Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, and: Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Mary Louise Kete. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 280 pp. $49.95 /$17.95 paper.

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Lori Merish. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 389 pp. $64.95 /$21.95 paper.

Mary Louise Kete's book describes the "alien esthetic" of being moved by the sort of poetry composed by Mark Twain's Emmeline Grangerford (xi). She draws from work by Lewis Hyde, Marcel Mauss, and Mary Douglas to produce "a study that spans across the years from the formation of antebellum American culture through the aftermath of the Civil War" (7 ). In looking for a formal component to American sentimental practices, she ranges from the vernacular to the canonical and seeks to understand "sentimentality as a discursive mode that transcends the boundaries of genre and performs its specific cultural work through a shared set of formal features" (7). Part of what makes this study unusual is its inclusion of a nineteenth-century cultural artifact, the keepsake album she calls Harriet Gould's Book, which contains copies and original poems lamenting the death of children. Kete also reproduces material culture elements such as photographs of flowers made from human hair and of the gravestones of children, along with reprints of the poems engraved on them.

Kete moves from a "thick description" (following the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) of Harriet Gould's Book to more canonical accounts of mourning in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, as well as in the poetry of Lydia Sigourney and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Announcing that "sentimentality is the constitutive instrument of the middle class" (54 ), Kete is interested in what she calls "sentimental collaboration." She describes this as "the system of exchange in which evidence of one's affection is given in such a way as to elicit not only a return donation of affection but also a continued circulation of affection among an increasing circle of associations" (53). Writers like Phelps demonstrate the "success of sentimental collaboration as a means of reconstructing the foundations of society and the family, even in the face of profound loss" (100).

Kete's discussion of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn leads to the epilogue, titled "Converting Loss to Profit: Collaborations of Sentiment and Speculation." Kete concludes that

[i]f sentimentality facilitates the construction of a collaborative individual from the predicate of loss, so does speculation. . . . Both economies allow for the creation of something (self, class, nation) from nothing while hiding the limits these economies impose on who can participate in these constitutive rituals.

Her final sentences attempt to address this asymmetrical participation in a symmetrical balancing act: "The important difference is that if sentimental collaboration endows the self with subjectivity, speculation invests the collaborated individual with the economic capital it needs to act on the capitalist world. This American self, I have argued, can neither repudiate the circulation of affections through an emotional economy nor repudiate the circulation of money through a market economy" (186).

An economy of sympathy also inspires Lori Merish's Sentimental Materialism. She begins by identifying "affinities between market laws and middle-class personal life and tracing their political effects" (3). She grounds her reading of the politics of nineteenth-century women's fiction in an account of sentimental materialism and its origins in the philosophy of Adam Smith. Like Kete, Merish notes, "As a particular code of identification, sentimental sympathy can seem to neutralize the relations of political inequality it upholds" (3). According to Merish it produces a category she calls "sentimental ownership," a "fantasy of intimate possession" that can be "produced and sustained by laws and economic policies" (4).

A thoughtful and thorough...