SOURCE: "The Legacy of American Victorianism: The Meaning of Little Eva," in The Feminization of American Culture, Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, pp. 3-13.

[In the essay that follows, Douglas asserts that the complex politics of sentimental novels emerges from a combination of American capitalism and Calvinism.]

Today many Americans, intellectuals as well as less scholarly people, feel a particular fondness for the artifacts, the literature, the mores of our Victorian past.¹ I wrote [The Feminization of American Culture, in which this essay appears] because I am one of these people. As a child I read with formative intensity in a collection of Victorian sentimental fiction, a legacy from my grandmother's girlhood. Reading these stories, I first discovered the meaning of absorption: the pleasure and guilt of possessing a secret supply. I read through the "Elsie Dinsmore" books, the "Patty" books, and countless others; I followed the timid exploits of innumerable pale and pious heroines. But what I remember best, what was for me as for so many others, the archetypical and archetypically satisfying scene in this domestic genre, was the death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

A pure and beautiful child in a wealthy southern family, Little Eva dies a lingering and sainted death of consumption. Her adoring Papa and a group of equally adoring slaves cluster in unspeakable grief around her bedside while she dispenses Christian wisdom and her own golden locks with profuse generosity. The poignancy of her closing scene is in no way diminished by the fact that a good third of the story is yet to come, and must proceed without her. Little Eva's significance has curiously little to do with the plot of the book in which she appears. For Little Eva gains her force not through what she does, not even through what she is, but through what she does and is to us, the readers.

Of course any character in any book is peculiarly available to her or his audience and dependent on it. A book can be produced by the millions, as this one was. Simply as a character in a story, Little Eva is a creature not only of her author's imagination but of her reader's fantasy; her life stems from our acceptance of her and our involvement with her. But Little Eva is one of us in more special ways. Her admirers have always been able to identify with her even while they worship, or weep, at her shrine. She does not demand the respect we accord a competitor. She is not extraordinarily gifted, or at least she is young enough so that her talents have not had the chance to take on formidable proportions. If she is lovely looking and has a great deal of money, Stowe makes it amply clear that these attributes are more a sign than a cause of her success. Little Eva's virtue lies partly in her femininity, surely a common enough commodity. And her greatest act is dying, something we all can and must do. Her death, moreover, is not particularly effective in any practical sense. During her last days, she urges her father to become a serious Christian and to free his slaves; he dies himself, however, before he has gotten around to doing either. Little Eva's death is not futile, but it is essentially decorative; and therein, perhaps, lay its charm for me and for others.

Stowe intended Little Eva's patient and protracted death as an exemplum of religious faith, but it does not operate exclusively as such. Little Eva is devout, precociously spiritual in a way that would have been as recognizable to an eighteenth-century theologian like Jonathan Edwards as to the typical mid-nineteenth-century reader. Yet her religious significance comes not only from her own extreme religiosity but also from the protective veneration it arouses in the other characters in the book, and presumably in her readers. Her religious identity, like her death, is confused with the response it evokes. It is important to note that Little Eva doesn't actually convert anyone. Her sainthood is there to precipitate our nostalgia and our narcissism. We are meant to bestow on her that fondness we reserve for the contemplation of our own softer emotions. If "camp" is art that is too excessive to be taken seriously, art that courts our "tenderness,"² then Little Eva suggests Christianity beginning to function as camp. Her only real demand on her readers is for self-indulgence.

Stowe's infantile heroine anticipates that exaltation of the average which is the trademark of mass culture. Vastly superior as she is to most of her figurative offspring, she is nonetheless the childish predecessor of Miss America, of "Teen Angel," of the ubiquitous, everyday, wonderful girl about whom thousands of popular songs and movies have been made. Like her descendants, she flatters the possibilities of her audience; she does not quicken their aspirations. In a sense, my introduction to Little Eva and to the Victorian scenes, objects, and sensibility of which she is suggestive was my introduction to consumerism. The pleasure Little Eva gave me provided historical and practical preparation for the equally indispensable and disquieting comforts of mass culture. Perhaps Victorian sentimentality appeals to us not because it is so remote but because it is so near. Its products have the heightened and endearing vigor that comes from being the first of a line, but their line continues, unbroken if debased, to our own day. We treat Victoriana today with the same ambiguity we reserve for the consumer pleasures provided by our televisions, movie screens, and radios. Whatever our fondness for American Victorian culture, our critical evaluation of its most characteristic manifestations is often low. Terms like "camp" used to describe phenomena such as Little Eva socialize our ongoing, unexplored embarrassment. We Americans are, after all, the first society in history to locate and express many personal, "unique" feelings and responses through dime-a-dozen artifacts.

