| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Lori Merish. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. x, 389 pp. Cloth, $64.95, ISBN 0-8223-2480-6. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-2516-0.)

Lori Merish's Sentimental Materialism is an "interdisciplinary project in cultural studies" meant to help us understand the "discursive representation and constitution of political subjectivities." It argues that an affective—as opposed to utilitarian—relation to commodities created a nineteenth-century sentimental self that furthered rather than opposed liberal capitalism. The book claims that because this self was white and female, white women both had more options within, and were more thoroughly supportive of, the dominant ideology of their day than criticism has recognized. 1

The opening chapter examines Scottish commonsense philosophers whose writings, Merish believes, underpin an American liberal ideology of consumption. Detaching the idea of commodity from aristocratic luxury and suggesting that goods were good because they indexed civility, Adam Smith, David Hume, John Millar, William Robertson, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, made commodities useful for republican narratives of progress. Thus, when white American women acquired their special sentimental relation to goods, they became agents of national capitalism. . . .

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