Unmasking Criticism: The Problem with Being a Good Reader of Sentimental Rhetoric

There is a tradition of studies of the nineteenth-century "scribbling women," as Hawthorne called them, beginning with a personal anecdote. Here is mine. When I showed a draft of my dissertation on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott to a fellow graduate student, she fastened on the tone. Why are you writing about texts which you feel so contemptuous about? I had not been aware of my tone and worried my advisors would not be pleased. I tried to erase it through a lot of strategic copyediting (though re-reading my dissertation, I see it creeping in at the edges). Yet I have grown tired of finessing the problem: it seems larger than a stylistic tic. Why was I suffused with contempt for something that also fascinated me?

In retrospect, my contempt for these sentimental novels strikes me as an attempt to deny what was a more complicated reaction. Let's just say that I had fallen into the habit of using tissues as bookmarks. Many of us literary critics vacillate in our responses to sentimental rhetoric, I suspect—just not in public. The fact that we comprise different kinds of readers results in a confusing yet often pleasurable schizophrenia, though one that is very hard to acknowledge in a critical article. Models of reading that assume we are members of only one interpretive community or imply that we cannot have conflicting habits of reading simplify the actual situation. But although sentimental novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin make it likely that contemporary critics will experience a complicated reaction, it was much easier, at least for me, to focus on just one, and contempt was a particularly gratifying choice. In what follows, I will not only pay attention to the varied responses that sentimental novels evoked in me but also explain why I still end up suspicious of some of them even as I recognize that readers who celebrate these novels, including many of my female students, deserve more credit than I once wanted to give them.

June Howard's plea that critics of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction strive for neutrality—to avoid "slides into celebration or condemnation" (63)—testifies to a history of critical responses both emotional and extreme. Howard offers a glimpse as to why such reactions arise: "[Sentimentality] is condemned so vehemently in part because its critics feel implicated in it" (69). This remark contains suggestive wording: what does it mean for a critic to be implicated (as opposed to merely caught up) in what she studies? What can sentimentality do to the critic to make her feel guilty?

In pursuing this line of inquiry, I will mostly refer henceforth not to "sentimentality" but to "sentimental rhetoric" since "rhetoric" foregrounds the role not just of author but also of audience. How an audience reads a text changes over time as reflected in a question I've faced at almost every job interview I've ever had: "How do you get students involved in these nineteenth-century sentimental texts?" As we shall see, the better question might be, "How do you prevent students from getting over-involved in these sentimental texts?" Many of my students, especially the female ones, become much more emotionally involved in these texts than I do. From this last observation, we can see that audience needs to be studied synchronically as well as diachronically: how and why, for example, different contemporary readers react differently to a given text. To this end, I will use a taxonomy of audience developed by the narratologist Peter J. Rabinowitz, particularly his distinctions between three different kinds of audience: actual, authorial, and narrative. I shall explain these terms more fully below, but for now, let me say that every fictional text invites a given reader to become a member of the latter two kinds of audience (we have no choice but to be a member of the actual audience). How that person reads and responds to a text depends on whether she chooses to inhabit a given text's authorial and narrative audiences, although...