Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English and Chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, also published by Duke University Press, and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. She is the editor of Compassion; Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (with Lisa Duggan); and Intimacy.

THE FEMALE COMPLAINT

The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American CultureBy LAUREN BERLANT

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4184-0

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………………….viiIntroduction: Intimacy, Publicity, and Femininity………………………………………………………………….11. Poor Eliza………………………………………………………………………………………………….332. Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat…………………………………………………………………………..693. National Brands, National Body: Imitation of Life……………………………………………………………….1074. Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation………………………………………………………………1455. Remembering Love, Forgetting Everything Else: Now, Voyager……………………………………………………….1696. “It’s Not the Tragedies That Kill Us, It’s the Messes”: Femininity, Formalism, and Dorothy Parker…………………….2077. The Compulsion to Repeat Femininity: Landscape for a Good Woman and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil…………………233Overture/Aperture: Showboat 1988-The Remake……………………………………………………………………….265Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………281Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………..319Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………347

Chapter One

POOR ELIZA

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. JAMES BALDWIN, “EVERYBODY’S PROTEST NOVEL”

“The Small House of Uncle Thomas”

Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s The King and I is a rare instance of classic Americana whose scenario is not in America. Atypical for its time (1949), the lavish musical is set during an imperial crisis in relations between Britain and Siam, which involves a variety of military and economic intrigues but focuses on a culturalist politics. Opening with the arrival of Anna Leonowens in Siam, the play recalls that Britain exported a civilizing pedagogy as part of its imperial strategy: Leonowens is imported “to bring to Siam what is good in Western culture.” Her teachings include respect for “science” and for anti-despotism in the political and palatial spheres.

Yet to describe The King and I this way neglects the sensuous spirit of the play: the spectacle and songbook continuously overwhelm the story, displaying the king’s visibly smooth and muscular body, the palace’s surface of shining metal and richly colored fabric, the women’s and children’s adorable exoticism, and the intensities of erotic and familial life in the world of the palace. Haunted by the love plot that never happens between the Siamese “King” (Mongut) and the British “I” (Leonowens), the play’s story nonetheless uses the tragi-comic conventions of “the war between the sexes” to express political and cultural antagonisms that also appear here in stereotypic drag as national tragedy and imperial farce.

The scene of this war is the passing into modernity of Siam, for which the king has prepared by insisting that the elite of his nation develop economic, technological, and rational literacy in the ways of the West. Eventually he learns from Leonowens, however, that to be modern requires something more than a cultivated mind-it wants an educated heart. But the king’s heart breaks and he dies when he is unable to follow Siam into the moment in which the nation becomes a state of feeling as opposed to a regime of power. As the play proffers the abject image of the king’s waning virility and pompous philosophizing it sets up a series of organizing antinomies by which the audience can measure the king’s and the nation’s progress, including West and East, barbarism and civilization, the vulgar and the refined, the vernacular and the literary, the student and the teacher, the brutish and the feminine. Above all is the king’s attempt to develop an organ of compassion as opposed to ideology or what the play calls philosophy. These changes are achieved aesthetically (in the play) and subjectively (by the characters) by a romance with a constellated third term: sentimentality, intimacy, democracy, America.

The unfinished business of sentimentality that this chapter tracks involves its political component, one that develops within political thought a discourse of ethics that, paradoxically, denigrates the political and claims superiority to it. This mode of sentimentality takes up the Enlightenment project of cultivating the soul of the subject toward a visceral capacity to embody, recognize, and sanction virtue, and it expands it into the collective activity of compassionate cosmopolitanism, which places affective recognition at the center of what binds strangers to each other. Yet sentimentality’s universalist rhetoric gains its authority not in the political domain, but near it, against it, and above it: sentimental culture entails a proximate alternative community of individuals sanctified by recognizing the authority of true feeling-authentic, virtuous, compassionate-at the core of a just world.

