Overview

Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to """"love one's neighbor as oneself"""" with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, Elizabeth Barnes focuses her attention on aggressors--rather than the weak or abused--to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture. Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, Barnes shows how violence and sensibility work together to produce a more """"sensitive"""" citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful protagonist identifies with the person he harms. Barnes argues that this identification and emotional transformation come at a high price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's blood. Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian culture in the United States.

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9781469614540

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Barnes adds a refreshing perspective. Valuable for those interested in women's studies as well as literature. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- Choice

Barnes adds a refreshing perspective. Valuable for those interested in women's studies as well as literature. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--Choice Elizabeth Barnes . . . reach[es] back to nineteenth-century literature, mapping an essential national dialect between violence and sentiment.--Journal of American History Love's Whipping Boy is a bold and persuasive attempt to account for a crucial paradox at the heart of the nineteenth-century American society. . . . [This] book is an impressive and compelling addition to readings of nineteenth-century American sentimentalism that is definitely worth including on reading lists for courses on U.S. literary culture.--The Year's Work in English Studies

Barnes adds a refreshing perspective. Valuable for those interested in women's studies as well as literature. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.-- Choice

Author Information

Elizabeth Barnes is professor of English and American studies at the College of William and Mary.

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