I will argue .. . for the intimate connection between critical aspects of Victorian culture and modern mass culture. Twentieth-century America is believed, if in pejorative senses, to be more "modern" than other modern cultures; nineteenth-century America was, in certain senses also usually considered pejorative, more Victorian than other countries to whom the term is applied. Even England, whose Queen was the source of the word "Victorian," was less entirely dominated by what we think of as the worst, the most sentimental, aspects of the Victorian spirit. It seems indicative, for example, that the Sunday School movement with its saccharine simplification of dogma found fewer obstacles and greater success in America than in England.³ Putting it another way, I might say that Vic-torian culture in England represented a complex and intelligent collaboration of available resources unparalleled in America. My point can be clarified by glancing at Victorian literature in the two countries.

England's major writers—Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot—dedicated their enormous talents to an exploration of Victorianism which, by the sheer fact of assuming its inescapability, complicated and enriched it. It was their treatment of their subject, not their subject, that distinguished them from other, less talented English writers. Even today they restore for us the context and possible seriousness of what are now more or less abandoned literary themes: feminine purity; the sanctity of the childish heart; above all, the meaning of religious conformity. In contrast, major American authors of the Victorian era like James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman turned their sights principally on values and scenes that operated as alternatives to cultural norms. Their subjects, as well as their styles, differed from those of many of their American contemporaries. They wrote dramas of the forest, the sea, the city. They sought to bring their readers into direct confrontation with the more brutal facts of America's explosive development. Thoreau, Cooper, Melville, and Whitman wrote principally about men, not girls and children, and they wrote about men engaged in economically and ecologically significant activities.⁴ When they treated Victorian mores, with a few notable exceptions they either satirized them or lapsed into pro forma imitations of conventional models.⁵ It was as if America's finest authors refused to redeem the virgin, the child, and the home from the isolation imposed precisely by their status as cult objects; they abandoned them to unreality. Here at mid-nineteenth century in America we see the beginnings of the split between elite and mass cultures so familiar today.

It is indicative of Victorian England's greater cultural cohesiveness that almost all the mid-nineteenth-century English authors we currently admire were admired by their contemporaries. In contrast, many of the American writers of the same period we now value were underrated and little read in their own time; those who, like Stowe, were highly esteemed are hardly studied today. Yet an examination of precisely what we dislike, at least theoretically, in the popular writers of the Victorian era—their debased religiosity, their sentimental peddling of Christian belief for its nostalgic value—is crucial for understanding American culture in the nineteenth century and in our own. The very ambiguity of our response is itself a motive for exploration.

Between 1820 and 1875,⁶ in the midst of the transfor-mation of the American economy into the most powerfully aggressive capitalist system in the world, American culture seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mother's Day. As the secular activities of American life were demonstrating their utter supremacy, religion became the message of America's official and conventional cultural life. This religion was hardly the Calvinism of the founders of the Bay Colony or that of New England's great eighteenth-century divines. It was a far cry, moreover, from the faith which at least imaginatively still engaged serious authors like Melville and Hawthorne.

Under "Calvinism" we can place much of what rigorous theology Protestant Americans have ever officially accepted. Until roughly 1820, this theological tradition was a chief, perhaps the chief, vehicle of intellectual and cultural activity in American life. The Calvinist tradition culminated in the Edwardsean school:⁷ most notably, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) and his friends and followers, Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), Joseph Bellamy (1719-90), and Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840). The Edwardsean school has often been mythologized, but, whatever its very real faults, it undoubtedly constituted the most persuasive example of independent yet institutionalized thought to which our society has even temporarily given credence. Its members studied together; they trained, questioned, and defended one another. They exhibited with some consistency the intellectual rigor and imaginative precision difficult to achieve without collective effort, and certainly rare in more recent American annals.