The culture of true feeling has no inevitable political ideology. It does not always liberalize society, forcing politics to gain a higher ethical footing by dismantling structural inequalities or expanding the formal terms of citizenship. Its core pedagogy has been to develop a notion of social obligation based on the citizen’s capacity for suffering and trauma. This structure has been deployed mainly among the culturally privileged to humanize those subjects who have been excluded from the formal and capaciously social aspects of citizenship, embedded seemingly intractably on the bottom of class, racial, ethnic, and sexual hierarchies. As a force for the conversion of the politically privileged, sentimental politics has had powerfully transformative effects on which subordinate populations are recognized as candidates for inclusion in the body politic. But as Baldwin asserts, the humanization strategies of sentimentality always traffic in clich, the reproduction of a person as a thing, and thus indulge in the confirmation of the marginal subject’s embodiment of inhumanity on the way to providing the privileged with heroic occasions of recognition, rescue, and inclusion. In this view, sentimentality from the top down softens risks to the conditions of privilege by making obligations to action mainly ameliorative, a matter not of changing the fundamental terms that organize power, but of following the elevated claims of vigilant sensitivity, virtue, and conscience.

The commodities of “women’s culture,” the first identity-marked mass cultural discourse in the United States, notably advanced these paradoxes of liberal sentiment, expressing a complex of desires as though they were a single claim. Primarily, “women’s” texts are gendering machines, locating the ideality of femininity in fantasies of unconflicted subjectivity in an intimate world organized by a sense of emotional recognition, reciprocity, and self-mastery, traits that are deemed the conditions for the survival of femininity if not of actual humans, whose material survival and sense of alterity represents the realist counterpoint to the modes of feminine sentimental fantasy that these works also develop. The axis of sentimental political practice involves expanding this scene of the feminine soul’s communion with a nimbus of abstract others to include a desire to build pain alliances from all imaginable positions in U.S. hierarchies of value: sentimental politics from the feminine position renders scenes and stories of structural injustice in the terms of a putatively nonideological nexus of vulnerability wherein a threat to the survival of individual lives is said also to exemplify and express conflicts in national life.

Thus while these emotions are normative (ranked according to culturally dominant virtues) in terms of the performance of femininity there are also affective components that invest any local drama of compassionate attachment with a sense of import beyond the scene of its animation, even if the personal-scale drama provides the register in which the collective scene is encountered. The expansion from the personal to more abstract domains constitutes the scene of judgment and critique. Emotional justice on the small scale figures the pre-experience of its resolution on the larger.

The main paradox here too lies in the centrality of clich and stereotype to the establishment of the expanded terms of the human. Sentimental politics bridges fantasy and realism precisely insofar as the blatantly artificial register of conventional troping stands as the textual performance of universality itself. In “women’s culture,” stereotype and clich bridge the complexity of the singular life and a conventional dialectic between a particular type of subject of true feeling and the general world that must absorb the claims of that subject.

The conjuncture of politics and mass norms of affective investment thereby raises aesthetic questions about the conventions with which exemplary relations have been posited between narratives of the experience and redemptiveness of personal suffering and the collective circumstances in which these plots are articulated as political. The archive of this essay-Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a set of related works such as The King and I, Dimples, The Bridges of Madison County, and Beloved-inhabits many positions within the domain of the politico-sentimental aesthetic and enables us to understand the ways its conventional forms and ideologies of feeling have influenced the construction and valuation of subjects, types, and publics since the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. More than that, it provides a foundation for talking about the ambivalence even antisentimental artists express and perform in bargaining with rather than repudiating the sentimental contract: the normativity of emotional humanism and sentimental utopias is that strong, saturating the modern imaginary field with its vague definition of the human. Other more historicist scholarship has catalogued every refunctioning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (although the list keeps expanding): the aim of this chapter and the two chapters that follow is to set forth a model for encountering the politics of suffering and trauma at the heart of mass-mediated publicity in the United States that locates the tradition in this early intimate public. The Uncle Tom genealogy always stages the contradictions of liberal culture as lived in the body, in relations of production, and in fantasies of the better good life; sentimental in its attachments, melodramatic, gothic, and comic in its genres, but realist in its desire to remake the world, it always reanimates questions about the ethics of emotional universalism or sentimental politics in the United States.

Anyone who has seen The King and I will know that my title, “Poor Eliza,” derives from the scene in which Tuptim, a sexual slave in the king’s palace, stages a dramatic adaptation of what she calls The Small House of Uncle Thomas. The occasion is a dinner party at which the king is trying to convince the British ambassador of his own and Siam’s sophistication, of Siam’s worthiness to be considered a peer nation in political, economic, and cultural terms. Tuptim’s play provides the “native” entertainment. However, her motives in performing Uncle Tom are different from the king’s: most broadly, she cares not to reflect the nation’s glory, but to use this as an opportunity to speak to the only sympathetic public she will ever have. The adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a performance of her belief in the power of Western, liberal compassion and a refusal to adapt to immoral power: it is also simply desperate.

