[In the following excerpt, Lerner discusses the reception of the sentimental style used in describing children's deaths and asserts that it has received more favorable attention in recent times because it has been linked with feminism.]

The whirligig of taste has performed many somersaults, but none more drastic than that concerning the sentimental child death. Sentimentality, which entered literature so self-consciously in the later eighteenth century, rode high in mid-Victorian times but by the twentieth century had disappeared from high culture, though it remained very much alive in popular culture—and the savagery with which [Aldous] Huxley and [F. R.] Leavis attack it may be partly directed at the “romantic” novels and tear-jerking films of their own day. Only in the last decade has there been a serious attempt to rehabilitate it.

The new case for sentimentality is feminist: it claims that the sentimental tradition is important because it is a way of empowering women. This view belongs primarily to American academic discourse, the tradition that it rehabilitates is above all that of the American sentimental novel, and the novel it concentrates on is, of course, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Much of the basis for this new view is set forth by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture, which maintains that sentimentality can be seen as “a strategy by which many women and ministers espoused at least in theory to (sic) so-called passive virtues, admirable in themselves, and sorely needed in American life.”¹ The most vigorous and influential proponent in literary studies is Jane Tompkins, whose book Sensational Designs defends Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with other popular women novelists of the time, against “the male-dominated scholarly tradition that controls both the canon of American literature … and the critical perspective that interprets the canon for society.” This tradition has “taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority.” In contrast to this, Tompkins argues that “the work of the sentimental writers is complex and significant in ways other than those that characterize the established masterpieces.” To do this, she quite explicitly shifts her literary criteria, seeing literary texts “not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order.” Seeing them in this way enables us to attach these works to “a cultural myth which invests the suffering and death of an innocent victim with just the kind of power that critics deny to Stowe's novel: the power to work in, and change, the world.” Stowe writes out of a conviction that “historical change takes place only through religious conversion, which is a theory of power as old as Christianity itself.” The sentimental novel should then be seen as an agent of cultural change which “represents the interests of middle-class women.”² This approach will enable the reader, if he lays aside his “modernist” prejudices, his bias against “melodrama,” “pathos” and “sunday school fiction,” to appreciate the sentimental novel on its own terms:

The vocabulary of clasping hands and falling tears is one which we associate with emotional exhibitionism, with the overacting that kills off true feeling through exaggeration. But the tears and gestures of Stowe's characters are not in excess of what they feel; if anything they fall short of expressing the experiences they point to—salvation, communion, reconciliation.³

The work of Ann Douglas, which lies behind this, is both more ambitious and more complex. Its argument that American mass culture in the twentieth century is partly a result of an extensive process of feminization in the nineteenth would lead us far from the present topic, and I will look only at her defense of sentimentalism as a valuable agent of cultural change, which is more qualified than Tompkins's. Douglas considers sentimentalism a way of protesting against “a power to which one has already in part capitulated. … It always borders on dishonesty, but it is a dishonesty for which there is no known substitute in a capitalist country.” And so she points out that “Little Eva's beautiful death, which Stowe presents as part of a protest against slavery, in no way hinders the working of that system”; and she is critical too of the language of sentimentality, which she describes as “rancid,” and contrasts with that of Romanticism, which though it may sometimes sound grandiose to our ears, has a relationship to its age that is fundamentally healthy. But she too treats sentimentalism as an aspect of feminization and an agent of cultural change.⁴

There is now quite a body of criticism that derives from and develops this position, treating sentimentalism in general, and Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular, as an intervention in American culture that sets out to resist its predominantly masculine and aggressive ethic. Gillian Brown claims that “abolishing slavery means, in Stowe's politics of the kitchen, erasing the sign and reminder of the precariousness of the feminine sphere.”⁵ Jean Fagan Yellin claims that Stowe's female exemplar, “powerless on earth, powerful in heaven, … is less an advocate of mundane emancipation than a model of heavenly salvation. As her conversion of Topsy demonstrates, she is a spiritual, not a political liberator.”⁶ And Elizabeth Ammons, too, defends the novel as a cultural intervention to which feminine values are central. Emphasizing the Christ-like qualities of both Eva and Tom, she treats this as part of the feminization of Christianity: since Tom's qualities are all feminine, she describes him as “the ultimate heroine of Uncle Tom's Cabin.” Stowe thus offers “the maternal Christ, the divine motherly love and light” as the means to “lead America out of the night of slavery.”⁷

The extension of this agenda from women's fiction to women's poetry is best represented by The Contours of Masculine Desire, by Marlon Ross, a learned and trenchant attempt to undermine the male canon of Romanticism and cause us to change drastically our notion of literary history. Corresponding to the rehabilitation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ross argues for serious consideration of a neglected phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, the rise of the “female affectional poets”:

Reclaiming these first women poets does not simply mean that we should attach them to the house of romantic poetry for the sake of liberal inclusiveness. … It means more fundamentally that we must re-examine romanticism itself, and enriched with the knowledge garnered from these recovered sources, that we must rewrite their history and in so doing rewrite our own.

The female poet closest to the concerns of this book is Felicia Hemans, whose celebration of the affections is explicitly linked by Ross to the feminine, and the modern refusal to take her poetry seriously is seen as “a way of fighting off the feminization of literature which is so integral and influential an aspect of the literary process since the mid-eighteenth century. By reclaiming Hemans' affectional poetics, then, we are representatively also reclaiming the power of the ‘feminine’ within literature and within ourselves.”⁸ At this point, Ross explicitly claims alliance with the agenda of Sensational Designs.

This campaign has not, so far, done much for the reputation of Hemans, but it has at least had the effect of bringing Uncle Tom's Cabin back into print and onto the syllabus of courses in American Literature. If the literary canon is now determined not by the judgment of the common reader with whom the critic rejoices to concur, as Johnson believed, but, as American professors universally believe, by the academic profession, then Harriet Beecher Stowe has rejoined the canon. How permanent this rehabilitation will be depends on whether the whirligig can ever be made to keep still. …

Notes

1. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977): (New York: Avon, 1978), 11.

2. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chapter 5, passim. [not in bibliography]

3. Ibid., 132.

4. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 12.

5. Gillian Brown, “Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): esp. 506.

6. Jean Fagan Yellin, “Doing it Herself: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Women's Role in the Slavery Crisis,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 94-95.

7. Elizabeth Ammons, “Stowe's Dream of the Mother-Saviour: Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Women Writers before the 1920s,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin; see also Mary Kelley, “The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home,” Signs 4 (Spring 1979): 434ff.

8. Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: 1989). I have thought it best to discuss a small number of critics carefully rather than attempt a survey of the feminist rehabilitation of sentimentality; but I will add Glennis Stephenson, “Poet Construction: Mrs Hemans, L. E. L., and the Image of the Nineteenth Century Woman Poet,” in ReImagining Women, ed. Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (Toronto: 1993).