Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism: Narrative Appropriation in American Literature

Notes

Notes 1 / Introduction 1. Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978), theorized that Western beliefs about the Orient were constructed entirely from Western perspectives and assumptions, leading to a dominant worldview based on “The West” and “The Other.” Said’s ideas have since influenced literary, social, gender, and race theories that posit that white privilege and heteronormative society also follows this pattern, creating Others out of individuals who are not members of the dominant, hegemonic group. 2. Famous examples of sentimental novels include Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1854), Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855). 3. For more thorough examinations of the cultural work of nineteenth-century sentimental literature, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985); Philip Fisher, Hard Facts (1985); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (2004); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism (1990); Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment (1992); Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (1996); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy (1997) and Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination (2011); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling (1997); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears (1999); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism (2000); Paula Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere (2003); and Laurent Berlant, Female Complaint (2008). 4. Building upon Weinstein’s argument, Carol J. Singley proposes that adoption— one method by which families are legally and officially expanded—is also a significant social construction in sentimental texts. In Adopting America (2011), Singley argues that adoption both redefines the family and reaffirms its importance as a social unit because “adoption may be represented openly as an alternative to biological kinship, or it may be designed as an elaborate fiction that replicates the biologically intact family structure it replaces” (6). The project of redefining the family, according to Singley, 204 / notes to pages 8–13 occurs on both an individual and a national level. The sentimental novel, with its frequent use of the adoption plot, fostered “a new republican conception of the family as a nonhierarchical group of individuals whose will to be together is at least as important as blood ties” (83). 5. In Sentimental Modernism (1991), Suzanne Clark effectively counters that sentimentalism was an integral part of modernism’s development that could never wholly be left behind: “Modernism rejected the sentimental, because modernism was sentimental . Modernism was still caught in a gendered dialectic which enclosed literature, making the text the object of a naturalized critical gaze” (7). Clark argues that modernism ’s attack on sentimentalism enabled the movement to establish a new form of literary criticism that was intrinsically gendered and heavily dependent on the very thing it denigrated. However, in order to define itself as a significant literary movement , modernism required something significant to define itself against; it needed the sentimental to provide an opposing system of values even as it held up true expression of human feeling as a test of its authenticity and the efficacy of the aesthetics endorsed. The sentimental became “a shorthand for everything modernism would exclude, the other of its literary/nonliterary dualism” (9). Michael Bell, in Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (2000), observes that despite its criticism of the sentimental , “the modernist generation also continued the transformation of sentiment into an implicit criterion of true feeling, a development which even now largely escapes recognition whether in the common language of feeling or in the specialist practice of literary criticism” (160). 6. The quotation used in the heading is from Meridel Le Sueur, “They Follow Us Girls” (1935), 7. 7. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” is the title of a report written and released in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor (and later a U.S. senator), and known more commonly as “the Moynihan Report.” In this report, Moynihan urged the U.S. government to adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the African American family, arguing that the real cause of the deep roots of black poverty arises not from segregation, discrimination, or a lack of voting power but from unemployment and the lack of a nuclear family structure. According to Moynihan, the structure of the African American family is unstable and “approaching complete breakdown.” Moynihan cites increasingly matriarchal African American family culture, where more than 25 percent of women are divorced, separated, or living apart from their husbands and in which approximately 25...