The Autobiographical Isn’t the Personal

The Female Complaint develops the pioneering idea of an “intimate public sphere” that Lauren Berlant began theorizing in her previous books. Individual chapters chart episodes in a history of “women’s culture” (the ideological and economic forces that since the mid-nineteenth century in the United States have encouraged women to overlook their individuality in favor of embracing one another as a class of persons presuming to share common experience on the basis of gendered embodiment), with particular attention to the role of affect generally, and sentiment particularly, in this phenomenon. Focusing on how women’s culture generates conventions and then repeats and adapts them, the book demonstrates how sentiment emerged as a discourse of authentic feeling (looking at master texts including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Show Boat, and Imitation of Life) and shifted toward a therapeutic discourse of feminine self-management and complaint (as in Now, Voyager, A Star Is Born, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil). Yet in addition to narrating a history, The Female Complaint advances and refines the relationship between intimacy and publicity in ways that suggestively rethink the category of individuality in late capitalism.

The Female Complaint is far less interested in saying that the personal is political than in understanding why making such a statement often feels undesirable. Its thesis is that the personal, under conditions of “lived liberalism American style” (146), is a category of collective rather than individual experience: “The autobiographical isn’t the personal”; “the personal is the general. Publics presume intimacy” (vii). The book’s ability to theorize the public sphere while keeping focus on identity implicitly and excitingly points its readers toward an analytic style for thinking simultaneously about the personal and social aspects of identity after the exhaustion of identity politics.

The book speaks of identity with strongly psychoanalytic cadences. For The Female Complaint, intimates and publics are sites of intense ambivalence, and as such, they absorb the contradictions of personal identity in social circumstances. The book carefully accounts for how ambivalence produces and sustains lives and worlds at the same time that it privileges this sustenance over politics. In Berlant’s words: “The displacement of politics to the realm of feeling both opens a scene for the analysis of the operations of injustice in lived democracy and shows the obstacles to social change that emerge when politics becomes privatized” (xii). As this quotation suggests, the psychoanalytic orientation of the book (which finds subject-sustaining value in seemingly petty triumphs) is tempered by an unmistakably Adornian critical method (which finds insidious consequences in seemingly trivial places).

Interestingly, the force that seems to work with privatization in Berlant’s account is genre, “the constantly emplotted desire of a complex person to rework the details of her history to become a vague or simpler version of herself, usually in the vicinity of a love plot” (7). But love, though generic, is not merely false consciousness, and the argument of this book is not that we just need to stop loving and start a revolution. The Female Complaint treats love with ambivalence, which is to say richness, observing that people and characters experience love incoherently — in some cases the incoherence is the point, in others it’s a side effect, in still others it feels or looks like coherence — and in all cases the fallout of this incoherence is unevenly distributed across social and political, as well as personal, worlds. (Berlant favorably cites Jacques Lacan’s infamous definition of love as “giving something one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it” [14]).

Offering an account of the form of love, the book opens nuanced possibilities for considering how a formalist turn in literary studies might not result (as some fear) in an apolitical aestheticism. Indeed, The Female Complaint goes so far as to consider sexual identity itself as a genre: “Something repeated, detailed, and stretched while retaining its intelligibility, its capacity to remain readable or audible across the field of...