Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses, and: A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson's Correspondence (review)

We all know by now, or should, that literary scholarship tends to construct its own impasses and dichotomies and then discover them, with fresh wonder, in its varied objects of study. Much of the challenge and excitement of criticism, then, lies in the effort to find a way around the inherited routines of critical practice and to recover something of a text's idiosyncrasy and obliquity, its strangeness to prevailing models. Nineteenth-century American literature has its share of beguiling strangeness, to be sure, and in two recent works of Americanist scholarship we see the struggle between textual peculiarity and critical regularity fully engaged.

Kristin Boudreau's Sympathy in American Literature addresses the manifestations and civic effects of a language of shared feeling, which she describes as "the cultural fiction of a natural affection alternately called sympathy, charity, and sensibility" (x). Beyond all else, the breadth and historical reach of Boudreau's book is impressive. She attends to the language of sympathy in texts ranging from John Winthrop to the James family, and in doing so provides a valuable sense of sympathy as an American project both seminal and ongoing, apt to be tuned to new civic purposes at new moments of need. The book's willingness to consider the civic role of sympathy (often expressed through the language of "consanguinity") in the early American republic, before the ascendancy of the culture of sentiment, is particularly welcome. As the work endeavors to cover this wide terrain, though—offering readings of Winthrop, Jefferson, Hawthorne, Douglass, Alcott, Howells, and the Jameses—it finds itself traveling a number of well-worn paths. For instance, I share Boudreau's impatience with "the subversion-containment paradigm" bequeathed to us by the Douglas-Tompkins debate (16); but the book, while it declines to read sympathy itself as innately subversive or conservative, nevertheless persists in reading individual examples of sentimental practice precisely as either subversion or antiprogressive collusion. Too often the book's thought is structured by the inherited antinomies and easy oppositions of sentimental critique: "diffuse sympathy" vs. "actual social critiques" (165); "ideal sympathy" vs. "disingenuous sentimentality" (166); irony vs. sentiment (183–192). The critiques of sympathy that follow from these oppositions—that it elides difference in its drive for communion; that it is an act of class consolidation rather than cross-class exchange; and that it is, finally, self-serving—are by now the familiar ones. But if Boudreau's book lacks something of the sophistication and conceptual nuance of other recent works on sympathy (by Elizabeth Barnes, Julia Stern, and especially Glenn Hendler), it works quite admirably to place the language of sympathy within a much more extensive narrative of American civic life than we are used to seeing.

In A Vice for Voices, Marietta Messmer's focus is much more local. Her bracing and polemical contention is that Emily Dickinson's letters constitute no minor autobiographical addendum to the poet's work but a vital and central component of her polygeneric project of language-making, inseparable from the poetry, and in some senses—because Dickinson did indisputably intend these texts for an audience—more dense with significance. Messmer provides an exacting account of the presumptions that have falsely divided the work of Dickinson's fascicles from her often metrical, heavily-dashed, grammatically and syntactically idiosyncratic epistolary prose. This opposition, Messmer convincingly argues, obscures much of the genre-breaking force of Dickinson's forays into language. Her readings of editorial practice around Dickinson's manuscripts, and especially of the poet's drive to "textualize" her most impassioned relations (to Sue Gilbert and Higginson) are especially subtle and fine. If there is a problem with...