Worshipping the Sentimental

...Eva van Arsdel, in My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors, is expressed through her "lovely clothes...

...Sentimentalism always asserts, Douglas writes, "that the values a society denies are precisely the ones it cherishes...

...The sentimentalism of these writers was a more complex phenomenon than their effusions might suggest...

...But Douglas does not mention James' novel, set in the 1870s, even though her book deals with the period 1820-75...

...Her only real demand on her readers is for self-indulgence...

...And she risks additional difficulties with her own application of "feminization...

...another novelist "wrote on her knees...

...In any event, it speaks well for the strengths of this tough and original study that readers are reminded of works she does not cite, and return to them to find implications earlier unnoticed...

...In Douglas' own childhood reading, we are told, Eva served as an introduction to "consumerism...

...It also became a religion of sorts, a successor to Calvinism...

...Douglas believes it to have been an unworthy one: However "repressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, patriarchal," Calvinism was, it deserved great opponents...

...Ransom's "chivalrous" conviction in The Bostonians that "the feminine influence" should be indirect, private, nonpolitical, takes on new meaning, the idea being central to the cultural accommodations Douglas discusses...

...These questions deserve more consideration than I can give them here, and I can only conclude, as much in tribute to the complexity of the author's thought as in criticism, with a more general reservation...

...Douglas assumes that the sufferings of 19th-century women are by now well known and refers to them primarily to explore the many ways women themselves sentimentalized, "feminized" (the two are virtually synonymous here) these travails, at great cost to their sex and to the society at large...

...From the most damnable feminization...

...Still, when it becomes clear that this pivotal concept does not refer exclusively to females, or treat sexual differences, or imply a conspiracy (as Basil Ransom does), Douglas' use of it is justified...

...the masculine tone is passing out of the world...

...Because Stowe's heroine, according to Douglas, "anticipates that exaltation of the average which marks mass culture, she is the predecessor of Miss America and 'Teen Angel'"—like them, she flatters the audience's sense of its own possibilities...

...almost feminine sensibility . . . feminine gentleness...

...One could argue," she says, "that the logical antagonist . . . would be a fully humanistic, historically minded romanticism," of the kind exemplified by Margaret Fuller and Melville, but precious few others...

...in male-dominated societies, but as an necessary preservative for all virtues, even . .. gentleness and generosity...

...Eva's sainthood is there to precipitate our nostalgia and our narcissism...

...Initially, this notion seems rather vague, and it is not until she deals with another Eva of Stowe's that the connections between these Victorian heroines and conspicuous consumption in modern mass culture become clear...

...of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been...

...The clergymen were described by their contemporaries as possessing "womanly temperament...

...The romanticism she admires in Melville, for example, is closest to what she finds Calvinist in him...

...But in treating Billy Budd and Moby-Dick she sometimes seems to stretch the texts to fit her thesis: Can Starbuck's death be regarded as "a demonstration of the inefficacy of the sentimental...

...She has difficulty, though, communicating the considerable historical evidence she finds in the epithets, as the following blurred double negative suggests: "Calvinism possessed a toughness, a sternness, an intellectual rigor which our society had been accustomed to identify with 'masculinity' in some not entirely incorrect if somewhat circular way...

...Perhaps the irony of this book is that Anne Douglas herself "reifies toughness," and may be implicated more than she realizes in its own kind of sentimentality...

...Douglas recognizes the great limitations of Calvinism, and sees tragedy not in "the demise of [its] patriarchal structures, but rather the failure of a viable, sexually diversified culture to replace them...

...For excepting Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose ultimate failure is more interesting to the author than her achievements), it celebrates no heroines...

...Douglas' chapters on these two authors' "protest"?Fuller's rejection of "vicariousness," her "disavowal of fiction...

...Sarah Hale, the influential editor of Godey's Lady's Book held that "to bring about the true Christian civilization, which alone can improve the condition of our sex, the men must become more like women and the women more like angels...

...Nevertheless, I sensed in The Feminization of American Culture a sadness, at times a nostalgia, over Calvinism's disappearance...

...and Melville's "revolt against the [feminized] reader"—are brilliantly formulated...

...Stowe intended her dying to be an exemplum of religious faith," Douglas writes, "but it doesn't operate exclusively as such...

...This celebrated passage could have served as epigraph to The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 403 pp., $15.00), by the historian Ann Douglas...

...The women declared themselves "heaven-appointed" educators, "quasi-clerical" authors: Stowe said "God wrote" Uncle Tom's Cabin...

...it was "the political sense obfuscated or gone rancid...

...Discussing the language of those who mourned the decline of New England Calvinism, Douglas notes the sexual bias in such words as "emasculated" and "virile...

...The book begins with a scene that seems to our modern taste almost a parody—the death of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin...

...Yet their regret was calculated not to interfere with their actions...

...Douglas says she respects "toughness, not isolated and reified as it is...

...Is Billy Budd really "an allegory of the older Calvinist gubernatorial theory of the Atonement...

...For women, sentimentalism became an ineffectual substitute for politics...

...Perhaps it seemed supernumerary, since she has chosen Melville to make the argument for "the masculine character" in all its complexity...

...In an analysis of the careers of 30 liberal ministers and 30 women writers, Douglas shows the collaboration and the rivalry for influence, the "pulpit envy" in both pastor and lady...

...to recover...

...Eva loves the Garden of Eden story, "as that's pretty and poetical, and is in the dear old Book that is so sweet and comfortable to us...

...The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is—a very queer and partly base mixture—that is what I want to preserve—or rather...

...They in turn celebrated the "Christlike" qualities of their largely female audiences...

...Consumerism"-Miterary, religious and material?was promoted, Douglas contends, by an uneasy 19th-century alliance: female writers responding to the dispossession of middle-class Northeastern women from their important work as producers and household managers, together with clergymen deprived of status and authority by the erosion of religious faith and the "disestablishment" (the loss of state support for Protestant churches in 1833...

...The whole generation is womanized...

...Many Americans "acknowledged indirectly that their pursuit of the 'masculine' goals [of expansion and industrialization] meant damaging . . . another good, one they increasingly included under the 'feminine' ideal...

...Ann Douglas is a feminist, an editor of Women's Studies, yet her book will give little support to the pieties of some of her ideological sisters...

...She too converts souls, but her theology is "a trivial know-nothingism...

...At first, however, her terminology is somewhat disorienting...

...Her religious identity, like her death, is confused with the response it invokes...

...it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age...

...It] provides a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated...

...By thus making "feminization" a measure of the larger culture during the half-century, she places a new grid over a map that has been studied by many other historians and—as did Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden and Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellec-tualism in American Life—establishes a new set of coordinates for exploring the territory...

...She is a parasite, a shopper rather than a worker, "the apotheosis of all the saints in the popular feminine fiction...

...We are meant to bestow on her that fondness we reserve for our own softer emotions...