Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Reviews Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature CINDY WEINSTEIN (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) fter nearly three decades devoted to the re-evaluationof sentimental fiction , scholarship no longer dismissesthe genre with the cavalier condeAscension of earlier critics. Yet considerablework remains to appreciate the art and ideas of sentimental novels, including exploration of how the genre seriously engaged canonical writers such as Melville. In Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, CindyWeinsteinsets out to demonstrate that sentimental novels are neither as uniformly constricted in ideology nor as debased in form as its critics still conclude. To that end, she examines sentimental texts in the framework of a wide variety of the other discourses through which nineteenth-century Americans debated the question of family, showing ways that this body of fiction functioned among other agents that debated the shift from a definition of kindred based in consanguinity to one based in sympathy and contract. Pierre comes in for treatment as a failed sentimental fiction,but not in the way that modernist Criticssuch as E 0.Matthiessen famously had it, nor yet in the way that Tara Penry has it in her fine study of Melville’s attraction to sentimental masculinity (“Sentimental and Romantic Masculinity in Moby-Dick and Piewe,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, University of North Carolina, 1999). The book takes for its method an enterprising blend of contextual analysis and close reading (a courtesy all too seldom extended to the sentimental) to explore different ways that the era produced and circulated sentiment. Between an introduction and short afterward (treating Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson), six chapters compare the model of family represented in sentimental novels (and one journal) with, respectively, models in maternal advice literature, family relations law, the debate over slavery,the genre of slave narrative, and radical reform history. In addition to the essay on Pierre, two others focus on a pair of bestsellers and a slave narrative, now in the reformed canon of antebellum fiction - Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide Would, and Harriet Jacobs’sIncidents in the Life of a Slave L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S55 R E V I E W S Girl. Other segments extend the recovery of the antebellum sentimental, begun notably by Nina Baym, Jane Tomkins, and Susan K. Harris, through attention to lesser known texts of fiction and nonfiction - Caroline Lee Hentz’s novels, Ernest Linwood and The Planterk Northern “Bride”; Mary Jane Holmes’s‘Lena Rivers; Nehemiah Adams’sproslavery fiction, The Sable Cloud; Mary Hayden Green Pike’s mixed-genre fiction Ida May; Lydia Maria Childs Romance of the Republic; and nonfiction that includes Solomon Northrup’s slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave; Frances Anne Kemble’s A Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839;and Stowe’s A Key to Uncle TomS Cabin. Weinstein’sopening chapter, “In locoparentis,” presents an elegant reversal of the presumption that sentimental novels parrot the message of advice literature and thereby reinforce the priority of the biological family and the mother. Although the novels offer rhetorical endorsement of the emergent family ideology, their absent mothers, inadequate fathers, and alternative forms of the middle-class family all go to undermine the ideal of consanguinity . The second chapter’sdiscussion of The Lamplighter shows that in the productive ambiguity ensuing from such cultural tensions both Cummin’sfiction and the developing field of domestic relations law assert the precedence, in some cases, of adoption or contracted family relationships over blood-family and the rights of the father. As law developed the concept of the “best interests of the child,” Cummin’s fiction develops the concept of what Weinstein calls “judicious sympathy,”an individual’s capacity to distinguish and react to the several demands others make on one’s feelings with a sense of the relative importance of those calls. What this means for Cummins’s sentimental heroine , in a world where family...