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Reviewed by:
  • Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses
  • Sara Crosby, NEH Fellow (bio)
Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses. Kristin Boudreau. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xv, 247 pp.

Sympathy's role in American literature has provoked some of the most contentious debate in literary studies for over two decades. The arguments about sympathy and sentimental literature have typically broken down into two opposed camps, or what Boudreau calls "the subversive-containment paradigm" (16). The "containment" line of argument follows Ann Douglas's skeptical approach, characterizing sentimentality as essentially conservative or politically quietist, while the "subversive" line takes sides with Jane Tompkins to recover sentimental literature's liberatory or even protofeminist functions. In recent years, under the influence of more racially inflected work, the binary has been refined from subversion and containment to subversion and colonization. The "subversion" side holds up sympathy's ability to create solidarity with the disenfranchised, while the "colonization" angle emphasizes its disciplinary function and its tendency to elide agency and (especially racial) difference and to colonize the subjectivity of its objects. Current criticism, however, has attempted to navigate this split by engaging sympathy as a complex affect producing a paradoxical literature with (in Glenn Hendler's words) an "internal logic" of its own that must be investigated on its own terms.

Sympathy in American Literature takes up this project and puts a new and illuminating historicist spin on "the paradoxes of sentimental culture" (167): Boudreau locates the interpretive tension between subversion and colonization, not just in the arguments of modern critics about early and nineteenth-century authors, but within the authors' perceptions of their [End Page 379] own work and authorial practice. The "earliest proponents of sympathy," she argues, had seen it as a "social panacea" capable of uniting a diverse people with ties of affection that mimicked the missing ties of blood. Later writers, however, began to worry about its side effects, namely its capacity "to reduce wonder to complacency" by eliding difference and instituting social discipline (xiv). Boudreau is able to make this developmental argument because, unlike many studies of sympathy in American literature that concentrate on limited spans of time, she affords herself an unusually broad canvas. Her study stretches from early American writers such as Hannah Webster Foster and William Hill Brown to luminaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, and the James family.

Yet in spite of this chronological range, Boudreau resists tracing a tight genealogy of sentimental texts or constructing an overarching theory of sympathy. She prefers a case-study approach, which allows her to examine how specific authors dealt with political or personal crises by working out their own negotiations between the "twin poles of sympathy" (xiv). In her introduction and first chapter, Boudreau sketches the disciplinary use of sympathy that later authors will react against and adapt. In this analysis of Scottish Common Sense philosophy and the early republic's seduction novels, she departs from Cathy Davidson's reading of the novels as subversive. Rather, Boudreau sees them as primarily regulatory—a less violent but no less coercive way to unite a recently revolutionary people under the sway of elite opinion. Chapter 2 examines a later adaptation of this sympathetic mechanism. Analyzing Nathaniel Hawthorne's reconsideration of John Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity," Boudreau argues that The Scarlet Letter deploys sympathy as a way of "binding together an otherwise dispersing population" (64), while at the same time attacking vague sentimentalism and strident or radical uses of sympathy. Chapter 3 addresses that subversive sympathy and maps its boundaries by juxtaposing the different versions of antislavery sympathy produced by Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. Boudreau deftly draws us back to the first drafts of Leaves of Grass and shows how Whitman's original wording reveals the poem as a work deeply about slavery and Whitman's projection upon and incorporation of the racial other. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin also appears as a work that colludes in the "erasure of all differences [End Page 380] between spectator and...

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