The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism

Introduction

Introduction The most poignant moments in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are moments of touch. When characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel experience profound emotions, they are silent, but they are able to share their feelings through bodily contact. With a sentimental touch, characters and readers alike imagine they are experiencing unmediated emotion. For instance, after the runaway Eliza eludes slave-catchers by carrying her child across the icy Ohio River, she finds unlikely help from Senator and Mrs. Bird, who aid in her escape: Mr. Bird hurried her into the carriage, and Mrs. Bird pressed on after her to the carriage steps. Eliza leaned out of her carriage, and put out her hand,—a hand as soft and beautiful as was given in return. She fixed her large, dark eyes, full of earnest meaning, on Mrs. Bird’s face, and seemed going to speak. Her lips moved,—she tried once or twice, but there was no sound,—and pointing upward, with a look never to be forgotten, she fell back in the seat, and covered her face. The door was shut, and the carriage drove on.1 Words elude Eliza. We know by her touch, though, that she conveys heartfelt gratitude to Mrs. Bird and that the two women share an earnest sympathy. There is no difference between the hand of the slave and the hand of the senator’s wife; both are “soft and beautiful,” equal in value, exchanged freely and easily. Stowe does not describe Eliza’s thoughts, but rather narrates her bodily actions. We know only by her movements that Eliza is overwhelmed with emotion. Though Eliza and Mrs. Bird are on 2 / introduction opposite sides of a defining racial divide, a touching moment can overcome the power structure that would bring the nation to war. For the sentimental author, the body reveals a surpassingly deep truth. The most authentic, transparent mode of communication occurs with the touch of hands. In a perfect sentimental touch, meaning is produced instantly and unproblematically. I would like to examine another sentimental touch, this time in a novel that is rarely, if ever, discussed alongside Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) is known mostly for its satirical depiction of modern business life and its critiques of conspicuous leisure and consumption .2 George Babbitt, a forty-six-year-old real estate agent, lives in a dismal world of fetishized consumer objects. In modernist style, the text is punctuated with advertisement slogans and newspaper clippings . Babbitt realizes the falsity of “zip and zowie” consumer culture, but finally conforms whimperingly. Caught up in his own psychological crisis, he slips back to his ailing wife: Instantly all the indignations which had been dominating him and the spiritual dramas through which he had struggled became pallid and absurd before the ancient and overwhelming realities, the standard and traditional realities, of sickness and menacing death, the long night, and the thousand steadfast implications of married life. He crept back to her. As she drowsed away in the tropic languor of morphia, he sat on the edge of her bed, holding her hand, and for the first time in many weeks her hand abode trustfully in his.3 Babbitt’s revelation—the sudden revaluation and recentering of a life that seemed out of control—is made manifest through abiding hands. Even in a drugged haze, Babbitt’s wife acknowledges and trusts the silent return of her husband. Babbitt’s circumstances could scarcely be more different than Eliza’s—Babbitt suffers the middle-aged alienation of white-collar mediocrity, while Eliza represents the purest victim of the vilest institution. Sinclair Lewis’s figuration of transcendent touch is different than the pure version of emotional profundity that we see in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet, strikingly, Lewis deploys a sentimental trope to signal a tight emotional union. Though George Babbit and his wife are silent, readers understand that he has changed. The touch of a hand secures what was a collapsing bond between George and Myra Babbitt. Critical discourse has separated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Babbitt: Stowe’s nineteenth-century sensibility—marked most of all by a deep sincerity —sits in opposition to Lewis’s modernist irony. But in the sentimental introduction / 3 touch we find an uncomfortable alliance between these two radically different texts. The utopianism of the sentimental touch has transformed from a vision of overcoming social barriers to a...