| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Questionable Charity: Gender, Humanitarianism, and Complicity in U.S. Literary Realism. By William M. Morgan. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. x, 251 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-58465-387-6. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-58465-388-4.)
At a time when literary critics and cultural historians have underscored the hypermasculinity of American manhood in the 1890s as the expression of an imperial ethos, William M. Morgan's Questionable Charity offers another narrative, one that focuses on the legacy of male sentimentalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its centrality in shaping literary realism and democratic humanitarianism. As a counter to Theodore Roosevelt's model of strenuous masculinity, Morgan highlights a tradition of postbellum "benevolent manhood" that imagines "a utopian social ethos of communal care" based on male maternalism (p. 98).	1
Far from being a monolithic, nationally unifying myth, American masculinity was internally fragmented and riddled with guilt derived from the "failed fiction of democratic citizenship" (pp. 23–24). In contrast to antebellum sentimentalism, which represents an abiding faith in the power of human sympathy, literary realism illustrates a postidealist sentimentalism, primarily concerned with the failure of the social and economic system to realize the republican ideals of democratic citizenship. The result is an American manhood preoccupied with failure, shame, and helplessness.	. . .

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