The Return to Sentimentalism in Antebellum Poetry Studies

A 2017 headline reads: “Merriam-Webster tweets definition of ‘snowflake,’ which is somehow a political act” (PenzeyMoog). To scholars of the written word, the premise that dictionary definitions can be political will not seem outrageous. But the tweet did carry more than a little dramatic irony. It explained that the use of snowflake as an epithet, generally hurled by conservatives at left-wing activists championing diversity, has a deeper history. “In Missouri in the early 1860s,” Merriam-Webster wrote in a complementary article, “a ‘snowflake’ was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people” (Merriam-Webster). As Jessica Goldstein has shown, lay definitions on UrbanDictionary.com quickly made note of the revelation. Above older definitions disparaging social justice advocates, a new, 2017 definition by a user named Lascaux Othello appeared: “Snowflake. Referring to someone, usually the Alt-Right, . . . whose immense white fragility causes a meltdown when confronted with the most minute deviation from orthodox White Supremacy. They often cry bloody murder when expected to give the most modest expression of basic human decency” (Othello). With a nod to the work of Robin DiAngelo, the definition makes snowflake the sign of “white fragility”: “a state” of “insulation” from “race-based stress,” characteristic of white communities in North America, “in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” (DiAngelo 54). Characterized throughout the 2016 election and in its aftermath as an emblem of liberalism’s addiction to empathy and individuality, the snowflake has, in an amusing turn, been historicized as a rather on-the-nose symbol for the trolls most likely to use it.

Yet the more immediate irony of the epithet, as a strategy for demeaning the left, should not be lost on us. No one has bemoaned the resilient sentimentalism of liberalism more than leftist scholars themselves. From Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) to Susan Stryker’s 1994 manifesto on “transgender rage,” the Gay Shame movement’s resistance to the commercialization of LGBT Pride as exemplified by Halperin and Traub, and Wendy Brown’s critique of tolerance discourse in Regulating Aversion (2006), the imperative to sympathize has been a subject of critique for a long time. Citing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-seller as a prime example, Berlant observes in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality (2008) that, while sentimental literature might elicit “fantasies” of political solidarity in readers, “the forces of distortion in the world of feeling politics that the citation of Uncle Tom puts into play are as likely to justify ongoing forms of domination as they are to give form and language to impulses toward resistance” (40–41). Such literature sets a low bar, in other words, by which fantasies of justice tend to become an end in and of themselves. And yet, against this familiar critique, a movement in scholarship un-allergic to the moniker of the sentimentalist has also been experiencing a resurgence as of late. Here, in a form of what Michel Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” a certain snowflakery is being recuperated (101).¹ The new scholarship invested in reclaiming sentiment continues to derive momentum from literature of the eighteenth century and antebellum period—eras in which sentimentalism served as a crucible for public opinion and revolutions in governmentality. Ramesh Mallipeddi’s Spectacular Suffering thus encourages scholars “to loosen the grip of ideological critique” in order “to engage more fully with sentimental mediations of slave suffering” (23). To dismiss sentimental appeals for political recognition [End...