Weeping Men

Vicki Olwell Weeping Men (on Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making ofAnglo-American Emotion [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999]) In a day when George W. Bush can train his squint on his party's nomination for the national election and at the same time openly mock Karla Faye Tucker's last pleas to him for her life, there is a certain schadenfreude to be derived from the publication of a book that sets forth the history of public sympathy. Bush, the smiling face of crony capitalism with a three-digit execution count, might seem to reside outside the Anglo-American sentimental tradition that scholars have made so vivid during the last decade and a half. Julie Ellison's Cato's Tears and the Making ofAnglo-American Emotion thus startles by arguing that public malice, and public indifference to suffering, has been internal to the structural logic of sentimentality since the seventeenth century and still governs the emotional climate of civic life. Not long ago, sentimentality was the sanctioned object of critical derision—as modernism's foil, as the sign of rigor's demise and consumerism's triumph, as the collective trash heap of bathos, bad taste, and baroque syntax. More recently, sentimentality has been revalued as an extremely flexible and mobile rhetorical mode, densely woven through modem understandings of embodiment, subjectivity, domination, and politics. Jane Tompkins cast sentimentality as an oppositional discourse in her now canonical Sensational Designs, and ever since, feminist, anti-racist, and post-colonial interlocutors have pushed her initial formulations into greater refinement and have asked tough questions about sentimentality's implication in disciplinary practices, its construction of race, its collusion with the politics of empire, and the limits it places upon its subjects' capacities to reimagine and reconstruct the world. Until very lately, most work on sentimental culture has centered on women's writing and has depicted sentimental writing as a feminine form. Whenever a critical gestalt begins to firm into a truism, it does us good to kick against it, and critics have begun to question the conflation of sentimental modes with women's culture. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler's anthology, Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics ofAffect in American Culture, for instance, explores scenes of masculine feeling that our most illuminating theorists of sentimentality had left in the shadows. Ellison's book goes one further by arguing that a specifically masculine sentimentality gave rise to the public life of the emotions as we know it. 354 the minnesota review In contrast to scholars who have sought sentimentality in the literature of home and hearth, Ellison finds sentimentality in the foundational moments of our official political institutions. Pained male hearts and flowing male tears entered public culture, Ellison argues, during Britain's Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, when political parties formed in parliament and intervened in monarchical succession . By speaking offeeling, the new parties sought to shake their association with treason and conspiracy and to announce their ultimately disinterested concern for the national good, imagined in republican and parliamentary terms. Yet this new masculine subculture ofpoliticized affect was structured, Ellison argues, by an inherent contradiction between, on the one hand, the ideal republican's belief in the virtue of impersonal governance and, on the other, the affection he was enjoined to share with members of his party. The tense union between the law and the affections drives the Roman dramas of the period, which, Ellison writes, "are preoccupied with the national competition for the proper relation to sympathy" (29). Over and over in these plays, stoical fathers inspire their sons' reverence —for them and for the republic—by emotionally abandoning them in favor of republican principle. The sons are impressed with the authority of the republic, yet their emotional suffering casts a harsh light upon the cost at which civil authority is achieved. The dramatic plots through which the emergent Whig culture struggled to define a new way of feeling about authority thus contain within them—and indeed depend upon—a critique of civil power. Rather than amplifying this critique and advocating political change towards less cruel forms ofpower, though, the new literature ofsensibility held sentiment and republican rigor in a...