From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of American Sentimentality

REVIEW ESSAY From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of Alnerican Sentimentality HILDEGARD HOELLER Kristin Boudreau. ~vmpat~v inAmerican Literature: American Sentiments fromJefferson to theJameses. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2002. xv, 247 pp. $59.95· Mary Chapm.an and Glenn Hendler, eds. Sentimental Men: Masculini !y and the Politics ofAJrect in American Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1999. ix, 288 pp. $24·95· Joseph Fichtelberg. Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780-1870. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2003. x, 280 pp. $39·95· Glenn Hendler. Public Sentiments: Structures ofFeeling in NineteenthCentury American Literature. Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 200I.. x, 275 pp. $19·95· Mary Louise Kete. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and MiddleClass Identi!Y in Nineteenth- Century America. Durham.: Duke U niv. Press, 2000. xx, 280 pp. $79·95, $22.95· Lori Merish. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodi!y Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham.: Duke Univ. Press, 2000. ix, 389 pp. $24.95. J oycelyn Moody. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives ofNineteenth - Century African American Women. Athens: U niv. of Georgia Press, 2003. xvi, 2:08 pp. $40.00, $I9.95. Marianne Noble. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000. 258 pp. $24·95· ESQ I II. 52 14TH QUARTER I2006 339 HILDEGARD HOELLER Julia A. Stern. The Plight ofFeeling: ~ympat~ and Dissent in the EarJy AmericanNovel. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, I997. xiii, 3 06 pp. $52.00, $I9· 00 . Cindy Weinstein. FamiJy, Kinship, and ~?ympatl]y in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004· x, 243 pp. $80.00. III What is involved here is more like the agony of feminist criticism, for it is the champions ofwomen's literature who are torn between defending the quality oftheir discoveries and radically redefining literary quality itself. -Lillian S. Robinson, "Treason Our Text" (1985) In the I980s the rapidly emerging feminist work on newly recovered sentimental women writers of nineteenth-century America had reached an impasse so severe that critics were arguing about what to call the problem rather than how to solve it. In I981 MyraJehlen characterized this "paradox of feminist criticism" in simple terms: "The sentimental novels that were best-sellers inAmerica from the 1820s to the I870s were written and read mostly by women, constituting an oasis of women's writing in anA:merican tradition otherwise unusually exclusively male. But this oasis holds scant nourishment; in plain words, most of the women's writing is awful. "I A few years later, Lillian Robinson feared thatJehlen had "understate[d] the case": "paradox," no, she insisted, "agony" is the right word!2 What was that agony about? While committed to recovering this body of women's writing, feminist critics found it hard to explore within the critical paradigms they brought to the venture: twentiethcentury feminism, on the one hand, and a critical taste favoring realism and irony over sentimental expression on the other. Through both ofthese lenses it was difficult to appreciate either the aesthetics of sentimental fiction or its feminist potential.3 Due to this apparent mismatch between critics and recovered texts, it became clear that sentim.ental writing could not simply be included in an existing critical view ofAmerican literature. 340 FROM AGONY TO ECSTASY Instead, it demanded that critics fundamentally revisit the way they conceived ofAlnerican literature and literary history. This appeared to be a formidable task, and the critical work it stimulated relmained agonized all the way into the late 1990s. In Sensational Designs (1985), Jane Tompkins had forcefully intervened by emphasizing aNew Historical rather than aNew Critical approach to American sentimental writing and by questioning the very processes and standards by which some works were judged masterpieces and others not. She proposed that we explore the "cultural work" of sentimental fiction in order t'to move the study of American literature away from the small group of master texts." Such an approach implied an ambitious "redefinition of literature and literary study" that sees "literary texts not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order." "In this view," Tompkins contended, "novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to...