Kenneth Dauber's introduction to The Logic of Sentiment highlights one of the problems that scholars of nineteenth-century US sentimentalism face today: concern that our work simply echoes the now well-established debates as to whether this literature proves subversive or hegemonic. Yet this general mood of skepticism toward sentimentalism and scholarship on the topic proves generative for both Dauber and Yao. In their respective work, each invigorates critical conversations around sympathy by analyzing how nineteenth-century writers themselves grappled with sentimentalism's limits. Dauber explores how sentimentalists “contend with” the realization “that not even a perfect understanding can bridge the gulf between us” (11), that the “I” and “you” always remain separate. Yao investigates who resisted sympathy, even within sentimental literature. In particular, she attends to how people of color refuse demands that they prove their humanity by displaying their affective attachments to whiteness. Together this scholarship expands conversations about what prompted doubt as to the efficacy or desirability of shared feeling.
Lest I overemphasize the commonality between Dauber's and Yao's works, let me note that they differ in their theoretical approaches, text selections, and conclusions. To distinguish his work from earlier studies, Dauber declares, “I wish to look at sentimentality from a somewhat less cultural lens” (10). As a counterpoint to exploring sentimentalism's relation to “solidarity, an assertion of the marginalized against the hegemonic” (9), Dauber insists that “the skepticism that gives us an I and a you goes all the way down” (10). In other words, he argues that there is an inherent, universal problem with the notion of closing the distance between individuals. His book locates this tension through chapters centered on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Each of these writers, he observes, asks, “What holds us together?” (10). Sentimentalism, he argues, says the answer is “love,” but that even in the face of deep feeling for one another and efforts to understand each other, “However identical your pain is to mine, it remains your pain and not mine” (11). Dauber concludes that “what holds us together” is “nothing but our disposition to hold and be held. And this is why a turn from looking at the hold of various historically determined solidarities that has characterized most investigations of the sentimental is in order” (11). This assertion that disposition or desire plays a key role proves persuasive. Less clear is why we should focus on the universality of this issue to the exclusion of analyzing how people's racialized and historically situated identities influence this “disposition to hold” or shape where we direct it.
Dauber's selection of the canonical authors Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville as the central figures of his study (with briefer attention to writers including Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and Henry James) neatly signals that the tensions between skepticism and attachment are central to the genre. The critical history positioning some of these authors in opposition to one another, as proponents and opponents of sentimentality, offers a persuasive means to assert that skepticism was often part of sentimentalism. Certainly, Dauber still locates differences in their work. He argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin ultimately collapses all sense of self and turns everyone into everyone else (as through Stowe's doubling of character names). The House of the Seven Gables, meanwhile, takes the haunting elements of this even further, suggesting that sentimentalism would require us to sympathize with the dead, namely Jaffrey Pyncheon. The conclusion, though, turns us from the grim scenes where we dwell with the dead to an ending that imagines characters taking pleasure in their affinities though they don't align with their politics. Dauber reads the conclusion as “Hawthorne's gift to us of … following our sentiments free of that sentimentality which would compel them where they do not list” (91). Finally, he reads Pierre as insisting that the characters’ unknowability of one another makes identification impossible, but that love persists in the face of this profound uncertainty. Dauber's larger argument often moves through broader readings of each plot, framed through each writer's corpus and relation to other canonical texts. Periodically throughout each chapter, he combines these more sweeping interpretations with moments of close textual analysis to make formalist claims – considering Stowe's use of direct address and relation to realism, as well as what he calls Hawthorne's “third first-personness,” where there is always an “I” and a “we” speaking that do not lose themselves in one another (77). In so doing, he works out what key elements of language writers deploy to evince both skepticism toward and investment in shared feeling.
Even as Dauber's structure effectively marks skepticism as foundational to sentimentalism, The Logic of Sentiment would benefit from explicitly naming what is at stake in treating this set of texts as definitive of the genre. For instance, is it a way of acknowledging that these writers continue to exert significant influence on scholarly understandings of sentimentalism? Does the choice to focus on a predominantly white set of writers reflect Dauber's attempt to set aside the focus on “solidarity” among minoritized people to explore the relationship between “you” and “I”? If so, does that suggest that this argument about skepticism's role is specific to literature about white characters or to literature by white writers? We get a hint of how Dauber might address questions about the role of race in understanding the relation between skepticism and sentimentalism when he briefly considers Frederick Douglass. Douglass, he contends, was able to refuse to identify with his earlier enslaved self in ways that would not have served white abolitionist writers. This brief discussion hints that engaging with cultural studies does not mean that Dauber would have to focus simply on the topic of minoritized subjects’ solidarity that he prefers to avoid.
Happily, Yao's Disaffected takes up these questions of how racialization, gender, and queerness inform who refuses or is refused fellow feeling in nineteenth-century literature. Yao shows us that when we treat the boundaries to people's sympathy only as universal, we miss seeing whose refusals of sympathy are taken as socially acceptable and whose are treated as a sign of their inhumanity. More specifically, the book demonstrates the double bind of sentimentalism for people of color: representations of people of color as unfeeling and therefore less than human and depictions of people of color's humanity that rely for evidence on their ability to sympathize with white people likewise position white people as the arbiters of who possesses humanity. In light of this context, Yao theorizes that refusing to feel for others – particularly white others – could offer a form of resistance, a strategy for survival, if not one always oriented toward enacting political change.
