Sentimental Aesthetics

In a poem entitled simply "Woman" (1850), Frances Sargent Locke Osgood describes an idealized female figure in terms of her natural beauty:

She's stolen from Nature all her loveliest spells:
Upon her cheek morn's blushing splendour dwells,
The starry midnight kindles in her eyes,
The gold of sunset on her ringlets lies.¹

In sentimental fashion, the poem extols woman's aesthetic value and warns that the treasure of feminine grace will be destroyed if placed in "chain" to a masculine world of commerce and politics. The reader is cautioned to preserve woman's unsullied beauty within a hallowed domestic space:

Not thus forego the poetry of life,
The sacred names of mother, sister, wife!
Rob not the household hearth of all its glory,
Lose not those tones of musical delight.

Yet while the poem locates aesthetic worth in the figure of the sentimentalized, domestic woman, few contemporary critics of literature would find aesthetic value within the formulaic tropes or tripping rhymes of such a poem. Indeed, in the critical tradition of American letters, placing sentimentalism and aesthetics together constitutes something of an oxymoron. Critical judgments of the sentimental writing of nineteenth-century American writers, particularly the poetry and prose of the "damned mob of scribbling women," has been summary. Sentimental writing represents "an escape rather than a challenge," according to Herbert Ross Brown. For Ann Douglas, it is language "gone bad"—"rancid writing."² These assessments accord, broadly speaking, with the disdain in high modernist thought for both mass culture and the sentimental. As Suzanne Clark argues, "[T]he term sentimental marks a shorthand for everything modernism would exclude, the other of its literary/nonliterary dualism."³ In the past two decades, a burgeoning field of scholarship has focused on reevaluating sentimental writing, addressing in particular what Jane Tompkins has characterized as the "cultural work" of women's sentimental writing. Shirley Samuels's important collection, The Culture of Sentiment (1992), is representative of more recent assessments of sentimental women's writing in the United States that make the case for its cultural rather than aesthetic value.⁴ This vital and growing body of scholarship thus might be seen as itself emblematic of a critical divide between the evaluative standards of an aesthetic criticism—in which sentimental literature retains an aura of failure—and the standards of cultural studies—in which, by virtue of its pervasiveness and popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, sentimental literature is a wellspring of cultural meaning and value.

A number of critics have noted the divide between cultural and aesthetic assessments of sentimental writing and have, indeed, called for an aesthetic reassessment of sentimentalism. Joanne Dobson, for instance, argues that modern literary aesthetic approaches miss the mark, failing to understand that a quite different set of values influenced sentimental writers. "Historically, blanket condemnations of sentimentalism's 'unskilled rhetoric' and 'false sentiment' have misunderstood or trivialized its aesthetic purposes and/or focused selectively on exploitative or banal realizations of the tradition," Dobson explains. "With an awareness of the values and literary practices of the sentimental ethos, critical readers can recognize in accomplished writers the inherent effectiveness of sentimentalism's transparent language and the intrinsic thematic richness of its affectional tropes."⁵ Dobson thus indicates that a version of cultural relativism is necessary to generate aesthetic understanding and value for sentimental texts. Rather than deploying aesthetic standards ushered in with modernism and New Critical reading strategies, the standards of the period need to be exhumed and placed back into service. With nineteenth-century lenses imposed upon our glasses, we might thus be able to assign aesthetic, literary value to these texts rather than merely see them as examples of dominant (or subversive) cultural formations. Dobson's argument resonates with recent attempts within the broader field of literary studies to rehabilitate the category of the aesthetic in the wake of the "cultural turn" of the discipline. In the introduction to Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, Emory Elliott writes that reevaluating the aesthetic will...