Tompkins, Jane.
1986, Oxford UP.
[Main Argument]
Against the modernist belief that art, in order to be art, must be free from propaganda, Tompkins contends that writers alike Brockden Brown, Commper, Stowe, and Warner wrote in order to alter the face of the social world, not to elicit aesthetic appreciation. Thus, the value and significance of the novels, for readers of their time depended on precisely those characteristics that formalist criticism has taught us to deplore: stereotyped characters, sensational plots, and clichéd language.
[Key Concepts]
l Remaking of Cannon
l Historicization (Always historicize)
l Setting aside modernist demands
l Submission as a form of power
l Survival strategies
[Quatations]
l [Redefinition of literature and literary study]: [Sensational] sees literary texts not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order. In this view, novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment. (xi)
l [Need of historisization: reconstruction of the historical context]It seems to important to recreate, as sympathetically as possible, the context from which they sprang and the specific problems to which they were addressed. (xiii) This is not to say that my own attitude toward these texts is neutral or disinterested. Any reconstruction of “context” is as much determined by the attitudes and values of the interpreter as is the explication of literary works. . . If I have from time to time accused other critics of a “presentist” bias, the same charge can be leveled against my own assumptions, which are of course no more free than theirs from the constraints of a particular historical situation. (xiii)
l The power of the copy as opposed to the original, I searched not for the individual but for the type. I saw that the presence of stereotyped characters, rather than constituting a defect in these novels, was what allowed them to operate as instruments of cultural self-definition. (xvi)
l When literary texts are conceived as agents of cultural formation rather than objects of interpretation and appraisal, what counts as a “good” character or a logical sequence of events changes accordingly. When one sets aside modernist demands—for psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, epistemological sophistication, stylistic density, formal economy—and attends to the way a text offers a blue print for survival under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions, an entirely new story begins to unfold, and one’s sense of the formal exigencies of narrative alters accordingly, producing a different conception of what constitutes successful characters and plots. (xvii)
l An ahistorical, transcendent textなどない: Rather than being the repository of eternal truths, they embody the changing interests and beliefs of those people whose place in the cultural hierarchy empowers them to decide which works deserve the name of classic and which do not (36-37).
l My assumption in each instance has been that the text is engaged in solving a problem or a set of problems specific to the time in which it was written, and that therefore the way to identify its purposes is not to compare it to other examples of the genre, but to relate it to the historical circumstances and the contemporary cultural discourse to which it seems most closely linked. Within this framework, the question of literary value undergoes a metamorphosis. (38)
l If the general charge against sentimental fiction has been that it is divorced from actual human experience, a more specific form of that charge is that these novels fail to deal with the brute facts of political and economic oppression, and therefore cut themselves off from the possibility of truly affecting the lives of their readers. (160)
l [Sentimental novel’s obsession with “power”]The great subject of sentimental fiction is preeminently a social issue. It is no exaggeration that domestic fiction is preoccupied, even obsessed, with the nature of power. Because they lived in a society that celebrated free enterprise and democratic government but were excluded from participating in either, the two questions these female novelists never fail to ask are: what is power, and where is it located? Since they could neither own property, nor vote, nor speak at a public meeting if both sexes were present, women had to have a way of defining themselves which gave them power and status nevertheless, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. That is the problem sentimental fiction addresses. (161)
l The fact is that American women simply could not assume a stance of open rebellion against the conditions of their lives for they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. They had to stay pit and submit. And so the domestic novelists made that necessity the basis on which to build a power structure of their own. Instead of rejecting the culture’s value system outright, they appropriated it for their own use, subjecting the beliefs and customs that had molded them to a series of transformations that allowed them both to fulfill and transcend their appointed roles. (161)
l [Submission as power] The women in these novels make submission “their boast” not because they enjoyed it, but because it gave them another ground on which to stand, a position that, while it fulfilled the social demands placed upon them, gave them a place from which to launch a counter-strategy against their worldly masters that would finally give them the upper hand. (162)/ her submission is not capitulation to an external authority, but the mastery of herself, and therefore, paradoxically, an assertion of autonomy./ By ceding themselves to the source of all power, they bypass worldly (male) authority and, as it were, cancel it out. (163)/ While outwardly conforming to the exigencies of her social role, inwardly the heroine becomes master of her fate and subject to no one outside herself. (165)/ These novels teach the reader how to live without power while waging a protracted struggle in which the strategies of the weak will finally inherit the earth. (165)
l Just as the practice of submission, which looks like slavery to us, became, in the context of evangelical Christianity, the basis for a claim to mastery, so confinement to the home, which looks to us like deprivation, became a means of personal fulfillment. (166)
l The religion of domesticity could never have taken hold if it had not had something real to offer. And what it had to offer was an extraordinary combination of sensual pleasures, fulfillment, spiritual aspirations, and satisfaction in work accompanied. (167)
l [Home as Closet] The mutual tenderness, affection, and solicitude made visible in the performance of these homely acts are the values sacred to sentimental fiction and the reward it offers its readers for that other activity which must also be performed within the “closet”—the control of rebellious passion. (170)
l In order to survive, they had to imagine their prison as the site of bliss (170)
l It is easy and may be inevitable at this point to object that such claims are pathetic and ridiculous—the fantasies of a disenfranchised group, the line that society feeds to members whom it wants to buy off with the illusion of strength while denying them any real power. But what is at stake in this discussion is precisely what constitutes “real” power. From a modern standpoint, the domestic ideal is self-defeating because it ignores the realities of political and economic life. But those were not the realities on which Americans in the nineteenth century founded their conceptions of the world. (171)
l While the premise of Twain’s novel is that, when faced by tyranny of any sort, you can simply run away, the problem that Warner’s novel sets itself to solve is how to survive, given that you can’t. In the light of this fact, it is particularly ironic that novels like Warner’s should have come to be regarded as “escapist.” / But “escape” is the one thing that sentimental novels never offer; on the contrary, they teach their readers that the only way to overcome tyranny is through the practice of grueling and inexorable discipline. (170)
l These novels resemble, more than anything else, training narratives. (176)
[Problems and Insights]
l If we read novels as “instruments of cultural self-definition,” certain particularity can be disregarded?
