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PARTISAN REVIEW
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE.
By
Ann Douglas.
Avon Books. $2.95.
Ann Douglas' book is an analysis of the process whereby
women, displaced from their role in the economy when the items of
household industry were replaced by factory-made material, and
ministers, whose position of spiritual authority was undermined with
the demise of state-supported clerical tenure, joined together to obscure
their mutual unimportance by becoming caretakers and promoters of
the culture of feelings.
In
so doing they took literature as the voice of
their cause. And to some extent this book is about the ongoing effects of
one of the most commercially successful, ideologically powerful, and
artistically distasteful strains of literature to emerge in nineteenth–
century America. Douglas develops an extended thesis about the
involvement of women and ministers in the transformation of Calvin–
ist theology into the sentimentality of nineteenth-century ladies'
fiction and, through this fiction, a general commercialization of the
inner life which has characterized America since that time.
As historical scholarship the work is a direct descendant of Perry
Miller's volumes of the "life of the mind" in America. But because
Douglas comes to the task with feminist, Marxist, and Freudian tools,
as well as learned and respectful knowledge of the intellectual and
social history of Christianity, she pays more attention to the impor–
tance of sexuality, and shows more sophistication and tolerance in
probing the apparently mindless drives of individuals in culture.
Her social history of the rise of sentimentality shows how women
and ministers coped with their exclusion from the economically
productive world of men, "sentimentalizing" their status, reassuring
themselves that the "feminine" values with which they were left were
indeed the highest ones. The minister becomes a middleman between
the world of commerce and the world of women, with the woman as
the item on which his future influence might be based. Influence, the
business of surreptitiously inculcating men with "feminine" moral
values, becomes the
raison d'elre
of the sentimental lady's life as well as
the major rationalization of her powerless position. Women writers
like Sarah Hale write in such publications as the
Ladies' Magazine
that
