Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Lori Merish (review)

Reviews Lori Merish. SentimentalMaterialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, andNineteenth-CenturyAmerican Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 389p. Doreen Alvarez Saar Drexel University For about a decade, Americanists have been working on rethinking the meaning of the once-maligned sentimental tradition. A part of this larger project, Lori Merish's Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and NineteenthCentury American Literature will be most useful for scholars ofAmerican literature and scholars ofgender since it gives a sprawling and often tantalizing account ofways in which American commodity culture found its emotional expression in the sentimental forms of the nineteenth-century. Merish's primary project is to show how things became not merely things but incorporations ofboth text and ideology (particularly as these things are consumed by women in sentimental narratives): that is, as Merish says in the preface, the nineteenth-century prelude to the twentieth-century Cartesian cogito, "I shop; therefore I am." SentimentalMaterialism takes the reader on a chronological voyage through a variety of cultural expressions that reveal the economics of market culture as an underpinning of sentimentalism. Reasoning that the republican culture of the eighteenth centurymust be a prelude to the flowering ofconsumerism in the nineteenth , Merish, following the Frankfurt School, reads the Scottish Enlightenment as central to a rethinking ofthe relationship between capitalism and freedom. She links this idea to the beginnings ofthe sentimental narrative inAmerica, suggesting that women's political existence in the new republic depended on the organization offemale emotions through the trope ofthe domestic. By the 1830s, the fledgling nation had undergone significant changes and the elements ofconsumerism were feminized. Merish theorizes that religion played a role in the development ofcommodity culture, arguing that, contrary to received belief, there is no impassable gulfbetween materialism and revivalism. Through her reading of Peter Cartwright's Autobiography, she posits that nineteenth-centuryAmericans were exposed to the notion that the maintenance ofa certain style ofhome and the acquisition ofappropriate domestic objects were indications of one's spiritual standing. The work of spreading this gospel of religious comfort and decency devolved on women and was reflected in sentimental narratives. Building on her discussion of the psychology of caring for objects and home as part oflogic ofsentimental consumerism, chapter three makes the case that the SPRING 2002 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 105 creation of an emotional face for consumerism made consumerism's capitalist imperatives seem natural and human. The portrayals ofthis economy ofdomestic happiness hid a variety of unpleasant facts about the management ofa comfortable home. The drudgery ofdomestic work was painted as an outpouring of love and everything in a household, from pets to children to slaves and servants, was reconstituted as marginalized objects whose existence was refracted through and dependent on the sentimental vision. Because the human objects ofthe domestic sentimental vision are themselves subjects who participate in American culture, Merish balances the chapters on white women's sentimentalism with an examination ofthe sentimental strategies ofAfrican-American women. In the process ofincorporating the sentimental design , black women call into question the very basis ofsentimentality. Some, like HarrietJacob in Incidents in theLife ofa SUve Girl, subtly undermine the precepts ofsentimentality because the unpleasant realities ofthe slave situation force a reordering of the conventions to accommodate both truth and ideology. In stark contrast to those who accepted the implicit requirements of the dominant culture , SojournerTruth rejected all the ladylike underpinnings ofsentimentalityand found herselfcriticized by both white and black men. As a further exploration of the construction ofAfrican-American women's identity, Merish introduces subject ofcommodity through a less known text, Elizabeth Keckley's BehindtheScenes or, Thirty Yearsa SUveandFour Yearsin theWhiteHouse. Aslavewho became seamstress to fashionableWashington women, including and most importandy Mary Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln's wife, Keckley was able to manipulate both the practice ofdressmaking and sentiment. Like Keckley, African-American women appropriated fashion as "an alternative, competing register ofpublicity and social recognition" problematizing "binaristic constructions of racial embodiment" (229). African-American narratives such as those ofPauline Hopkins and Emma Dunham Kelley helped in the creation ofan African-American equivalent ofthe white sentimental female; this sentimentalized African-American female, usually a mulatta, provided a means forAfricanAmericans to participate in the same civic conventions that governed the social recognition ofwhite American women. Awash in a sea...