| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Ed. by Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. x, 288 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-520-21621-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-520-21622-9.)

This anthology makes a number of very important points, with wide-ranging implications for the way we interpret nineteenth-century American culture. At the broadest level, the essays remind us of the historical specificity of human emotions. Which emotions are valued or discouraged, how they are typically expressed, and toward what ends they are displayed vary according to the period and cultural context. Even historians who are sticklers for detail often forget that such universal emotions as love, grief, and longing are inescapably molded by social conventions. 1

More specifically, the essays argue convincingly that, in their heyday, the principles and rhetoric of sentimentalism were central to masculine culture. As Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler observe in the introduction, the modern interest in empathy as a social phenomenon—what was then known as "sensibility"—was originally epitomized by the eighteenth-century "man of feeling." The rejection of sentimentalism in the late nineteenth century was part of the natural cycle of novelty, dominance, and obsolescence that drives any significant cultural convention. Stigmatizing "the cult of sentiment" as "feminine" was one of the more effective ways of relegating it to the attic of popular culture. . . .

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