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Article Excerpt
States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. By Elizabeth Barnes. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. By Julia A. Stem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom. By Russ Castronovo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century America. By Eva Cherniavsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Stephanie Smith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics. By Lora Romero. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
The books under review here represent a controversial trend in recent feminist studies of U.S. culture and literature. (1) Some feminist scholars have complained among themselves that the landmark work of a recent generation of feminist critics that strongly influences all these books (for instance, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Laura Wexler, Lauren Berlant) (2) demonstrates a misuse of feminist energy insofar as the scholars critique and even castigate white, middle-class womens work and culture for its complicity with patriarchal and racist oppression. Other feminist scholars, somewhat differently, see the turn toward the study and theorizing of "gender" central to most of them as incipiently if not actually retrograde, a strategy that returns us to the old days when women, their works, lives, and achievements were ignored in favor of a constant, unselfconscious focus on the lives, works, and achievements of men.
Such objections are absolutely valid to feminist gender studies debates and to feminists ongoing commitment to theorizing and critiquing forms of gender oppression both old and new. But I would say that what is most exciting about the emerging trends in literary and cultural studies of the early national (1776-1820) and antebellum (pre-Civil War) eras is that they give us plenty of reason to see the solid value of at least some gender studies work to a feminist project. Among the books under review here, we can see that beyond the fights over whether the "feminization of American culture" (3) is a good or a bad thing (or even whether that is an accurate way to describe what happened in the antebellum United States), there is a much more complicated way to understand cultural productions of gender and their interimplication with particular, often racist and exclusionary, modes of national identity. Here the focus is less on the value of the role women played in mass culture, or the value of womens texts to literary canons. Womens importance as social actors is no longer debated but assumed. Instead, the questions focus on the nexus of gender ideology with the production of national or citizen identity: these texts ask us to rethink the relation of the gender/practices that "hail" (some of) us and the attachment of those identity/practices to national identity practices that exclude on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the name of universalism.
The books collected for review here mostly refuse to see gender or power in binary ways, insisting that we begin better to understand, as Lora Romero puts it, in Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics, "the complexity of authors social positionality and the volatility of the rhetorical, historical, and material circumstances compelling the authorial enterprise" (p. 6). As such, the books contribute to the dismantling of some of our most cherished assumptions about the "separate spheres," the idea that women and men had substantively-even near hermetically-different spaces for and discourses of power in the antebellum period. Elizabeth Barnes, in States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, provides a concise summary of the "separate spheres problem":
While the criticism often begins critiquing conventional antebellum views of white middle-class men and womens roles in American society (the idea that men inhabit the public sphere, associated with the antisympathetic market values of competition, capitalism and greed, while women become the guardians of the private sphere, characterized by Christian morality, self-sacrifice and maternal love), the analysis often ends by reproducing the dichotomies it is purportedly seeking to investigate. Although feminist attention to the nineteenth-century womans sphere" has helped readers better understand various womens experiences since the American Revolution, it has sometimes kept both readers and critics alike from examining the rhetorical strategies by which such categories as mens" and "womens" spheres are developed and maintained." (Pp. 129-30 n. 24)
One noticeable result of their attempt to construct models of analysis that move apart from a separate spheres paradigm comes in the way these critics and others engaged in this project have been able to shed light on the way that the social reproduction of separate spheres logic in the early United States worked on behalf of the construction and maintenance of an exclusionary civic logic.
The books I review here represent a collection of only some of the most recent studies emerging from a strong contingent of such "gender/sexuality/race/nation" analysts in early nation and nineteenth-century United States, which includes Lauren Berlant, Shirley Samuels, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Gillian Brown, Ivy Schweitzer, Amy Kaplan, T. Walter Herbert, Chris Castiglia, Bruce Burgett, and Kirk Savage in literary criticism; and Laura Wexler, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Mary Beth Norton, Linda Kerber, Susan Juster, Alex Nemerov,...
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