For some time, roughly between 1740 and 1820, the rigor exhibited by the Edwardsean ministers seemed representative of the wider culture or at least welcomed by it. Edwardsean theology, however, outlived its popular support. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in the twentieth, the vast majority of American Christians identified themselves as members of one of the various Protestant groups.⁸ Yet the dif-ferences between the Protestants of, say, 1800 and their descendants of 1875 and after are greater than the similarities. The everyday Protestant of 1800 subscribed to a rather complicated and rigidly defined body of dogma; attendance at a certain church had a markedly theological function. By 1875, American Protestants were much more likely to define their faith in terms of family morals, civic responsibility, and above all, in terms of the social function of churchgoing. Their actual creed was usually a liberal, even a sentimental one for which Edwards and his contemporaries would have felt scorn and horror. In an analogous way, Protestant churches over the same period shifted their emphasis from a primary concern with the doctrinal beliefs of their members to a preoccupation with numbers. In ecclesiastical and religious circles, attendance came to count for more than genuine adherence. Nothing could show better the late nineteenth-century Protestant Church's altered identity as an eager participant in the emerging consumer society than its obsession with popularity and its increasing disregard of intellectual issues.

The vitiation and near-disappearance of the Calvinist tradition have been sufficiently lamented, and perhaps insufficiently understood. The numerous historians and theologians of the last four decades who have recorded and mourned its loss themselves constitute an unofficial school which can loosely be termed "Neoorthodox."⁹ In analyzing Calvinism's decline, however, they have not examined all the evidence at their disposal. They have provided important studies of the effects of the democratic experiment in a new and unsettled land, effects all tending to a liberal creed in theology as in politics: immigration on a scale unparalleled in the modern world, huge labor resources facilitating rapid urbanization and industrialization, amalgamation of diverse cultural heritages often at the level of their lowest common denominator. Yet they have neglected what might be called the social history of Calvinist theology. They have given scant consideration to the changing nature of the ministry as a profession or to the men who entered its ranks during the critical decades between 1820 and 1875. And they have overlooked another group central to the rituals of that Victorian sentimentalism that did so much to gut Calvinist orthodoxy: Little Eva's most ardent admirers, the active middle-class Protestant women whose supposedly limited intelligences liberal piety was in part designed to flatter. As if in fear of contamination, historians have ignored the claims of what Harriet Beecher Stowe astutely called "Pink and White Tyranny":¹⁰ the drive of nineteenth-century American women to gain power through the exploitation of their feminine identity as their society defined it.

These women did not hold offices or own businesses. They had little formal status in their culture, nor apparently did they seek it. They were not usually declared feminists or radical reformers. Increasingly exempt from the responsibilities of domestic industry, they were in a state of sociological transition. They comprised the bulk of educated churchgoers and the vast majority of the dependable reading public; in ever greater numbers, they edited magazines and wrote books for other women like themselves. They were becoming the prime consumers of American culture. As such they exerted an enormous influence on the chief male purveyors of that culture, the liberal, literate ministers and popular writers who were being read while Melville and Thoreau were ignored. These masculine groups, ministers and authors, occupied a precarious position in society. Writers had never received public support; ministers ceased to do so after 1833 when the "disestablishment" of the Protestant Church became officially complete in the United States. In very real ways, authors and clergymen were on the market; they could hardly afford to ignore their feminine customers and competitors.

What bound the minister and the lady together with the popular writer was their shared preoccupation with the lighter productions of the press; they wrote poetry, fiction, memoirs, sermons, and magazine pieces of every kind. What distinguished them from the writer, and made them uniquely central agents in the process of sentimentalization . . ., is the fact that their consuming interest in literature was relatively new. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the prominent Edwardsean minister, Nathaniel Emmons, returned a novel by Sir Walter Scott lent him by a friend with protestations of genuine horror. A scant fifty years later, serious ministers and orthodox professors of theology were making secular literature a concern and even an occupation. During the same period, women writers gradually flooded the market with their efforts. While a female author at the beginning of the nineteenth century was considered by definition an aberration from her sex, by its close she occupied an established if not a respected place. The Victorian lady and minister were joining, and changing, the literary scene.

Northeastern clergymen and middle-class literary women lacked power of any crudely tangible kind, and they were careful not to lay claim to it. Instead they wished to exert "influence," which they eulogized as a religious force.¹¹ They were asking for nothing more than offhand attention, and not even much of that: "influence" was to be discreetly omnipresent and omnipotent. This was the suasion of moral and psychic nurture, and it had a good deal less to do with the faith of the past and a good deal more to do with the advertising industry of the future than its proponents would have liked to believe. They exerted their "influence" chiefly through literature which was just in the process of becoming a mass medium. The press offered them the chance they were seeking to be unobtrusive and everywhere at the same time. They inevitably confused theology with religiosity, religiosity with literature, and literature with self-justification. They understandably attempted to stabilize and advertise in their work the values that cast their recessive position in the most favorable light. Even as they took full advantage of the new commercial possibilities technological revolutions in printing had made possible, they exercised an enormously conservative influence on their society.