l Submission as autonomy… very Buddhist, but a bit overstated?
l Huckleberry Finnのほうがある意味でescapistだという議論は全く正しい。父の手から逃れられるのはHuckが浮浪児だから。Adolescent wish fulfillmentである。そうでない女達は家庭にこもるしかない。(175)
l キャノン再編成の時代の息吹を感じる作品。
Ann Douglas, Feminization of American Culture (1977, 1998)
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985)
Ann Douglas opens her 1998 preface to Feminization of American Culture with an episode at the dinner before her lecture at Harvard. Asked whether her second book was a continuation of Feminization, Douglas recollects, she almost automatically answered: “To my surprise, I heard myself answer, ‘Of course not. The first book was suicide’” (xi). It is surprising that Douglas, twenty years after the publication of the book that harshly accuses the sentimentalization of American culture, avails herself of somewhat sentimental effect of her unconsciousness utterance in order to demonstrate her awareness of the book’s alleged flaws—“[its] lofty tone, its apparent ease and severity of judgment.” Her strategic use of sentimentalism further leads her to a striking confession: “In some quite real sense, Calvinism itself was my star protagonist and certainly my real love-object.”
By rendering Calvinism her “real love-object,” Douglas seems to ascribe an apparent limitation of Feminization to her personal emotional attachment, thereby attempting to absolve it. Douglas’s main argument in Feminization is that middle-class white women and clergymen, both deprived of their traditional roles and authority, achieved “influence” by promulgating the sentimental values through popular literature. The way Douglas links the secularization of religion and the creation of the sentimental novel through the concept of “feminization” is no doubt convincing. The problem lies in Feminization’s dichotomous logic that unconditionally champions “Calvinism/ power/ rationality/ production/ masculinity” over “Unitarianism/ “influence”/ sentimentalism/ consumption/ femininity.” Douglas seems to fail to provide a rationale for her valorization of the one over the other; instead, twenty years later, she explains it was rooted in her private feeling: Calvinism was her “real love-object.”
Yet, what is especially intriguing here is the contrast between power and “influence” that Douglas delineate. “Influence” is one of the key concepts of Feminization, which Douglas always puts in quotation marks. “Influence” in Feminization seems to be an equivalent of the Foucauldian concept of power that cannot be located in one specific agency. In contrast to older form of monarchical power, its operation is insidious, invisible, all-embracing, and therefore hard to revolt against—it is a form of power in capitalist society. Yet, granted that women and clergymen’s “exertion of ‘influence’” was a desperate substitution for the “exercise of power,” what is at stake here is that nobody could be the agent of power in the newly emergent structure of power (77). The exertion of “influence” through sentimentalism can be, then, at least a possible way to establish one’s agency. In fact, Douglas’s own appeal to emotional language in her 1998 preface ironically seems to demonstrate this point—sentimental language can more effectively convince the book’s legitimacy than the “lofty tone” of rationalism.
In one sense, Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Design can be read almost as a direct response to Feminization. Tompkins, rejecting the modernist demands that posit aesthetic and moral sophistication as sole criteria of literature, attempts to resurrect sentimental literature as that which provides the reader with a “blueprint for survival under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions” (xvii). For Tompkins, domestic novels “offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). The way Tomkins uses “culture” as subject here—“a culture thinks about itself”—is interesting, especially when seen in the light of Douglas’s concept of “influence” as opposed to power. When Tompkins unapologetically renders novels as “instruments of cultural self-definition” (xvi; emphasis added) she does not concern about the novels’, or the novelists’ autonomy, from which what Douglas would call power supposedly emanates. Writers of sentimental fiction of course do not exercise power; they, as instruments of invisible power of culture, just exert its “influence.”
Yet, unlike Douglas, Tompkins does not regard this exertion of “influence” as a deplorable substitution for the exercise of power. Instead, she argues that in the sentimental novelist’s very renunciation of power lies a possible moment of subversion. Deprived of worldly power, the material means of escape or opposition, both the novelist and the reader cannot reject the culture’s value system outright. Instead, “they appropriated it for their own use, subjecting the beliefs and customs that had molded them to a series of transformations that allowed them both to fulfill and transcend their appointed roles” (161). In other words, sentimental novels, through its outward conformity to the societal demands, “teach the reader how to live without power” (165).
Tompkins’s rendition of sentimental literature’s strategy of outward submission offers a constructive alternative for Douglas’s argument that dismisses domestic fiction as offering merely “intricate and unperceived forms of dishonesty” (Douglas 79). After all, as Tompkins states, “[t]he religion of domesticity could never have taken hold if it had not had something real to offer” (167). Whether it is a form of “dishonesty” or not, sentimental fiction surely provided the readers with an emotional/spiritual “blueprint for survival” in the world wherein they were deprived of power. At the same time, however, Tompkins’s argument seems to be fraught with danger of overemphasizing the subversive power of submission, especially when she contends that “by ceding themselves to the source of all power, they bypass worldly (male) authority and, as it were, cancel it out” (163). It seems to be important to draw a line between emotional or spiritual solution that domestic fiction could offer and solutions for social/legal situations that, in often cases, it did not immediately call for. Otherwise, Tompkins’s argument allows Douglas-like criticisms that sentimental literature merely perpetuated the disemfranchisement of women by offering them an illusion of strength.
