Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric

Notes

[165] [Notes] introduction: The How of Sentimentality 1. See, for example, Nina Baym, Joanne Dobson, Marianne Noble, Lora Romero, and Robyn Warhol (“As You Stand”). Dobson, Noble, Romero, and Warhol are discussed in more detail in chapter 6. 2. Andrew Lawson has also noted the derivativeness of Bowery culture in Maggie and attributes it to what he calls “class mimicry”: the attempt of the lower-class slum dwellers to mimic the language and external attributes of the middle and upper classes. Class mimicry, according to Lawson, was what the “charitable visitors,” middle-class women who visited the New York slums in the 1880s, tried to foster in the poor by making home visits and “performing middle-class identity”for the poor person’s benefit (Lawson 604). In return, the visitee would perform her own “grateful” response: as a result, “character itself becomes artificial, hollowed out”(Lawson 604). 3. This is a rich simile: it evokes the same kind of hypocrisy—a so-called penitent whose physical grossness signals his duplicity—that we find the mother guilty of (while reminding us of her Catholicism).This also achieves another kind of irony.It reminds us of portraits of prosperous burghers and other figures of the bourgeoisie by painters such as Frans Hals,suggesting the distance between the milieu depicted in these portraits and that inhabited by Maggie and her family.It also underlines the futile aspiration of Mary and her friends to be “respectable,” an aspiration embodied in the mock religious service that follows. 4.The scene does not just cannibalize “sympathy”; it also cannibalizes another preoccupation of sentimental novels.Sentimental novels abound in keepsakes of the dead, often a picture or a lock of hair. In Maggie, this keepsake comes in the notes to pages xv–4 [166] form of a wholly untranscendent “pair of worsted boots”:“I kin remember when . . . her two feet was no bigger dan yer tumb, an’she weared worsted boots”(67). Mary wants to put the boots on her dead daughter, to which her son responds, “Dey won’t fit her now, yeh damn fool”(68). 5.The famous phrase derives from a letter that Hawthorne wrote to his publisher William D.Ticknor in 1855: America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the “Lamplighter,”and other books neither better nor worse?—worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000. (qtd. in Frederick 231) chapter one 1. The subject of rhetorical training fascinated not just men but women (and not only upper-class women), as may be witnessed in Nicole Tonkovich’s “Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor,” which traces the many articles by Sarah Josepha Hale,the long-time editor of the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book,that sought to teach her female readers how to have rhetorical power. 2. Channing is actually much more skeptical about electrifying orators—the classical irresistible orator—than his predecessor,John Quincy Adams,who held them up as an ideal. See Potkay for an examination of Adams’s and Channing’s very different attitudes about the ideal of civic eloquence. 3. Why, though, does the problem of disingenuous eloquence become such a problem in nineteenth-century America? Although I do not have the space to pursue this question in much detail, I think it is plausible to see the specter of disingenuous eloquence as a consequence of or parallel to the rise of the confidence man and other symptoms of American class mobility and increasing urbanization.The confidence with which earlier generations associated eloquence with virtue becomes increasingly hard to come by.For an argument about the way in which the American middle class changed in relation to ideals of sincerity and transparency in the nineteenth century, see Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women. 4.Lawrence Buell,in New England Literary Culture,as well as Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, discuss the neoclassicism of nineteenth-century rhetoricians and orators. They also chart the decline of its influence as the century progresses. Buell sees neoclassical norms of speaking replaced by increasing vernacularization and hybridization,whereas Clark and Halloran see neoclassical values replaced by those of individualism and professionalization. [3.140.186.241] Project MUSE (2024...