Disaffected builds to the argument that “unfeeling is the detachment from … hegemonic structures of feeling” (17) through rich, historically informed close readings. The opening chapter quickly demonstrates how analyzing the refusal of sympathy through cultural studies offers a new view of even the most canonical of nineteenth-century US writers. Here Yao asks what would happen “if we considered Babo instead of Bartleby in our discussions of [Herman] Melville's exploration of refusal?” (29). The “generosity” and sympathy that Melville's white narrator extends toward Bartleby and that are refused Babo, Yao argues, elucidate “the white sentimental politics of recognition that in turn demands the affective labor of Black peoples and other minoritized peoples as the condition and the limits of their humanity” (32). Notably, Yao does not embrace Melville's portrait of disaffection but rather argues that he “critiques the conditional sympathy granted Black people and the deadly consequences to unsympathetic Blackness … but he accepts that foreclosure” (68–69).
Her second chapter locates similar patterns of black resistance in Martin Delany's Blake, while arguing that Blake ultimately works to envision alternative structures of affiliation, particularly between black and indigenous people. Yao's close readings throughout the chapter make a persuasive case that Delany's novel gradually changes – moving from more simplistic portraits of black/indigenous relations to complex scenes where the characters challenge one another's relations to white hegemony. Yet Delany does not deepen the depictions of women of color across the novel or explore their roles in such affective resistance. As this reading shows, Yao draws on the long history of attending to how sentimentalism can be both subversive and complicit; Disaffected consistently considers moments when refusal challenges existing power structures, without presuming that it only builds toward a politics of liberation.
Yao's following chapters offer a counterpoint to the gaps in Melville's and Delany's works, exploring what happens when female characters refuse feeling and, at times, try to envision new structures of affiliation. Her third chapter shifts away from a focus on one central novel to compare how a variety of writers – including William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Annie Nathan Meyer – represented the white woman doctor. On the one hand, Yao notes a kind of feminist progression in these works, particularly observing how “reading [them] in their order of publication roughly suggests a triumphant evolution of the woman doctor's struggle to achieve work–life balance according to her own terms” (120). In particular, Yao attends to how characters deploy the idea of the woman professional's frigidity and association with queerness to push back at efforts to read her care for patients through the lens of heterosexual affection. Yet as Yao observes, the texts at times conclude with her marriage and a return to heteronormativity. Only Phelps's version of this ending “allows us to interrogate the uncomfortable terrain of what makes the New Woman desirable to hegemony and the maintenance of white patriarchal power” (136).
By contrast, Yao's fourth chapter, on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy, considers how Leroy's role as a Civil War nurse relates to her refusal to participate in a white marriage. Yao situates the novel in relation to black women's roles as war nurses and at Civil War hospitals, which allowed for a shift away from the coerced emotional labor black nurses were expected to perform for white masters and toward an increasingly professionalized role (157–58). Linking this shift with Iola's choice to decline a white doctor's marriage proposal, Yao positions Iola as resisting the claims of white feeling upon her, in favor of “transformative Black love” (26). More broadly, the chapters on the woman doctor and nurse not only demonstrate the richness of her historicizing approach as a way to figure out why and how these characters matter to specific cultural moments but also position this book as part of a larger challenge to strands of affect theory that attempt to treat feeling as “universal,” instead building on work like Kyla Schuller's and Sara Ahmed's that examines sentimentalism's complicity in white-supremacist biopolitics and various forms of affective resistance to it.
Yao's final chapter complements the rest of the book by turning our attention from figures who resisted various claims on their feelings, to the affective mode of “Oriental inscrutability[,] perhaps the most coherent racialized mode of unfeeling” (171). Much as the first chapter contends that writers like Melville show us how black characters’ refusal to feel for their white oppressors was deployed as evidence of black inhumanity, this last chapter acknowledges that “Oriental inscrutability stands out as the primary expression (or lack of it) of the treacherous inhumanity of the Yellow Peril that threatens the good white American family” (175). Through readings of Sui Sin Far's fiction and autobiographical writing, Yao demonstrates that it also offered a radical way to refuse some of the coercive demands on Chinese immigrants, including expectations that they perform feelings of gratitude and appear easily known in order to be deemed human or permitted entry to the country. Yao here is careful to underscore that expressions of black and Chinese American disaffection are not the same, instead asking how some specific Chinese concepts – particularly the notion of “face” – offered writers including Far a specific way to refuse the notion that they must imitate the white American New Woman. At the same time, the chapters clearly speak to one another, and Yao reminds us that Far herself explored the possibility of solidarities among people of color, however imperfectly. Like Harper, then, Far considers both when to refuse affection and how experiences of racialized feelings might foster new attachments.
This review would require much more detail to convey the new textual readings Dauber and Yao give us. What I want to emphasize, though, is how generative these approaches are, as they consider when nineteenth-century writers – including those most closely associated with sentimentalism – questioned the ideal of sympathy. Where Dauber proposes that uncertainty about the premise that we can understand and feel for another is inevitable, Yao helps us consider how specific sets of cultural circumstances – most especially histories of gender and racialization – provoke refusals of fellow feeling. There is a moment in Dauber's chapter on Stowe when he briefly considers Harriet Jacobs, implying that he finds it appealing to imagine that, following Jacobs's freedom, she did not continue to work for the cause of abolition, but rather that this liberty allowed her “eternal noncaring beyond anything but the sphere of caring for her own children, her Harry or Willie as it were” (27). While the reading of Jacobs seems to leave out knowledge we do have – of her efforts to compose her narrative, most obviously – this moment strikingly unsettles the relation between Dauber's and Yao's works. Despite their disparate comments on cultural studies, this moment in The Logic of Sentiment hints at just how resonant Yao's argument is. Dauber's very call for us to treat the relation between the “I” and the “you” as more universal begins to dwell on how skepticism about such connections reads differently when we consider the position of an enslaved black mother. Yao's work invites us to further attend to disaffection – to examine how we might read it through different texts and tropes – by demonstrating that we can deepen our understanding of its disparate forms and political ends through carefully historicized, theoretically informed readings of them.
