Response to the Responses

Further Responses to Marianne Noble on Stowe, Sentiment, and Masochism

Glenn Hendler, Michelle Massé, Elizabeth Barnes, and I are all in agreement that the politics and pleasures of sentimentality are issues with ramifications beyond the analysis of nineteenth-century American women’s literature; nonetheless, I do wish to suggest a few differences between us.

Though Glenn Hendler offers many admiring words, he does take issue with my representation of the dangerously private pleasures of sentimentalism and questions why critics like me (and Barnes) are so literal about the sentimental appeal to the body of the reader, and about the gap between literary presence and “real presence.” Surely, actual physical presence is not the only kind of presence a book can construct, he writes, and he wants to focus upon a different sense of “real presence.” He urges us to imagine a public body constructed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a reading community not simply rallied but actually brought into being by books like Stowe’s, which offered a new structure of feeling, a new framework in which to interpret experience. He argues that the book made possible a sense of the self as part of that public body. So, I understand him to be saying, when Stowe writes in the last sentences of the novel that “this Union is to be saved . . . by repentance, justice and mercy,” she implicitly constructs her reader’s experience in such a way as to make every individual’s feelings and moral actions part of the experience of a national body. ¹ Since obviously the body politic is not a modern invention, I am eager to hear more from Hendler on the kind of interpellation the nineteenth-century sentimental performs and the structures of embodiment it constructs.

In imagining this sentimental structure of experience, Hendler argues that sentimental authors did not separate feelings and language, affect and representation, as contemporary critics like me do. But I wonder about that. Do we know that nineteenth-century readers really believed (“the bedrock of reality,” Hendler writes) that a literary work cracked a whip in every household in the land? Surely they knew the difference between imagined experience and real experience as fully as we sophisticated modern critics do. Hendler, I suspect, means that they were less suspicious of imagined forms of reality than we are and less prone to ponder how metaphorical speech constructs reality. But I find that Hendler’s representation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics misrepresents my own experience. I, for one, am not really particularly inclined to the kind of literalism that I display in my essay. Rather, it was Stowe herself who took me down that path.

Anxiety over the gap between representation and affect pervades Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Consider the scene in which Tom is sold: “The trader and Mr. Shelby were seated together in the dining room afore-named, at a table covered with papers and writing utensils” (26). An unholy transaction is desecrating a sacred space; dining tables should be spread with tangible food that nurtures, not symbolic communications that alienate men from fundamental human feelings. The next chapter reiterates the notion that symbols representing the “real presence” of people create emotional distance. Mrs. Shelby asks who was “‘that low-bred fellow that [Mr. Shelby] lugged into our dinner-table today?’ ‘Haley is his name,’ said Shelby, turning himself rather uneasily in his chair, and continuing with his eyes fixed on a letter” (27). Evading the emotional repercussions of selling Tom by focusing upon a symbolic communication lead Shelby to deny that he is “at all partner to any unfairness” in the sale of Tom. “‘All fair,’ said the trader; ‘and now for signing these yer.’ Mr. Shelby hastily drew the bills of sale towards him, and signed them, like a man that hurries over some disagreeable business, and then pushed them over with the money” (26). In exchange for Tom, he receives “a parchment”—a symbol of his home. If Tom were physically present, Stowe suggests that Shelby would not be able to go through with this brutal economic exchange facilitated by symbols. Similarly, while this scene...