Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern (review)

Sentimental criticism has legs. That is the conclusion I drew from Faye Halpern’s wonderful new study. Almost forty years after Ann Douglas published her castigation of nineteenth-century literary domestics in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), and thirty years after Jane Tompkins came to their defense in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), Halpern demonstrates that the issues surrounding nineteenth-century American sentimental prose are still relevant for feminist literary academics. However, Halpern is less concerned with the what or the why of sentimentalism than with the how. How, she asks, have readers read sentimentalism, and in what ways has sentimentalism played a part in explicitly dictating those reading strategies? In addressing these questions, Halpern reveals much, not only about the sentimental novels themselves, but also about the biases and assumptions of academic criticism and university teaching.

The book begins with an exploration of what Halpern calls “sentimental rhetoric.” Although it has become standard fare to position sentimental authors and their literary themes in the domesticated space of the home, Halpern claims that such a move elides the extent to which these writers and their novels were “enmeshed in the public, male world of rhetoric and oratory” (xvi). More specifically, sentimental novels were a response to a problem that often beset male orators of the nineteenth century, that of “disingenuous eloquence” (2). As Halpern masterfully demonstrates, this concern dates back to the Ancients and can be witnessed in the Socratic dialogues. But given its particular relation to questions of transparency, “disingenuous eloquence” took on special significance for the developing American nation.

In chapter 1, Halpern follows the oratorical travails of Edward Tyrrel Channing, who, plagued by the fear that audiences might be persuaded to believe a falsehood, attempted to extirpate all art and passion from his own speech. Such an ambition necessarily led Channing into all manner of logical contortions, for if oratory lacks art, how can it be taught, as he proposed to do? According to Halpern, Channing’s attempt to defend rhetorical training while embracing the “natural orator” created an unsolvable dilemma that set the stage for a rival to the professional male speaker: the female sentimental novelist (19).

This rival is perhaps best typified in the figure of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, unlike Channing, preferred her orators deeply passionate and embodied. Her protagonists speak from hearts that never lie, that insist on the congruence of words and feeling. But as Halpern shows in her close reading of The Minister’s Wooing in chapter 2, Stowe herself was not immune to the problem of “disingenuous eloquence.” Recognizing that language can deceive, she often renders her most persuasive orators in silence, letting their bodies and sighs rather than their words attest to the authenticity of their emotions. In this way, she creates orators whose persuasive power rests in their corporeal presence more than in their language. The results are texts that forswear their own textuality.

For Halpern, Stowe’s novels represent the apex of sentimental rhetoric, but the genre would soon lose its ascendency, unable to sustain its promise of transparency in an increasingly modernized and complex world. Chapters 3 and 4 chart the decline of the sentimental orator, first in the literature of Louisa May Alcott and then in the fiction and personal history of Henry Ward Beecher. Central to Halpern’s claims is that the final third of the nineteenth century produced a new, more skeptical kind of reader. Influenced by Delsartism—a system of oratory positing that emotions sprang from gestures, not vice versa—this new reader could no longer place her faith in the authenticity of the body, which could be manipulated at will. Nor could she sustain the belief that the sentimental fiction of Stowe and others was spontaneous and unpremeditated. This realization continues to plague sentimental novels to this day...