Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern (review)

Reviewed by: Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern Amy Coté Faye Halpern. Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. 215pp. $45.00 paper. Faye Halpern’s Sentimental Readers offers a nuanced examination of what she terms a “disparaged rhetoric.” This vigorous volume takes up the question of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction by authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Ward Beecher, asking how and why twenty-first-century readers approach these texts, how these approaches might differ from those of nineteenth-century readers, and how we might learn from the “uncritical” practices advocated by sentimental rhetoric. Halpern’s potential audience is broad: this book holds obvious appeal for specialists in nineteenth-century American fiction and rhetoric, but its detailed historical contextualization, careful close readings, engagement with affect and reader response theory, and feminist literary criticism make it a compelling text for scholars from various disciplines, periods, and geographical areas. Furthermore, Halpern’s reflections on and assertions about the role sentimental rhetoric might play in pedagogy makes this book a valuable asset for anyone involved in teaching, especially early years of undergraduate English. Halpern begins her volume by addressing widespread assumptions about sentimental fiction: that it is socially conservative, tied to traditional gender roles, full of derivative plots and forced deathbed conversion scenes, and ultimately a “lesser” form of literature. As Halpern succinctly claims, though, “Certainly, sentimental novels do have favourite plots and themes, but it is a premise of this book that we should see sentimentality as less of a what than a how: how does a sentimental text direct its audience to read?” (xv). Various incarnations of this question and its implication occupy the remainder of Sentimental Readers. Halpern grounds her first chapter in vigorous research and detailed socio-historical context. This chapter, while somewhat lengthy, sets out [End Page 210] the foundational problem encountered by professional rhetoricians and sentimental novelists alike throughout the nineteenth century. Through an investigation of Edwart Tyrrel Channing (1790 to 1856), Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Halpern articulates the circular debate surrounding disingenuous eloquence and the potentially dangerous powers of persuasion wielded by public figures. Was the ability to persuade an audience an innate quality, or could it be learned through instruction and study? If the former, what was the function of professorships in rhetoric and oratory; if the latter, how was an audience to tell a true conviction from a manipulative performance? Using Channing’s writings and biography as a springboard, Halpern tackles the complexities of this question, reaching backwards as far as Socrates and forward to the “scribbling women”—the sentimental writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the subject of Halpern’s second chapter. Here, Halpern asks why scholars have not explored connections between professional orators and sentimental writers, who so often use rhetorical strategies in their fiction. Through an examination of The Minister’s Wooing, which she calls Stowe’s “rhetorical manifesto” (34), Halpern tackles the question of disingenuous eloquence as sentimental novelists encountered it. Halpern contends that The Minister’s Wooing employs the conventional love triangle plot to stage a battle between different types of persuasion. A successful orator, according to Stowe, is someone whose outside and inside align perfectly: someone for whom “seeming” and “being” are indistinguishable. Halpern extends this reading into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, addressing what she terms the “paradoxes of sentimentality” (54). Chief among these paradoxes is the way sentimental fiction relies on orality in spite of its textual status—they “speak” and persuade, inspiring strong feelings in audiences both within and beyond the novel through reported speech, apostrophes, and direct appeals. This orality is bound up with a suspicion of the written word as unreliable and prone to conceal and thus implicated in the problem of disingenuous eloquence. As Halpern writes, “far from the medium being the message, the medium is undermined and … transformed by it. The pinnacle of sentimentality saw readers accepting this transformation and being transformed by it in turn” (63). For Stowe, then, characters must exist within the text without belonging exclusively...

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