Eng. 341 Links, resources, quotes

Quotes

"The sentimental novel, the dominant literary form of the late eighteenth century, was innovative as a form largely because it attracted an unprecedented audience to literature. This readership was not only numerically larger than that previously attracted, it was also notable because it was made up of a new social alliance. The sentimental novel addressed women as much as men, and, increasingly, those who belonged to the middle station of life, the social level between manual workers and the gentry that Dorothy Marshall characterized as 'the Middling Sort.' This audience conceived of novel reading as a pursuit of leisure, as a variety of entertainment alongside diversions such as pleasure gardens, plays and periodicals. These readers were also amateur, agreeing amongst themselves that novel reading did not require or demand extensive intellection or education.. Paradoxically, then, by addressing an audience that was disenfranchised and lacking power in political life, the sentimental novel effectively created a new political role for literature." Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, 2-3.

“Sentimentality was a theory of gender. It held that Differences among the domestic lives of peoples were natural rather than historical differences and that a new education in domesticity was necessary both for white males and nondominant peoples.” Laura Wexler, “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye,” In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 164.“The valorization of the visual image of the middle-class white woman as the signifier of the category ‘woman’ that makes other social relations invisible took shape in the early nineteenth century. Sentimental ideologies of womanhood explicitly turned to images to market the social divisions advanced by the middle class and to make them seem to be rooted in something actual.” 167. Thus, Wexler advocates “examining the relation of these Others to the regime of sentiment, taken as an aggressive, rather than merely a private, social practice. In this view, the culture of sentiment aimed not only to establish itself as the gatekeeper of social existence, but it aimed at the same time to denigrate all other people whose style or conditions of domesticity did not conform to the sentimental model.” 168.

"Drawing on the materialist and sensationalist psychology of the early Enlightenment, the sentimental literary culture of the period relied upon readers' affective, passionate, and embodied responses to fictive characters and situations in order to produce political effects. As such, sentimentalism located readers' bodies as both pre-political sources of personal authenticity and as public sites of political contestation. The body thus served two contradictory functions within sentimentalism: it provided surface upon which sensations were express for a public that could imagine itself as respecting the autonomy of every body, and it provided a literary site for the management of those sensations through collective and potentially heteronomous means." (Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Public Sphere 3-4)

"The relation between slavery and the emergent humanitarian sentiment in the later half of the eighteenth century has become a contested point of historical debate — part of the assessment of the motives, interest and effects of the abolition activists. Broadly, the field might be seen to have two main camps. On one side are those that argued that the abolition movement is a particular and successful expression of a wider egalitarian and humanitarian philosophy prosecuted by religious and evangelical protagonists. Recent versions of this argument have stressed the abolition lobby's connection to other liberal and radical causes within Britain, and perceive the abolitionists to have empowered disenfranchised groups in Britain by providing an issues (around which critique could be rallied)that did not challenge established power groups within metropolitan Britain. On the other side, a more economically determined argument starts from the recognition of the simultaneous appearance of industrial capitalism and anti-slavery sentiment in Great Britain . . . In this view, not only were the abolitionists not genuinely interested in the reform of slavery, but they also veiled or mystified domestic issues of inequality. At the very least, this argument illuminates the manner in which the trope of slavery presented a rich symbolic storehouse for articulating related issues of contemporary note, such as marriage, imprisonment or labour. If then we seek to understand more of the sentimental novel by reading the history of slavery, so too we might under the history of slavery better by reading the sentimental novel." (Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, p. 50).

" . . . representations of slavery in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century are not primarily interested in the condition of chattel slavery. For example Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and Richard Steele's 'Yarico and Inkle' (1711) are roughly contemporary with the pleas of individual Quakers for the mild treatment of slaves and their conversion, but because these literary works have a slave as protagonist does not mean that they are in any straightforward sense anti-slavery literature. In fact it was only after the rise of the abolition movement that such works were seen as anti-slavery." (Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, 54).

"The attraction of the theme of slavery to the sentimental novel lies in the asymmetrical power relation essential to slavery, exploiting the scopic possibilities of the violence and inequality inherent to the chattel slave economy, and the ambiguous, mute dociility of the slave subject. However, the sentimental novel in general, like all the literature of the period, coexists with these various discourses on slavery and shifts uneasily between them, not only from author to author and moment to moment, but even from chapter to chapter, sentence to sentence . . . The theme of slavery in the sentimental novel celebrates the rhetorical slipperiness of the figure of slavery. The figure of slavery is often deployed transferentially, to discuss something else — for example notions of national identity, incarcerative punishment or even existential melancholy. However, the most significant relation in the theme of slavery is the conjunction of race and gender: where slavery is made to figure gender relations such as the 'bonds' of love or marriage." (Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, 55).

"The sentimentalist discussion of slavery is particularly eloquent because of the priority and privilege it accords to the feelings and to the heart, rather than the scopic typologies of complexion and race. Sentimentalism wants to believe that all humanity is equally capable of feeling and that this equality of feeling is not determined or prejudiced by appearance or skin colour. Depictions of slavery are also felicitous to the sentimentalist interest in pain and suffering. In this way, sentimentalist writers had a significant role in the formation of the moral conscience of the abolition movement. Furthermore, their humanitarian and benevolent intentions (albeit unrealised) both produced and reflected the emergent anti-slavery politics, providing ready-made examples for more polemical activists. However, the sentimentalist approach, while advertising the suffering occasioned by slavery, fails or refused to move beyond the depiction of its theme to a critique of that theme's subject, slavery proper. Sentimentalist writers found it difficult to cross certain limits in their portrayal of the victims of social and economic change without endangering the entire system of values by which their world was ordered, and this they were disinclined to do. Whenever these limits were approached, benevolent emotions were channelled into safer images of suffering and exploitation . . . which offered secure and unproblematic ground for testing and developing new attitudes." (Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, 86)

"You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive." (Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream").