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

In “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (The Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 [1997]: 295–320), Marianne Noble analyzes a rhetorical effect that she calls “the sentimental wound,” a bodily experience of anguish caused by identification with the pain of another. She argues that Stowe deliberately turns to a strategy of wounding her readers in order that they re-live their own experiences of pain, associate them with those of slaves, and consequently reject slavery viscerally. In appealing to the bodies of her readers, Stowe attempts to communicate a sense of the slaves’ “real presence,” by which she means a felt experience of them as fully human, embodied, emotional beings, neither purely body (as slaveholders represented them), nor purely soul (as many critics have argued). In arguing that this sentimental self is intersubjective and explicitly anti-individualistic, Noble reveals an unrecognized, important feminist dimension of the genre.

But there is a sexual dimension to the sentimental wound, which, she argues, considerably complicates any intent to celebrate its politics. Numerous testimonials from both nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers explicitly attribute sexual feelings to the reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Noble argues that the structure of sentimental wounding is in large part responsible for this response. Implicit in the ideal of wounding is a notion of total fusion of selves, and a consequently perfect form of communication without gaps between signifier and signified. And while sentimental discourse necessarily falls short of that ideal, it does function as a trope for the desire for real presence. A cluster of sexual images and tropes that Stowe uses inflects that language of desire, making it seem to express a desire for an erotic version of real presence, a sexual transcendence of individuality. This erotic discourse associated with wounding shapes the reader’s visceral experience of sentimental affect, so that reading the book can provoke a pleasurable sensation of eroticized suffering on behalf of slaves. Attributing the popularity of the book at least in part to this sadomasochistic pleasure, Noble concludes with a consideration of the political implications of Stowe’s exploitation of the pleasures of sympathy.