Tuptim’s specific complaint is that the king has decreed that she become his currently most favored “wife.” She is thereby denied access to her true love, Lun Tha, and is a prisoner in the king’s harem as well as a slave to his sexual will. Tuptim’s hope to build a life around consensual love in a conjugal family rather than live with the authoritarian rules of royal sexuality merges the historical novel’s traditional deployment of the love plot to play out political dramas with a contemporary Cold War-ish espousal of healthy hetero-sexuality as an emblem of “democratic” individual freedoms in a “modern” capitalist society. Yet Uncle Tom’s Cabin is far more than a commercial for U.S.-style democracy in The King and I.

In the autobiographical text by Anna Leonowens and its fictionalization by Margaret Landon, there are no royal performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In The King and I, the novel’s citation touches on the aspect of Stowe’s pedagogy that exhorts the nation to embrace the progressive urgencies of a revolutionary historical moment in order to preserve its ambition to be good as well as great. The citation of Uncle Tom here also figures the centrality of the aesthetic to mass national politics as that space of projection for unimagined or nondominant trajectories of national life. Just as the novel puts forth characters who model virtue for the individual reader, its example has become a truism, a monument to the claim that inspired art can produce a transformative environment toward which the fallen social world can aspire.

Thus it is not surprising that very different projections onto the novel’s iconicity as a sign of national optimism are put into play in The King and I. For the king, the novel’s presence at court is indeed a sign of Siam’s modernity: a foreign text translated, an American text appropriated and mastered, a politics consumed that proves the achieved enlightenment of Siamese consciousness. Tuptim’s decision to stage the book appears to the king as merely an equivalent act to the other preparations he makes for the event, such as learning Western table manners and clothing styles to augment the “scientific” knowledge he has cobbled together. Beyond this, however, the king’s linkage with Uncle Tom’s Cabin has already been established through his strong identification with the rationality and wit of “President Lingkong,” whom he has been trying to enlist in a plan to bring elephants to the United States so that the North might win the Civil War.

Lincoln’s presence in The King and I represents a horizon of possible development for the king, whose voice and body are otherwise staged through a kind of generic Asiatic bronzeface, his body exposed and his vernacular enjoyed in what a U.S. audience would recognize as minstrel fashion, further highlighting the paradoxical differences and linkages between “their” kind of slavery and “ours.” The king’s attraction to Lincoln’s great and simple wisdom implicitly enables him to imagine saving Siam with similar aplomb at its own time of radical transition. Yet this self-understanding is a joke the play plays on the king. He comprehends the relation between wisdom, greatness, and the abolition of slavery, but he never recognizes the sexual slavery of the harem as relevant to these issues. His speeches about “Lingkong” are staged as funny and stupid, even though the self-misunderstanding he reveals through them has visibly violent effects. But the king’s aspiration to be the American president is nowhere quarreled with in the play.

Tuptim’s identification with Uncle Tom’s Cabin also mixes up the personal and the political, but she configures their zones of overlap in distinct and incommensurate ways. One has to do with authorship as a figure of citizenship. “Harriet Beecher Stowa” represents to the slave the unthinkable possibility that a woman can be sovereign, circulate in public, and write a book, especially one that challenges the patriarchal national regime that forces her to do sexual hard labor. Authorship produces the form of public sphere disembodiment that mimes freedom in citizenship and predicts the intimate world of emotionally like strangers. But Tuptim also identifies with “poor Eliza,” whose story inspires her own subsequent flight from the palace: as Lincoln is an emblem for the king, Eliza models for Tuptim the need for the slave’s courage to invalidate morally unjust law. The story itself authorizes breaking the law and becoming therefore inhuman in a way that releases the gothic’s intensified aesthetic, Buddha’s spiritual superpower, and superhuman, antinomian energy. Like Eliza, Tuptim breaks the law that has broken itself by escaping to a new space and putting her body on the line to bridge the authoritarian world in which she lives and the emancipated world of freedom to love to which she seeks transport.

(Continues…)

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