Love's Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination

Introduction

(1) Introduction F or the past two decades, scholars of nineteenth-century U.S. literature have wrestled with the problems and possibilities presented by American sentimental culture. Alternately scorned as a superficial (and hypocritical) cure-all for social injustices and lauded as a radical intervention into the self-interested aims of capitalist culture, sentimentalism has evaded our attempts to pin down its particular (ab)use in U.S. society.1 I believe this is in part because sentimental narratives tend to work both toward and against an ideal vision of democratic community. In their invocation of empathy for others, nineteenth-century sentimental texts posit the potential for breaking down hierarchical structures to acknowledge the core suffering that all human beings, regardless of rank or position, share. Yet the fullest manifestations of empathy in these texts continue to operate across a status divide, albeit an inverted one: in sentimental narratives, as Lori Merish notes, the “weak” have ethical primacy over the “strong” by virtue of the former’s “intimate knowledge of suffering, a sign of Christ-like authenticity.”2 In the sentimental scenario, true personhood is attained not by social elevation but by encounters with pain, encounters to which the “strong” have access via their empathy with the “weak”: through their identification with the suffering victim, even the empowered gain “authentic,” “Christ-like” subjectivity. The emphasis on shared pain as a catalyst for achieving true personhood and democratic union complicates what Merish goes on to describe as the “civilizing” process of sentimentality, a process in which the aggression of the “strong” is sublimated “into sympathetic desire.”3 As I see it, in theirequation of suffering with authenticity , nineteenth-century sentimental texts implicitly (and often explicitly) authorize nonsublimated aggression as a means through (2) Introduction which redemptive suffering is brought about. “No pain, no gain” might be thought of as the colloquial, contemporary expression of an earlier sentimental logic that imagines violations to the bodyas a precursor to individual transformations. In the nineteenth-century texts I examine, such transformations do not, as one might imagine, constellate around the victims of violence, but rather the perpetrators of it. Aggressive expressions become the medium for spiritual regenerations that, somewhat paradoxically, produce theirown selflacerating effects.To put this another way: I will argue that it is precisely through their demonstrations of aggression that the strong identify themselves with the weak to become the self-proclaimed victims of the violence they employ. One of the claims of this book is that sympathetic identifications valorized in sentimental texts reveal and encourage a bifurcation of identity—specifically, a bifurcated white masculine identity —brought on by the witness’s or abuser’s empathy with the sufferer. This split consciousness allows the privileged protagonist to see himself as the “true” sufferer of his demonstrable expressions of power. To understand how violence gets folded in to sentimentalism ’s egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian U.S. culture. It is also to acknowledge the ways in which the material consequences of physical powerare obscured byaggression ’s ultimate translation into a means of achieving a more authentic life. As Philip Fisher usefully reminds us, the “vehement passions” (for example, anger, shame, grief, fear) produce self- and social knowledge.4 They thus constitute worthy objects of study for anyone interested in human nature and culture. But I am less concerned here with individual motivations leading to violent acts than I am with the sociopolitical structures, abetted by literary forms, that render the vehement passions a vehicle for ostensible democratic engagement and enhancement. Critics of nineteenthcentury literature have tended to think about sentiment and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Sympathetic interventions, Introduction (3) so the story goes, ameliorate the aggressive tendencies of the maledominated , competitive public sphere (with more or less success) by emphasizing the kinship of all humanity. Although women have traditionally been viewed as the primary torchbearers of sympathetic , Christlike love in the early national and antebellum periods, recent work on sympathy and manhood has shown males to be key players in America’s national, sentimental drama.5 What remains to be examined is the extent to which masculine aggression itself, rather than undermining the work of sympathy, contributes to and perpetuates a sentimental ethos. As I will argue, far from being opposing strategies, sympathy...