On a thematic level, they specialized in the domestic and religious concerns considered appropriate for members of their profession or sex. But content was not the most important aspect of their work, nor of its conservative impulse. Ministerial and feminine authors were as involved with the method of consumption as with the article consumed. Despite their often prolific output, they were in a curious sense more interested in the business of reading than in that of writing. . . . Of course involvement and identification between authors and their readers was characteristically and broadly Victorian. Henry James could rebuke Anthony Trollope for his constant asides to the reader, for his casual admissions that he was making up a story to please an audience,¹² but Trollope was in the majority. To ask a Victorian author, American or British, not to address his readers was a bit like asking a modern-day telecaster to ignore his viewers. Literature then, like television now, was in the early phase of intense self-consciousness characteristic of a new mass medium: the transactions between cultural buyer and seller, producer and consumer shaped both the content and the form. The American groups I am discussing, however, showed an extraordinary degree, even by Victorian standards, of market-oriented alertness to their customers. They had a great deal in common with them.

The well-educated intellectual minister of the eighteenth century read omnivorously, but the dense argumentative tracts he tackled forced him to think, not to "read" in our modern sense; metaphorically speaking, he was producing, not consuming. His mid-nineteenth-century descendant was likely to show a love of fiction and poetry and a distaste for polemical theology; he preferred "light" to "heavy" reading. By the same token, numerous observers remarked on the fact that countless young Victorian women spent much of their middle-class girlhoods prostrate on chaise lounges with their heads buried in "worthless" novels. Their grandmothers, the critics insinuated, had spent their time studying the Bible and performing useful household chores. "Reading" in its new form was many things; among them it was an occupation for the unemployed, narcissistic self-education for those excluded from the harsh school of practical competition. Literary men of the cloth and middle-class women writers of the Victorian period knew from firsthand evidence that literature was functioning more and more as a form of leisure, a complicated mass dream-life in the busiest, most wide-awake society in the world. They could not be altogether ignorant that literature was revealing and supporting a special class, a class defined less by what its members produced than by what they consumed. When the minister and the lady put pen to paper, they had ever in their minds their reading counterparts; the small scale, the intimate scenes, the chatty tone of many of their works complement the presumably comfortable posture and domestic backdrop of their readers. They wrote not just to win adherents to their views, but to make converts to literature, to sustain and encourage the habit of reading itself.¹³ Inevitably more serious writers like Melville attempted alternately to re-educate, defy, and ignore a public addicted to the absorption of sentimental fare.

To suggest that problems of professional class or sexual status played a part in the creation and character of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture is not, hopefully, to suggest a conspiracy view of history. The ministers and women I am considering were intent on claiming culture as their peculiar property, one conferring on them a special duty and prerogative. They were rightly insecure about their position in the broader society; they sought to gain indirect and compensatory control. Yet they were not insincere, ill-intentioned, or simple-minded. It must be remembered how these people saw themselves, and with what reason: they were Christians reinterpreting their faith as best they could in terms of the needs of their society. Their conscious motives were good—even praiseworthy; their effects were not altogether bad. Under the sanction of sentimentalism, lady and clergyman were able to cross the cruel lines laid down by sexual stereotyping in ways that were clearly historically important and undoubtedly personally fulfilling. She could become aggressive, even angry, in the name of various holy causes; he could become gentle, even nurturing, for the sake of moral overseeing, Whatever their ambiguities of motivation, both believed they had a genuine redemptive mission in their society: to propagate the potentially matriarchal virtues of nurture, generosity, and acceptance; to create the "culture of the feelings" that John Stuart Mill was to find during the same period in Wordsworth.¹⁴ It is hardly alto-gether their fault that their efforts intensified sentimental rather than matriarchal values.

Moreover, whatever the errors of the sentimentalists, they paid for them. The losses sustained by the ministers and the women involved, as well as by the culture which was their arena, were enormous. The case of the ministers is clear-cut; they lost status and respect. The case of the women is equally painful, but more difficult to discuss, especially in the atmosphere of controversy that attends feminist argument today. I must add a personal note here. As I researched and wrote [The Feminization of American Culture] I experienced a confusion which perhaps other women scholars have felt in recent years. I expected to find my fathers and my mothers; instead I discovered my fathers and my sisters. The best of the men had access to solutions, and occasionally inspiring ones, which I appropriate only with the anxiety and effort that attend genuine aspiration. The problems of the women correspond to mine with a frightening accuracy that seems to set us outside the processes of history; the answers of even the finest of them were often mine, and sometimes largely unacceptable to me. I am tempted to account my response socialization, if not treachery. Siding with the enemy. But I think that is wrong.

I have a respect for so-called "toughness," not as a good in itself, not isolated and reified as it so often is in male-dominated cultures, but as the necessary preservative for all virtues, even those of gentleness and generosity. My respect is deeply ingrained; my commitment to feminism requires that I explore it, not that I abjure it. Much more important, it does no good to shirk the fact that nineteenth-century American society tried to damage women like Harriet Beecher Stowe—and succeeded. It is undeniable that the oppressed preserved, and were intended to preserve, crucial values threatened in the larger culture. But it is equally true that no one would protest oppression with fervor or justification if it did not in part accomplish its object: the curtailment of the possibilities of growth for significant portions of a given community. Nineteenth-century American women were oppressed, and damaged; inevitably, the influence they exerted in turn on their society was not altogether beneficial. The cruelest aspect of the process of oppression is the logic by which it forces its objects to be oppressive in turn, to do the dirty work of their society in several senses. Melville put the matter well: weakness, or even "depravity in the oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, as being, in a large degree, the effect and not the cause of oppression."¹⁵ To view the victims of oppression sim-ply as martyrs and heroes, however, undeniably heroic and martyred as they often were, is only to perpetuate the sentimental heresy I am attempting to study here.

I have been more interested in the effects than in the conscious motives of the women and ministers under consideration, for there is no better indication of their dilemma than the often wide and tragic divergence between the two. In the process of sentimentalization which they aided, many women and ministers espoused at least in theory to so-called passive virtues, admirable in themselves, and sorely needed in American life. They could not see to what alien uses their espousal might be put. Sentimentalism is a complex phenomenon. It asserts that the values a society's activity denies are precisely the ones it cherishes; it attempts to deal with the phenomenon of cultural bifurcation by the manipulation of nostalgia. Sentimentalism provides a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated. It is a form of dragging one's heels. It always borders on dishonesty but it is a dishonesty for which there is no known substitute in a capitalist country. Many nineteenth-century Americans in the Northeast acted every day as if they believed that economic expansion, urbanization, and industrialization represented the greatest good. It is to their credit that they indirectly acknowledged that the pursuit of these "masculine" goals meant damaging, perhaps losing, another good, one they increasingly included under the "feminine" ideal. Yet the fact remains that their regret was calculated not to interfere with their actions. We remember 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. The minister and the lady were appointed by their society as the champions of sensibility. They were in the position of contestants in a fixed fight: they had agreed to put on a convincing show, and to lose. The fakery involved was finally crippling for all concerned.

The sentimentalization of theological and secular culture was an inevitable part of the self-evasion of a society both committed to laissez-faire industrial expansion and disturbed by its consequences. America, impelled by economic and social developments of international scope, abandoned its theological modes of thought at the same time its European counterparts abandoned theirs; it lacked, however, the means they possessed to create substitutes. American culture, younger and less formed than that of any European country, had not yet developed sufficiently rich and diversified secular traditions to serve as carriers for its ongoing intellectual life. The pressures for self-rationalization of the crudest kind were overpowering in a country propelled so rapidly toward industrial capitalism with so little cultural context to slow or complicate its course; sentimentalism provided the inevitable rationalization of the economic order.

In the modernization of American culture that began in the Victorian period, some basic law of dialectical motion was disrupted, unfulfilled, perhaps disproved. Calvinism was a great faith, with great limitations: it was repressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, patriarchal to an extreme. Its demise was inevitable, and in some real sense, welcome. Yet it deserved, and elsewhere and at other times found, great opponents. One could argue that the logical antagonist of Calvinism was a fully humanistic, historically minded romanticism. Exponents of such romanticism appeared in mid-nineteenth-century America—one thinks particularly of Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville—but they were rare. In America, for economic and social reasons, Calvinism was largely defeated by an anti-intellectual sentimentalism purveyed by men and women whose victory did not achieve their finest goals; America lost its male-dominated theological tradition without gaining a comprehensive feminism or an adequately modernized religious sensibility. It is crucial that I be as clear here as I can. The tragedy of nineteenth-century northeastern society is not the demise of Calvinist patriarchal structures, but rather the failure of a viable, sexually diversified culture to replace them. "Feminization" inevitably guaranteed, not simply the loss of the finest values contained in Calvinism, but the continuation of male hegemony in different guises. The triumph of the "feminizing," sentimental forces that would generate mass culture redefined and perhaps limited the possibilities for change in American society. Sentimentalism, with its tendency to obfuscate the visible dynamics of development, heralded the cultural sprawl that has increasingly characterized post-Victorian life.

