The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism by Aaron Ritzenberg (review)

From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) through Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Aaron Ritzenberg’s The Sentimental Touch examines how the action and meaning of touch in literature changed from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. During this period, “the utopianism of the sentimental touch [was] transformed from a vision of overcoming social barriers to a promise of intimacy in an anonymous world” (3). With the growth of managerial culture, the presumption that touch could connect oneself with others to inspire social change was undermined by the proliferation of disperse corporate hierarchies, and by the rise of literary realism. But importantly, Ritzenberg notes that with their rise, sentimentalism did not vanish. Rather, it was “used, reused, and disfigured during the rise of managerialism” (3). While critiqued—and perhaps manipulated—by authors such as Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, the sentimental touch persisted: even in the literature of realism, “as its appearance becomes rarer, its correspondence with a specific utopian ideal becomes more pronounced” (6). In this way, the sentimental touch continues to capture an idealism that seems loftier, yet more subject to manipulation, today.

Ritzenberg’s introduction sets up the primary tension between sentimentalism and managerialism. “If the sentimental body was transparent, legible, and intimate, the managerial body is opaque, mysterious, and unlocatable” (7). This does not mean, however, that these bodies are entirely separate from each other. As Ritzenberg notes in his first chapter, on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sentiment is an emotion managed by its authors: in Stowe’s case, sentiment is carefully deployed to train readers to understand the book’s political message. “Sentimental works show us the feelings of characters to manipulate our own feelings. … Sentimentalism, then, always has a certain political charge insofar as it is engaged in manipulating the real bodies, the actual lives, of its readers” (16–17). By showing readers the potential for radical politics through characters that are touched by slavery’s very resistance to touch, Stowe shows readers how to “properly” understand the world in which they live. It may “feel” spontaneous, but as Ritzenberg demonstrates, sentiment, like most “feelings,” are not exclusively self-determined.

In his second and third chapters, Ritzenberg explores how sentimentalism is critiqued by Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson. The promise of touch to connect people is particularly questioned by Twain in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), through Huck’s—and Twain’s—constant “stretching” of stories to suit their purposes. “For the sentimentalist, truth lies in the realm of the body. … By questioning the very possibility of truth, Twain questions the political potential of sentimentalism” (46). For Twain, touch is no longer sincere in its origins, a reflection on a rising culture that sees sentiment as a way towards productivity and profit. In Ritzenberg’s reading of Tom Sawyer, he sees both “cheap sentimentalism” leading to “abusive managerialism” (68). For Anderson, in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), touch is not only insincere, but a sign of dysfunction. Touch neither creates nor signifies solidarity, but anxiety; touch intrudes upon alienated characters who do not understand why they are being touched. As Ritzenberg writes, “In such a world, the sentimental touch should not work. An act where two characters share a single truth through their bodies seems doubly impossible. … The sentimental bodies in Anderson’s work are utterly lost in the modernist age” (81). Yet the presence of touch, no matter how awry, indicates that realism and modernism “hold on” to the sentimental in some way: even in showing how unsentimental the managed world has become, both Twain and Anderson manipulate sentimental tropes, including touch, to show the difference between the sentimental and the modern.

In the tension between the sentimental and the managerial, the managerial ultimately wins out, as Ritzenberg articulates in his reading of West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Managers come to deploy sentiment as a way to humanize their corporate practices; elsewhere, workers find sentiment to...