Dr. M Chapman
English 540 American Literature to 1890
"Sentiment and Gender in 19th-century American Culture"
Mondays 1pm-3pm
Office hours (BuTo 510) Any time by appointment
marychap@interchange.ubc.ca 604 822 5120
Since the appearance of The Feminization of American Culture in 1977, feminist scholars
have been engaged in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described as a "conscious
rehabilitation of the category of the sentimental." This rehabilitation has taken a number
of strategies: The first has involved challenging the absolute binary represented by the
ideology of the separate spheres and perpetuated in criticism by "bring[ing] female
subjects and the representation of gender into the center of a social history of the public"
(Ryan ix) and providing evidence of women's involvement in the public sphere as
political, commercial, and moral agents. Other works, especially Jane Tompkins'
Sensational Designs (1985) and Fisher's Hard Facts: Form and Setting in the American
Novel (1985), have focused more particularly on the political value of the cult of
sentiment by validating the popular mode of sentiment for its reformist implications. For
some feminist scholars, sentimentality can be interpreted as part of a popular feminist
counter-politics. Jean Fagin Yellin, Hazel Carby, Lori Ginzberg, and Dana Nelson have
all explored the politics of sentiment in terms of identificatory strategies between women
and racial others, seeing sentiment as an index of white women's political engagement in
reform movements such as abolition, protests to Indian removal, etc..
Although the debate about the political value of sentimental culture has been
largely shaped by the extreme positions represented by Ann Douglas and Tompkins,
work on sentimentality since 1985 has, regardless of its view of the political value of
sentimental culture, largely accepted the gendering of sentiment as female. Virtually all
of the critical work which responds to Douglas and sentimentality's other detractors has
continued to assume that sentimentality is a fundamentally feminine affective structure of
feeling; its literature is presumed to be centered on an identification with a suffering
female protagonist, a sympathy extended to other subordinated groups in novels such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Contemporary feminist literary criticism has continued to perpetuate
this "gendering" of sentiment by constructing what amounts to an alternative canon of
popular but critically marginalized texts written for, by, and about women, thereby
ignoring the ways in which canonical male writers, such as Emerson, Melville,
Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dreiser, have all deployed the discourse of sentiment in their
works. In the midst of these recuperations, critics have tended to reinforce rather than
question the gender binary to such an extent that the origins of American sentimentality
in the "man of feeling" have been all but lost.
The goal of this course is twofold: to build on the important work done by the
scholars mentioned above, by taking the next crucial step in reclaiming the sentimental
for American masculinity by challenging studies that accept an uncomplicated gendering
of sentiment as feminine and presume that the ideology of separate spheres was
uncontested and uncomplicated by race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, and to continue
the analysis of the political work performed by sentiment.
Primary Readings
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl
Emerson, “Threnody” and “Experience”
Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance
Melville, “I and My Chimney” and “Lightning Rod Man” [optional: Pierre]
James, The Bostonians
Elizabeth Jordan, The Sturdy Oak
All asterisked critical essays (non-asterisked essays are optional). Readings are available
in the Reading Room OR on-line through the library website.
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel
Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender and Literature in the Early Republic
Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist.
Chapman, Mary and Glenn Hendler, ed. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of
Affect in America.(BuTo)
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Anchor, (1977) 1988.
Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the
Sentimental Novel
Ellison, Julie, Cato’s Tears: The Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1999.
Fichtelberg, Joseph. Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market 1780-1870.
Athens and London: The U of Georgia P, 2003.
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York:
Oxford UP, 1985.
Ginzberg, Lori. Women and the Work of Benevolence. New Haven:Yale UP, 1990.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Democracy in the
American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-century
American Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001.
Howard, June.ed. The Whole Family: A Novel by 12 Authors. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Kaplan, Amy. Domestic Imperialism
Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-class Identity in
19th-century America.
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture and NineteenthCentury American Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Moody, Jocelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-century
African American Women
Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature.
Otter, Sam. Melville's Anatomies.
Phillips, Mark. Society and Sentiment.
Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States.
Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Samuels, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in
19th-century America. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the
Body. U California P, 1993.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P,
1990.
Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 17901860. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.
Yellin, Jean Fagin. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture.
Yale UP, 1989.
Course requirements:
*Participation 20%
*Seminar: If you have signed up to do a seminar, you should suggest questions/topics via
email two days before class and give a 30-minute presentation about the literary and/or
critical texts of the week. (30%)
*20-25 pp. revised essay due April 10th (50%)
January 8: Introduction
January 15: June Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?”**
http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol11/issue1/index.dtl
Chapman and Hendler, "Introduction" to Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the
Politics of Affect in American Culture, 1-16. (BuTo)**
Evan Carton, “What Feels An American? Evident Selves and Inalienable
Emotions in the New Man’s World” (BuTo)
January 22: The Paradigmatic Sentimental Text: Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Ann Douglas, "Introduction: The Legacy of American Victorianism: the Meaning
of Little Eva" The Feminization of American Culture 3-13. (BuTo) **
Jane Tompkins, "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Power of
Literary History” 122-146 (BuTo) **
(These two classic readings construct a debate over the value/ meaning of
sentimentality)
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
Jan 29: Beyond Domesticity: Uncle Tom's Cabin continued
Amy Kaplan "Manifest Domesticity" (BuTo)**
Noelle Gallagher, “The Bagging Factory”, Nineteenth Century Contexts. June 05
(2): 167-187.
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
Feb 5: The Man of Feeling, Sentiment, and its Gothic Underside:
Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond
Julia Stern, Chapters 1 and 4 from The Plight Of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent
in the Early American Novel. (BuTo) **
Julie Ellison, "Introduction" to Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American
Emotion 1-22. (BuTo)
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
Feb 12: Canonical Sentiments I: Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience" (BuTo) and
"Threnody" http://www.bartleby.com/248/166.html
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, "'Then When We Clutch Hardest': On the Death of a
Child and the Replication of an Image" in Sentimental Men 64-85. (BuTo)**
Eric Haralson, “Manly Tears: Men’s Elegies for Children in 19th-century
American Culture” (BuTo) **
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
Feb 26: Canonical Sentiments II: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance
Lori Merish, "Sentimental Consumption" from Sentimental Materialism 165-190.
(BuTo)
Stacey Margolis, “The Blithedale Romance and Other Tales of Association”
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
March 5: Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl
Franny Nudelman, "Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female
Suffering" ELH. (1992): 939-964.(BuTo)
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, "Righting Slavery and Writing Sex" from Touching
Liberty 83-104. (BuTo)
Saidiya Hartman, from Scenes of Subjection Introduction and Chapter One
(BuTo)
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
March 12: Canonical Sentiments III:
Melville "I and My Chimney"
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MelChim.html
"The Lightning Rod Man" http://www.melville.org/lrman.htm
Vincent J. Bertolini, "Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood
in the 1850s" in Sentimental Men 19-42. (BuTo)
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
March 19: Whitman, “The Child and the Profligate” (BuTo)
Glenn Hendler, "Bloated Bodies and Sober Sentiments" in Sentimental Men 125148. (BuTo)
Michael Millner, “The Fear Passing the Love of Women: Sodomy and male
Sentimental Citizenship in the Antebellum City” (BuTo)
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
March 26: James’ The Bostonians
SEMINAR PRESENTATION
April 2: Uncoupling Gender and Authorship
Elizabeth Jordan et. al The Sturdy Oak: A Novel of American Politics
Selections from Mrs. Spring Fragrance (BuTo)
McCann, “Connecting Links” (BuTo)**
Suzanne Clark, intro to Sentimental Modernism (BuTo) **
SEMINAR PRESENTATION