¹On American Victorian culture, see Meade Minnegerode, The Fabulous Forties 1840-1850 (New York, 1924), and E. Douglas Branch, The Sentimental Years 1836-60 (New York and London, 1934). For important efforts to define "Victorianism" as an American phenomenon, see the essays in the special issue of American Quarterly, 27 (1975) entitled "Victorian Culture in America," particularly the lead article by Daniel Walker Howe, "American Victorianism as a Culture."

² See Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp' "in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1969), pp. 277-83.

³ See Edwin Wilbur Rice, The Sunday School Move-ment 1780-1917 and the American Sunday School Union 1817-1917 (Philadelphia, 1917), pp. 42 ff.

⁴ Thoreau carefully told his readers in Walden, a rural narrative which is hardly a pastoral in any conventional sense, the monetary cost of his experiment in self-reliant solitude; and he never forgot the railroad whose cars thundered near his retreat. Cooper's Natty Bumppo, the hero of the Leatherstocking Tales, despite his religious adherence to conservation, is a hunter who kills more animals and Indians than he saves. Whether he likes it or not, Natty is the vanguard as well as the refugee of civilization, and his appearance in any forest prophesies its eventual demise. The great protagonist of Melville's Moby Dick, Ahab, whatever his spiritual quest, is a part of America's aggressive whaling industry, and as such, a proto-technocrat; if Natty's most intimate friend is his gun, Ahab's is his harpoon. The transcendental jingoism of Whitman's early Manhattan persona is not designed to conceal the fact that he is celebrating the proliferating population, self-propagating machinery, and randomly abundant materialism of the most ruthlessly expanding and constricting city in the world.

⁵ I am thinking here particularly of Hawthorne's treatment of the pure maiden figure: Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance (1852) and Hilda in The Marble Faun (1860).

⁶ I hope the reasons I have chosen this period (1820-75) as the crucial one for the development of Victorian sentimentalism in the Northeast will become clear in the course of this book. Recent historical opinion has minimized the importance of the Civil War as a crucial dividing line for American culture. I will make just a few further points here. First, the period 1820-1875 includes the initial commercialization of culture, most notably the revolution in printing and the rise of nationally circulated magazines. Second, the most important work of the leading figures in the sentimentalization process . . . seems to appear and, more significantly, to receive its highest valuation during these years. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for example, who was born late in the period (1844), produces her most characteristic work, The Gates Ajar, in 1868; thereafter, she repeats herself and receives steadily less critical attention and praise until her death in 1911. Third, the period marks the time when the majority of Protestants in the Northeast changed from a strict to a "liberal" creed and when the Protestant Church forged its relationship with the newly commercialized culture: both changes are still in force today. . . .

⁷In discussing what I am calling Calvinism, the older Protestant tradition of the Northeast, I am focusing throughout this study on its eighteenth-rather than its seventeenth-century New England exponents not because the former were greater than the latter but because they were inevitably more directly influential on the nineteenth-century Protestant clergymen whose reformulation of Calvinist thought will be my chief concern. I use the term "Calvinism," despite its partial imprecision, because it was the word the ministerial and feminine groups I am studying most commonly employed to describe the older, sterner creed of their forebears.

⁸ Martin Marty, in the "Foreword" to Righteous Em-pire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970), notes: "today seven out of ten citizens identify themselves as Protestants" (n.p.).

⁹ For an excellent introduction to Neo-orthodoxy, see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven and London, 1972), pp. 932-48, and Martin E. Marty, op. cit., pp. 233-43. For the most astute Neo-orthodox analysis of the American religious tradition, see Francis Miller, Wilhelm Pauck, and H. Richard Niebuhr, The Church Against the World (Chicago, 1935), and H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1929). Scholars like Perry Miller, who might be seen as the head of "Neo-orthodox" historiography, did not necessarily share the religious beliefs of those they studied, or of the Neo-orthodox theologians (the Niebuhr brothers, Paul Tillich, and others) who began to write in the 1920s. But they are "Neo-orthodox" in the sense that they admire the Calvinist tradition and regret its passing.

