Emotional Reinventions

How can we engage with one another and respond to suffering without feeling sentimental empathy or sympathy? What lies outside the pitfalls of sympathy that is not merely cold, unfeeling, and alienated? These are the questions at the core of both Melanie V. Dawson’s Emotional Reinventions and Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough. Dawson focuses on American literary realism’s overlooked interest in emotions and its deliberately unsentimental ways of registering, understanding, and portraying them, while Nelson tells the story of a twentieth-century female tradition of “unsentimentality” that she traces through the works of Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil. While the two books are quite different in style and scope, they each depict attempts by writers and artists to circumvent sentimental sympathy. As much as both books describe the critique of and escape from sentimentality—its aesthetic and emotional entrapments, its perceived inefficacy—together they also show implicitly the power of sentimentality and sympathy as both aesthetic traditions and emotional modes. In that sense both books contribute to a long-standing struggle in American letters between sentimentality’s power and its seduction.Dawson’s book brings us back to the moment when American literature most forcefully established realism as a corrective to sentimental writing. Realists, Dawson argues, engaged in a “taxonomic” approach to emotions and “displaced broad categories of emotion (sympathy, for example . . . ) with a series of interrogative gestures that subdivided emotional moments and their histories, examining expressive gestures and their underlying motivations” (8). Taking a scientific approach, realists traced how emotions manifested in specific historical circumstances and explored emotional habits, modifications, reflections, and controls. Examining the writings of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Charles M. Sheldon, as well as the collaborative text The Whole Family (1908), Dawson brings to light the significance of emotions—and their detailed depiction—for realist writing and the complex aesthetics of trying to render emotions unemotionally. The close readings that follow are informative and significantly expand our understanding of realism’s preoccupation with emotion.Sentimental writing, Dawson insists, is crucial to her argument: “Realism was, at its heart, an affectively invested mode of writing, not despite its differences from sentimental paradigms but, rather, because of them” (11). And yet the book does not engage with a single sentimental text or give any examples of sentimental writing. Even one chapter that would consider a few canonical American sentimental texts such as Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or some comparative close readings would have pushed the study to another level. Further, it would have challenged some of the book’s assertions about sentimental texts, such as their happy endings—which sentimental seduction novels belie—or their lack of thought about emotional control or emotional habits and localized feelings. Even a cursory look at The Wide, Wide World, for example, would suggest that emotional control, localized feelings, and detailed descriptions of emotions are at the core of sentimental writing. There are significant differences between the realist modes Dawson describes and those of sentimental writing, but they can be elicited only by looking at sentimental writing and realist writing with equal scrutiny. All this does not take away from the fine study of emotional depictions in realism that Dawson offers; it just troubles these observations, simplifies them in their oppositionality to sentimental fiction’s supposed errors. Surprisingly, too, Dawson stays away from the gender dynamics of realism’s attempt to “correct” sentimental fiction, which Nelson’s book faces head-on.Tough Enough is a moving account of six women artists’ and intellectuals’ attempts to face human suffering without engaging sentimental discourse. These women considered themselves realists of a kind; they also were “ambivalent or outright hostile to the feminist movements of their days” (11). Outlining the “toughness” of Weil, Arendt, McCarthy, Sontag, Arbus, and Didion, Nelson argues for a tradition of “unsentimentality” that connects these women enough to tell the story of her book. Nelson traces each woman’s attempt to reckon with human suffering—particularly in the aftermath of the twentieth-century atrocities of wars and genocide—in a way that avoids sentimentality. But rather than being cold and heartless—as so many critics saw them—Nelson argues that these women are “tough” and in their toughness constitute a countertradition of unsentimentality. The “unsentimental,” Nelson explains, “does define something specific” that links the diverse work of these six writers and artists. “What they share first is their attention to the same terrain as sentimental literature—painful reality, suffering, sufferers—but without emotional display” (5) and without a community of sufferers. Instead, these women want to face pain and suffering alone and without comfort. “The detachment of these women—their preference for solitude over solidarity—seeks to eliminate the in-betweenness of affect, or feelings and emotions” (11), Nelson explains. This solitude is also essential for their relationship with their audience members, who must remain alone, without the comfort of a sympathetic involvement with those whose suffering is described or with the writer or artist herself. The writing and art, then, enable the artist to be isolated from her audience, communicating only the suffering without creating a bond. As Nelson shows throughout, this is a formidable task, a near-impossible balancing act. For the same reason, Nelson’s own project of telling the story of a tradition must give up on the idea of creating bonds between the writers. While “these women may have many overlapping biographical, artistic, and philosophical connections,” Nelson explains, her book is “not an argument for influence or a description of anything like an artistic or intellectual collective”; “as it turns out, collectivity is something none of the women could abide” (11). Writing against the progressive political movements of their time, these women saw the only hope in a relentless and solitary confrontation of pain and suffering and an aesthetic mode that left their audience uncomforted and alone but also promised “an active, expansive, and transformative relationship to reality” (10). While each chapter shows this immense struggle to stay true and alone in the face of pain, it is less clear how such a solitary, painful gesture might be transformative in a broader sense. Here, too, the power of the sentimental reminds us how transformative Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in its sentimental attempt to move readers to engage with the sufferings of the enslaved and to oppose a system that ensured such pain.Both texts do a wonderful job of involving us in the struggles of unemotional depictions of emotions and the complex, vexed aesthetics of the unsentimental. Realism, in both texts, becomes an aesthetic quest—rather than a documentary impulse—to capture emotional realities without sympathy and to keep the reader at a distance, observing, facing, but never “feeling right.”

Art · Epistemology · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy · Psychology