Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction111 position of revealing, provocative texts to be the perfect opportunity to develop new explications and sources. Those seeking a more pronounced argument about Twain's Bermuda, however, are likely to lament its lack of direct interpretation of his life and writings as a traveler. Washington University in St. LouisHeidi Aronson KoIk Weinstein, Cindy. Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in NineteenthCentury American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. 243 pp. Coth: $85.00. Paper: $28.99. The late political philosopher John Rawls once explained why he didn't take a combative tone in his critical writings: "I always took for granted that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time ... by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed those writers saw it too and must have dealt with it." Cindy Weinstein's book, recently reissued in paperback , does not mention Rawls but follows in his footsteps, reading American sentimental fiction as a kind of moral philosophy and judging it with a similarly generous impulse. Weinstein seems motivated not only by a genuine curiosity regarding the odd repetitions in so many of these sentimental novels—she reads with a keenly-tuned sensibility, picking up an astonishing number of echoing phrases and plot lines—but also by the desire for less hostile readings of sentimental fiction than we have seen lately. As she notes, a number of recent assessments have contended that "the nature of 'feeling right'" (the famous formula from Stowe's conclusion to Uncle Tom's Cabin) "has the same homogenizing meaning, the same stultifying and baleful effect, the same mode of production, regardless of the context in which it is cultivated, extended, and received" (2-3). Sensitive to context, Weinstein reminds us that the frequent analogies between married white women and black slaves do not amount to full identification; as she insists in one careful reading after another, "structural analogies ... do not necessarily elide the differences" between these groups, though they can and often do "provide the foundation for acts of sympathy which hold out the possibility of better lives for both" (102). In considering the contexts of these structural analogies, Weinstein distinguishes between sympathies, like Stowe's, that are committed to "a progressive politics of abolition," and others that "reveal the conjoining of sympathy and racism" (67). She argues that "the cultural work of sentimental fiction" (from conservative to progressive) is the interrogation of family and the replacement ofconsanguinity with an affectively-based model offamily legitimated 118Reviews by free choice (9). The progressive payoff in these fictions is that patriarchal systems of blood yield to an ideal of contract simultaneously being formalized in a variety of other liberal discourses, most notably in the legal realm where courts negotiated and codified the practice of adoption. The danger to progressives, though, was that the disparagement of consanguineous family ties could unwittingly support slavery, which relied on the claim that cultural bonds between a slaveholder and his "children" were more legitimate than biological bonds between natural parents and children. Weinstein considers these problems and opportunities in the context of sentimental fiction (Ida May, Twelve Years a Slave, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World), near-sentimental fiction (Pierre), narratives concerning slavery (Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl, Fanny Kemble's Journal), and a host of relevant nonliterary discourses about the meaning of family. At her best, Weinstein is an attentive and discerning reader. Her account of an episode in Kemble's Journal reveals this strength. When Kemble, her marriage failing, breaks the law by teaching a slave to write, she not only provides him with the means to secure his freedom, but she does something not quite equivalent, though comparable, for herself. As a feme couverte she is unable to own property, so any fine for the crime must be paid by her husband. On the third offense, however, an offender is sent to prison, and since imprisonment "can't be done by proxy" (100), Kemble imagines herselfforcing the law to recognize her agency and sees her possible incarceration as a "great victory over the institutions of...

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