¹⁰ This is the title of a novel published by Stowe in 1871.

¹¹ My understanding of "influence" and how it func-tioned for the clerical and feminine groups under discussion was shaped by the work of Sigmund Freud and Heinz Kohut on narcissism as well as by the theories of a number of sociologists. I came to feel that, while Protestant ministers had been part of an elite group, they were increasingly joining middle-class women and becoming part of a special subculture. Such subculture groups, past and present, evince certain inherent patterns. Most simply, one might say that society forces members of a subculture at any moment of intersection with the larger culture into a constant, simplified, and often demeaning process of self-identification. The minister between 1820 and 1875 was beginning to experience the enforced self-simplification women had long known. In 1820 the statement "I am a minister" had a series of possible precise connotations, theological and political. By 1875, the statement meant roughly what it does today: it connotes vague churchbound efforts at "goodness." "I am a housewife," millions of American women have been explaining implicitly and explicitly for the last hundred and fifty years; yet, the term "housewife" is imprecise and obfuscating to an extreme. Surely there was (and is) as much difference between tending a childless urban apartment and running a fully populated farm household as there was between practicing law and selling merchandise. Yet just at the period when women were increasingly adopting a punitively generalized mode of self-description, men were labeling themselves in ever more specialized terms. The all-inclusive designation "lady" slowly gave way over the nineteenth century to the equally blank-check appellation "housewife." In contrast, the polite term "gentleman" had no real successor; it fragmented into a thousand parts, personal, political, and professional. Why have not men identified themselves by an equally adequate, or inadequate, catchall phrase such as "breadwinner"? Quite obviously, because society expresses its greater esteem for masculine occupations by honoring them with a highly differentiated nomenclature.

Naturally those belonging to a subculture will themselves be preoccupied with who they are, often in equally simplistic and distorted terms. They will struggle obsessively, repetitiously, and monotonously to deal with the burden of self-dislike implied and imposed by their society's apparently low evaluation of them. In a sense, they will be forced into some version of narcissism, by which I mean to suggest not only a psychological process but a sociological and even a political one. Narcissism is best defined not as exaggerated self-esteem but as a refusal to judge the self by alien, objective means, a willed inability to allow the world to play its customary role in the business of self-evaluation. Heinz Kohut has explained lucidly the causes for the development of narcissism: "Being threatened in the maintenance of a cohesive self because in early life . . . [the narcissist is] lacking in adequate confirming responses . . . from the environment, [he] turns to self-stimulation in order to retain [his] . . . precarious cohesion." The narcissist must always by definition be self-taught, because the world's lessons are inevitably unacceptable to his ego. He is committed not only to an underestimation of the force of facts, but, in Freud's words, to an "over-estimation of the power of wishes and mental processes. . . . a belief in the magical virtue of words and a method of dealing with the outer world—the art of magic." Narcissism can necessitate the replacement of society by the self, reality by literature. See Heinz Kohut, "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," a paper delivered as the A. A. Brill Lecture of the New York Psychoanalytic Society on November 30, 1971; Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction" in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. John Rickman, M.D. (New York, 1957), p. 106. For a definition of minority groups, see Helen Mayer Hacker, "Women as a Minority Group," Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series in the Social Sciences, 5-108. The ministry had constituted in the past what Suzanne Keller calls a "strategic elite"; see Suzanne Keller, Beyond the Ruling Elite: Strategic Elites in Modern Society (New York, 1963).

¹²See Henry James, "Anthony Trollope," in The Fu-ture of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), pp. 247-8.

¹³ There are many interesting studies of this aspect of the reading phenomenon. Works that particularly stimulated my thinking are the "Introduction" in The Oven Birds: American Women on Womanhood 1820-1920, ed. Gail Parker (New York, 1972), pp. 1-56; Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975); and Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (1973), especially 12-16.

¹⁴ I am indebted for my understanding of the positive side of sentimentalism to the superb study by Elaine Showalter, The Female Tradition in the English Novel: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing (Princeton, 1976). For the J. S. Mill reference, see The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York, n.d.), pp. 103-17.

¹⁵Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (New York, 1967), p. 141.