Douglas, Ann.
1977, 1998.
[Main Argument]
The alliance of two powerless groups, women and the clergy, formed a special subculture with far reaching effects on popular literature in nineteenth century America. Clerical disestablishment had resulted in a loss of minister’s traditional authority and, since they no longer received automatic revenue from taxes, created economic dependence on their mainly female congregations. At the same time publishing was becoming a hugely profitable and growing business. Literary magazines proliferated, predominantly domestic and religious in content, and were written by clerics and women for a readership of middle class northeastern women with no real work to do except to read and consume. Women no longer married to help their husbands get a living, but to help them spend their income.
During the nineteenth century, two events, seemingly unrelated, occurred on the American cultural scene: the rise of liberal religion and the creation of the sentimental novel. Douglas attempts to link these two together, theorizing that a general move towards “feminization” was behind changes in both literary and literary culture. According to Douglas, both middle-class white women and the clergy joined forces as they realized that their traditional roles were becoming obsolete in the face of household and religious innovations. Feminization was conceived as a reactionary tactic, a way to keep women and clergymen relevant to society through the pulpit and the pen. Douglas adds that feminization’s sentimental tendencies led to the modern excesses of capitalism and mass culture.
[Key Concepts]
l “Influence”
l “Feminization”
l “glorification of death” (202)
l “consolatory literature” (202)
l “Compensation process”
l “Cult of Motherhood”
[Quotation]
l “Campiness” of Little Eva: “Her sainthood is there to precipitate our nostalgia and our narcissism, We are meant to bestow on her that fondness we reserve for the contemplation of our own softer emotions. If “camp” is art that is too excessive to be taken seriously, art that courts our “tenderness,” then Little Eva suggests Christianity beginning to function as camp. (4)
l “Influence”: Northeastern clergymen and middle-class literary women lacked power of any crudely tangible kind, and they were careful not to lay claim to it. Instead they wished to exert “influence,” which they eulogized as a religious force. They were asking for nothing more than offhand attention, and not even much of that: “influence” was to be discreetly omnipresent and omnipotent. This was the suasion of moral and psychic nature, and it had a good deal less to do with the faith of the past and a good deal more to do with the advertising industry of the future . . . . (9)
l “Dirty work of society”: Nineteenth-century American women were oppressed, and damaged; inevitably, the influence they exerted in turn on their society was not altogether beneficial. The cruelest aspect of the process of oppression is the logic by which it forces its objects to be oppressive in turn, to do the dirty work of their society in several senses. (11)
l “Sentimentalism’s complexity”: Sentimentalism is a complex phenomenon. It asserts that the values a society’s activity denies are precisely the ones it cherishes: it attempts to deal with the phenomenon of cultural bifurcation by manipulation of nostalgia. Sentimentalism provides a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated. It is a form of dragging one’s heels. It always borders on dishonesty but it is a dishonesty for which there is no known substitute in a capitalist country. (12)
l The pressures for self-rationalization of the crudest kind were overpowering in a country propelled so rapidly toward industrial capitalism which so little cultural context to slow or complicate its course; sentimentalism provided the inevitable rationalization of the economic order. (12)
l “Feminization” inevitably guaranteed, not simply the loss of the finest values contained in Calvinism, but the continuation of male hegemony in different guises. (13)
l In some quite real sense, Calvinism itself was my star protagonist and certainly my real love-object. (xi)
l Compensatory power is also a form of oppression and exclusion, and oppression and exclusion always damage in some way those they target; the tactics my feminine and clerical subjects adopted to achieve their goals are a case in point. (xiii)
l “Unitarianism as a secularization”: Unitarianism is not itself a religion, but rather a kind of cultural substitute for religion; hence its triumph has been a victory for the forces of secularization. (17)
l The essential point is that feminine labor and its function in society were visible in the earlier period, and this visibility assured a minimal recognition, and a minimal degree of directness in the assessment of the feminine contribution. (55)
l The middle-class woman should be trained to play the part . . . of an indirectly beneficial laggard in the march of capitalistic progress.
l The ideal woman whom the counselors and educators wished to shape was to exert moral pressure on a society in whose operations she had little part, and to spend money—or have it spent on her—in economy she could not comprehend. She was in embryo both a saint and a consumer. . . . the two roles, saint and consumer, were interlocked and mutually dependent; the lady’s function in a capitalist society was to appropriate and preserve both the values and commodities which her competitive husband, father, and son had little tome to honor or enjoy she was to provide an antidote and a purpose for their labor. (60)
l “Influence,” whether exerted by advertising or anything else, in other words, is a technique adopted less to challenge than to seduce a competitive capitalist society too much in a hurry to get it tastes and values in any way but on the run, on the sly, and unawares. Indeed, “influence” is a form of flattery, if dangerously insidious and ambitious one, for the advertiser studies the needs and wants of his potential market with extraordinary care and intensity. (67)
l Feminine “influence,” no matter how genuine the religious convictions which inspired its formulation and exercise, represented the first appearance of what would be the most important means of forming and controlling opinion in fully developed capitalistic culture: “influence” was ironically the mother of advertising, the only faith of a secularized consumer society. (68)
l “Cult of Motherhood” in mid-nineteenth century America: Praise of motherhood could bolster and promote the middle-class woman’s biological function as tantamount, if not superior, to her lost economic productivity; imprison her within her body by glorifying its unique capacities; encourage her to outproduce her prolific, uneducated immigrant competitors. (74) The cult of motherhood, like the Mother’s Day it eventually established in the American calendar, was an essential precondition to the flattery American women were trained to demand in place of justice and equality. It offered them, of course, a very genuine basis for self-respect. It gave them, moreover, an innate, unassailable, untestable claim to charismatic authority and prestige, a sanction for subjectivity and self-love. (75)
l Barred from the manifest spoils and responsibilities of office, women understandably sought less legitimate rewards for their very real energies: psychological, emotional, what they called “moral” or “religious” control over the minds of their actual or symbolic offspring. (76)
l Both liberal ministers and literary women had lost practical function within American society and were anxious to replace it with emotional indispensability; they turned of necessity from the exercise of power to the exertion of “influence” (77)
l Inevitably the uneasy alliance of ministers and women deepened their mutual entanglement in intricate and unperceived form of dishonesty. (79)
[Problems, Insights, etc.]
l Misogyny: Douglas assumes that every effect of feminization was negative. Douglas seems to write from a standpoint in which old-style, “masculine” Calvinism is “normal” American religion. In other words, she seems to hold that “Calvinism is good, Unitarianism is bad.” Unitarianism is associated with “weakness,” which is associated with the feminine. Calvinism is “strong” religion, and therefore masculine—and better.
l Dichotomy: Douglas relies heavily on a masculine/feminine, positive/negative, elite/mass, intellect/feeling dichotomy.
l The concept of “Influence”: Douglas always brackets the word. It is somewhat a Foucauldian idea. Insidious power which cannot be located. Women and clergies were not agencies of the power, they were medium of the influence.
