Love's Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination by Elizabeth Barnes (review)

As I read Elizabeth Barnes's new book, Love's Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination, I was reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson's metaphor for the threat inherent in the experience of sympathy: "A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger they will drown him" (Emerson 324). The "sympathetic person" here seems to be the competent person—the swimmer among drowning men—able to keep the self alive in an alien element. If the person responds to the murderous appeal of drowning men with sympathy, will he cease to be a person? If he responds with self-defensive violence against the drowning men, will he cease to be sympathetic? Barnes restates what she considers "the dilemma that America yet faces" this way: The "reparative ends" of sympathetic identification "are too often bought with some body's blood," but how are we "to be redeemed— from selfishness, apathy, and/or existential estrangement—without it?" (174).

Love's Whipping Boy explores the full nature of this dilemma for the American imaginary over the course of four closely argued chapters. These treat a range of genres (novel, slave narrative, memoir, poetry) from the post-Revolutionary era through the post-Civil War era to push hard on the now critical commonplace that sentimentality plays a key role in the constitution and reproduction of American identity. What accounts, she asks, for the over-determined relationship between violence and empathy that so often results, in and out of fictions, in love being expressed as violence? The answer she proposes is that "concepts of violence and empathy" are linked in a mutually constitutive relationship through the operation of sentimentality in the American imagination (9). Emerson's sympathetic person might use violence to protect himself against the drowning men who "wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices" (324). Barnes's argument suggests that such violence is not only deserved but also essential for the constitution and continued existence of the sympathetic self as a person. The apparent dilemma between violence against others and empathy for others is a way of disguising, according to Barnes, that to be a subject of sympathy is to be both subject to, and an agent of, violence.

In other words, as Barnes puts it, Americans have needed both to have and to imagine being a "whipping boy" in order to create the kind of affective bonds that can counter an otherwise "existential estrangement" and to "substantiate a notion of American character itself as exceptionally empathetic" (174, 3). Barnes's trope of the whipping boy is one "who is to be flogged in the prince's place" so that "[t]he prince's body remains untouched, but his sensibilities are aroused and sharpened . . . through his identification with the boy who stands in his place" (9). She uses this trope to explain the way that "nineteenth-century sentimental texts implicitly (and often explicitly) authorize nonsublimated aggression as a means through which redemptive suffering is brought about" (1-2). This trope is apt because in this book Barnes is particularly interested in the foundations of an American sense of masculinity that judges men by the authenticity of their feelings and their potential for violence.

Starting with Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and ending with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women series, Barnes examines what can seem to be an uneasy or antithetical relationship between the exceptional violence and the exceptional empathy of the white, male, model Americans. Both of these chapters deal with the work done by the deaths of children. She revisits Wieland to make the point that the familicide at the center of the novel is both a way of producing and an effect...