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

3. The Art of Character in Louisa May Alcott’s Work

[65] xx 3 The Art of Character in Louisa May Alcott’s Work The Minister’s Wooing charts the triumph of the sentimental orator; Henry Ward Beecher embodies his downfall.But Louisa May Alcott has already foretold his defeat. Only a decade and a half separates The Minister’s Wooing from the “scandal summer”of 1874,when the alleged affair of Henry Ward Beecher with one of his parishioners riveted the nation and made people regret their previous susceptibility to this silver-tongued preacher.A few years earlier,Louisa May Alcott’s Work:A Story of Experience (1872) was published in a magazine edited by Beecher.Alcott did not single-handedly undermine the authority of the sentimental orator,but her novel allows modern readers to understand why this figure would soon meet with such skepticism.In this chapter I offer an explanation of why sentimentality loses its persuasiveness in the last third of the nineteenth century and how this process is hastened— rather than hindered—by some of its own practitioners.1 One of my claims in this chapter is historical: certain cultural developments in the last third of the nineteenth century led readers and listeners to distrust sentimental rhetoric. I show how the entry of middle-class women into the workforce,2 the new interest in parlor chapter three [66] theatricals and dramatic training,3 and, more abstractly, the shift from “character”to “personality”are reflected and reinforced in Alcott’s and Beecher’s sentimental writings. Yet my account avoids pinpointing whether the waning power of sentimental rhetoric during this period is caused by elements outside sentimental texts or by elements within it.The extrinsic and intrinsic cannot be separated because the historical developments that I focus on—such as the popularity of François Delsarte’s acting method and the decreased attention paid to “character ”—register within these texts.It is also plausible to suppose they are reinforced or hastened by them.These new textual themes come more and more to preoccupy their readers and cause them to question their previous susceptibility to sentimental rhetoric. Yet to suggest that sentimental stories and novels disappear toward the end of the nineteenth century or that sentimental rhetoric loses its ability to persuade each and every one of its readers even in this period of lessening influence is to speak falsely: Alcott’s Little Women has never gone out of print, and Beecher retained his ministry even after his trial.It seems more accurate to say that the power of sentimentality oscillates,and in the last part of the nineteenth century texts employing sentimental rhetoric did not move readers to the extent or on the scale that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had. The second claim of this chapter is a literary-critical one.If I am right about the oscillating power of sentimental rhetoric in the nineteenth century (specifically why this power falters once working women and white men start using it),we might want to revise what was itself already a revision in critical thought about these popular nineteenth-century American women writers. The historian Barbara Welter started what amounted to a critical industry with “The Cult of True Womanhood” (1966), which described how nineteenth-century Americans idealized the white middle-class woman into a pious, submissive, sexless creature . Literary critics took this idea of “true womanhood”and linked it to the “scribbling women” writers, whose apparently “separate sphere” allowed critics to discern the hidden rebellion that lay below the surface conformity of their writings.4 The “separate spheres” paradigm began to be strafed in the late 1980s and came under increased attack in the late 1990s. In 1989 the historian Laura McCall suggested that Welter had cherry-picked her sources when it came to identifying “The Cult [67] Character in Louisa May Alcott’s Work of True Womanhood” and its four pillars of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness; Cathy Davidson began dismantling this model as well as the association between women writers and sentimentality in a special issue of American Literature (1998),asking “why is the metaphor of the separate spheres both immediately compelling and ultimately unconvincing as an explanatory device?” (444). Collections like Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler’s Sentimental Men (1999) and Millette Shamir and Jennifer Travis’s Boys Don’t Cry? (2002) continued the job. But it has always troubled me that the wholesale rejection of the separate spheres model has a hard time...