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Chapter 3 “the medicine oF symPAthy” Mothers, Sons, and Affective Pedagogy in Antebellum America It is important that the son be as much as possible with the mother. —“Training of Boys II” Good mothers alone make good men. —E. N. Kirk A boy . . . does not readily find the medicine of sympathy. —Lydia Sigourney As we saw in the last chapter, debates about discipline often centered on the respective merits of two approaches: corporal punishment and moral suasion. Many educators argued that physical discipline was particularly effective with boys because hitting a boy was speaking to him in a language he could understand : that of the body. The success of moral suasion, however, was not so assured. It could work only if both participants in a domestic disciplinary encounter—typically the mother and her child—possessed the ability to sympathize with each other. If one couldn’t “feel” for the other, then persuasion was impossible. The omnipresent antebellum image of the mother as a “fountain of sympathy” should have been reassuring to those interested in affective pedagogy. But many maternal advice writers challenged this belief about maternal affect; they were eager to show that the “all-sympathizing” mother was a sentimental fiction, arguing that mothers often needed the most basic of instructions on how to generate and perform sympathy in the management of children.1 Antebellum writings on the mother-son bond expose a fear about the consequences of boys’ nature, for if boys were “mischievous,” “troubled,” and motivated only by selfgratification , how could maternal sympathy—which relies on the moral nature of 44 “The Medicine of Sympathy” both the authority and her charge—be effective in managing them? As Foucault observed, the celebration of sympathy has been central to a discipline based upon “the affective intensification of the family space” (Discipline 109). It is easy to see, then, why domestic advice writers would be concerned, for they argued that the mother-son relationship was the affective familial bond most crucial to domestic and national stability. Critics often discuss the mother-child relationship without making the kinds of distinctions between male and female children made by many antebellum women writers. These authors saw the category of “the child” as complicated by gender and they revised sentimental conventions about the natures of mothers and of children. Like corporal punishment theorists, they discussed crucial differences between the affective capacities of boys and of girls, noting that such distinctions were essential to mothers’ approaches to discipline, even in ways that many mothers did not recognize.2 Among the numerous texts I explore, the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Sigourney perhaps best represent this revision. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which in many ways exemplifies the dominant form of antebellum sentimentalism in its celebration of the efficacy of domestic affect and motherhood, narrates the failure of maternal sympathy as a tool for managing boys. Possibly the period’s most dramatic commentary on the limits of sympathy, the novel features two idealized sentimental mothers who raise the text’s two most troubled sons. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Sigourney’s Letters to Mothers praises “mother love” as a powerful and redemptive social force, yet she shows it to be a fiction that bears little if any connection to the presence (or absence) of pedagogical sympathy within boyhood management. She believes that when a son is the disciplinary object, most mothers simply do not act in accord with the convention of the “all-sympathizing” mother. Along with their interrogation of ideas about maternal sympathy and boys, Stowe, Sigourney, and the other writers I examine make varied and contradictory claims about the nature of sympathy itself. Some believed it flowed naturally from mothers to all children and was therefore the most accessible and potent form of discipline. Others agreed it was an involuntary response but made an important qualification: it typically manifested itself only within the mother-daughter relationship. Mothers, they claimed, had an inherent tendency to disidentify with boys; given that the nature of boys was so different from that of girls and women, mothers distanced themselves from sons. These writers believed, however, that mothers could learn to generate sympathy, that it could be authentically performed if mothers recognized its disciplinary benefits. Though it might seem paradoxical given the many sentimental depictions of sympathy as natural and involuntary, these authors understood it as a learned, rational response to the problems of child management. [18.191.216.163] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01...

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