critics have argued whether she only learns to control her desires (and the infamously excessive bouts of crying) or to express them in less obvious ways (and thus potentially subverts the stereotypical roles of women in nineteenth-century fiction), as Stacey Margolis points out, they agree on the narrative of education and progress “from helpless orphan to self-sufficient evangelical Christian” (Margolis 2005, 52). Cummins’ debut novel The Lamplighter similarly revolves around an orphaned girl but arguably provides its heroine Gerty with more independence and authority compared to Ellen. In the beginning of the novel, Gerty lives with Nan Grant – a “horrid, wicked woman” (8), who ultimately throws her out on the streets. Trueman Flint, the old and lonely lamplighter of the novel’s title, takes the young girl in and becomes her “friend and […] protector” (9) who initially supports her religious, moral, and emotional education. Later, blind Emily Graham, who “never forgot the sufferings, the wants, the necessities of others” (23), helps Gerty advance her self-control, her faith in God as well as her “progress of knowledge” and offers her a “new home” – as already the chapter titles reveal (cf. chapters XI and XV). The development is signaled not only by her change of behavior and growing self-control but also through her name – she is now mostly referred to as Gertrude. “If I had not had sorrows,” Gertrude reflects on the necessity of her experiences and suffering for her personal development, “I sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editors’ Preface
• Contents
• Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel in the Present: An Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index
• List of Contributors