Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture by Mary Chapman, and Glenn Hendler (review)

300 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 predictable qualifications, Bevis's book is an enormously useful one, that I expect to have many occasions to return to in the future. (ALAN BEWELL) Mary Chapman, and Glenn Hendler. Sel1time11ial Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect ill AmericQIJ Cult/Ire University of California Press. x, 288. US $50.00, us $19.95 One of the pleasures of reviewing a fine collection of academic essays like Sentimental Men is that, as a reviewer, one is obligated actually to read all of the essays in the anthology. And in this case, the task has been generally a happy one to fulfil, as many of these essays make original and persuasive contributions to the study ofnineteenth-century American sentimentalism. The anthology boasts three essays on the early republican period ('7871820 ), six essays covering topics from temperance narrative and abolitionism to funereal photography and literary sentimentality in the antebellum period (1820-60), and four essays with a Similarly diverse postbellum range, from medical practice and portraiture to entrepreneurial sentiment and naturalism. The 'point' of the book - if anthologies can truly be held responsible for making one general daim - is to demonstrate the depth of the American masculine encounter with sentimental ideology and discourse from 1780 to "900. EditorsMary Chapman and Glenn Hendler make the case for understanding sentimentality as constitutive of masculine selfrepresentation and culturalnegotiation. The book is thus a timelycorrective to the long-held view ofsentimentalism's essential femininity, and readers interested in the intersections of nineteenth-century sentimental discourse with configurations of race, dass, gender, sexuality, and authorship will find much in Sentimental Men to admire and enrich. Its contributors are some of the most exciting young scholars of American studies today. Most of the best essays in this volume maintain that sentimentalism is a genre, gender, race, and cultural sphere bending discourse of the emotive American self. The most original essay in the book, Scott Sandage'S discussion of the postbellum 'begging letter' in which down-and-out men (and their wives) solicited famous millionaires like John D. Rockefeller for employment and money, convincingly demonstrates how 'economic life was always both rational and sentimental' and that the begging letter 'reimagined the personal relationships created and severed by economic exchange.' Karen Sanchez-Epplermakes a similarly unexpected daim about antebellum funereal photography, arguing that in antebellum photographs of dead children we find not a ruptured family but a cohesive one: the 'capacity of drawers to become like graves, of homes and hearts to harbor loss.' In other excellent essays, Philip Gould analyses the eighteenthcentury attempt to theorize virtue through the historiography of King Philip's War, and P. Gabrielle Foreman discusses Frederick Douglass's sentimental abolitionist rhetoric. Many of the essays here are written from a queer studies perspective, the most noteworthy beingJohn SaiJIant's on the same-sex propensities ofearly republican abolitionist rhetoric. The elasticity of the term 'sentiment' therefore reflects and contributes to the unsettling of rigid sexual categories found in queer theory, as same-sex desire and affective simultaneity mirror each other in and as representation itself. Another frequent conceptual move in Sentimental Men is the deconstructive 'assertion and its negation' conceit of so much contemporary criticism. This habit is particularly on display in Martin Berger's essay on Thomas Eakins's late portraits, which argues without supplying much by way of evidence that Eakins's renowned realism actually depended on the sentimentalism he would disown . The collection's final essay, on arch-naturalist Frank Norris, finds sentiment at the core of his anti-sentimental naturalist project. This isn't to suggest that any part of this book is trite, only that some of its theoretical underpinnings have become, with use, a bit worn. Sentimentalism'sinfusion within so many precincts ofAmerican cultural life becomes a bit question-begging: that is, what isn't sentimental? If the sentimental seems to be everywhere - and on the account of this book and its '994 sister collection, The Culture of Sentiment, it is - then we need to have a more complicated anatomy of what sentimentalism finally is. Does the eighteenth-century epistolary sentiment of Charles Brockden Brown indeed form a continuum with the failed businessmen of postbellum...