The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (review)

The Female Complaint is the second in what will be a quartet of books by Lauren Berlant exploring the historical centrality of women’s culture to the production and organization of American nationality and political life. The series began with The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), followed by The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), which, although appearing second, is the third installment. In each of these books, Berlant tracks the cultural forms and circuits of reception through which the American public sphere became an affective rather than simply, or only, or even mainly an ideological or intellectual sphere. With The Female Complaint, Berlant concentrates on the early to mid-twentieth century and looks to “middlebrow” fiction by popular female authors and their filmic adaptations in order to track the productivity of sentimentality both as a resource for women in a world that too easily diminishes or dismisses their contributions and as a constraint on their capacity to imagine forms of social agency and belonging.

Berlant is one of the most influential scholars in American feminist cultural studies working today. Her work engages multiple fields, including feminist and queer theory, and demonstrates an impressive command of the intellectual archives of each. Richly theoretical, Berlant’s work is also attuned to the rigors of close reading and archival research. It is this combination that makes Berlant’s work important for historians too and that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries. The Female Complaint brilliantly exemplifies Berlant’s talents. Organized, for the most part, chronologically, the book moves through a series of chapters on such classics of American melodrama as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Show Boat (1926), Imitation of Life (1933), Now Voyager (1941), and A Star Is Born (1937) and concludes with two chapters in which Berlant assesses the political possibilities of more recent uses of sentimentality. Although each chapter is anchored by a discussion of a text, Berlant also offers extensive readings of their various adaptations, tracking the shifts in affective force and emotional meaning produced through their plot alterations and character changes. By following the additions and elisions of adaptation, Berlant reorients her object of study: rather than offering yet another literary study of twentieth-century American sentimental fiction, she instead examines the historical enactments of what she calls “intimate publics,” or those forms of collective publicity enabled by the mass media and organized through fantasy rather than ideology.

Berlant’s focus on the concept and enactment of intimate publics is the major theoretical innovation of The Female Complaint. The intimate public both challenges and extends the Frankfurt School’s work on publics and counterpublics. For Berlant, the concept of the counterpublic “underdescribes the dynamics of indirection and mediation” through which a public usually manifests itself (8). In Nancy Fraser’s terms, a counterpublic is defined by its marginal and subordinate position relative to a dominant public sphere and can be divided into “strong” and “weak” versions depending on whether the public is a “decision-making” one that addresses itself primarily to state institutions or an “opinion-making” one that engages largely in cultural production. Relative to its perceived strength or weakness, a counterpublic is, then, always either imminently or actually political.¹ Berlant’s critique focuses on the underlying assumption of a direct causal relationship between social antagonisms and the production of counterpublics. What needs to be taken more into account are the mediations and obfuscations of consumer capitalism and the mass-mediated national public sphere, both of which engender myriad and “imprecise” practices of identification and imagined belonging for people that often operate in contradictory relation to complex “environments of living” (9).

The intimate public is Berlant’s term for conceptualizing this less obviously antagonistic practice of collective public activity. The primary example of an intimate public for Berlant is “women’s culture,” the “first mass...