 | 38. Douglas,
Feminization of American Culture,
12.
|
| 39. Gillian Brown, "Domestic Politics in
Uncle Tom's Cabin," American Quarterly
36 (1984): esp. 506.
|
| 40. Jean Fagan Yellin, "Doing it Herself:
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and Women's Role in the Slavery Crisis," in
New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin,
ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 9495.
|
| 41. Elizabeth Ammons, "Stowe's Dream of the Mother-Saviour:
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and American Women Writers before the 1920s," in
New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin;
see also Mary Kelley, "The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home,"
Signs
4 (Spring 1979): 434ff.
|
| 42. Marion Ross,
The Contours of Masculine Desire. Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry
(New York: 1989). I have thought it best to discuss a small number of critics carefully rather than attempt a survey of the feminist rehabilitation of sentimentality; but I will add Glennis Stephenson, "Poet Construction: Mrs Hemans, L. E. L., and the Image of the Nineteenth Century Woman Poet," in
Relmagining Women,
ed. Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (Toronto: 1993).
|
| 43. Tompkins,
Sensational Designs,
125.
|
| 44. Quoted in George Ford,
Dickens and His Readers
(Princeton: 1955), 20. This is the best discussion of the reception of little Nell that I have come across.
|
| 45. quoted in
The Letters and Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray,
ed, Gordon Ray 4 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 2:266.
|
| 46. Ross,
Contours of Masculine Desire,
1314.
|
| 47. There is a further objection to the didactic/ideological position of Tompkins that may sound like an intrusion into her personal beliefs, though I do not know how else to put it. Artistic criteria do not require us to admire only authors we agree with: much of the project of Romantic and modern aesthetics can be seen as an attempt to describe those qualities of a literary work that do not depend for their value on its moral or political purpose. But the critic who judges didactically or ideologically cannot do this. If we value a work primarily for its political function, we need to value that function. When therefore Tompkins praises Uncle Tom's Cabin for vindicating "the notion that historical change takes place only through religious conversion," that the true goal of its rhetorical undertaking "is nothing less than the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth," it seems to me crucial that she indicate whether she accepts this goal. I have no doubt that she accepts the goal of abolishing slavery, but she is quite right to point out, as she does here, that for Stowe this had to be done by religious conversion. If Tompkins does not share this view, then her political defense of the book seems made in bad faith.
|
| 48. This sentence from Chorley's
Memorials of Mrs Hemans
(1836) is quoted by Ross on 305.
|
|
